2. cables
  3. 166355-2693

Why Do So Many Audiophiles Reject Blind Testing Of Audio Components?

Because it was scientifically proven to be useless more than 60 years ago.

A speech scientist by the name of Irwin Pollack have conducted an experiment in the early 1950s. In a blind ABX listening test, he asked people to distinguish minimal pairs of consonants (like “r” and “l”, or “t” and “p”).

He found out that listeners had no problem telling these consonants apart when they were played back immediately one after the other. But as he increased the pause between the playbacks, the listener’s ability to distinguish between them diminished. Once the time separating the sounds exceeded 10-15 milliseconds (approximately 1/100th of a second), people had a really hard time telling obviously different sounds apart. Their answers became statistically no better than a random guess.

If you are interested in the science of these things, here’s a nice summary:

Categorical and noncategorical modes of speech perception along the voicing continuum

Since then, the experiment was repeated many times (last major update in 2000, Reliability of a dichotic consonant-vowel pairs task using an ABX procedure.)

So reliably recognizing the difference between similar sounds in an ABX environment is impossible. 15ms playback gap, and the listener’s guess becomes no better than random. This happens because humans don't have any meaningful waveform memory. We cannot exactly recall the sound itself, and rely on various mental models for comparison. It takes time and effort to develop these models, thus making us really bad at playing "spot the sonic difference right now and here" game.

Also, please note that the experimenters were using the sounds of speech. Human ears have significantly better resolution and discrimination in the speech spectrum. If a comparison method is not working well with speech, it would not work at all with music.

So the “double blind testing” crowd is worshiping an ABX protocol that was scientifically proven more than 60 years ago to be completely unsuitable for telling similar sounds apart. And they insist all the other methods are “unscientific.”

The irony seems to be lost on them.

Why do so many audiophiles reject blind testing of audio components? - Quora
128x128artemus_5

Showing 1 response by orgillian197

orgillian197
119 posts
 
1-Most of us have pieces of music we've listened to hundreds of times if not more. An example for me would be Abbey Road. A test of systems (or components in a system not my own) playing it to me would still be useless as my reference is my own system and without a direct comparison to that, I would have virtually no frame of reference to opine on what may or may not be different. But even worse, playing random bits of anything one is not used to under any circumstances is just pissing in the wind. That said, blind switching of cables, components, etc in my system playing that album would give me useful information.

2-What exactly is better? Again in reference to what we are used to in our own systems, different might not be defined as an improvement by everyone or anyone. Various posters here have mentioned that different cables have made an audible difference to them when heard in their systems. An interesting test would be to see if that would also be the case when played in a system they were not familiar with.

3-The often mentioned blind Pepsi vs Coke discussion has no relevence here. One soda has more carbonation than the other and one is far sweeter. However there are people who crave salt that taste no difference at all.
More to discover