Everyone sites this and that and my ears and brain are better than yours, etc., etc., but frankly none of this matters. All that matters is the simple question, “does music move you emotionally and does the system you have deliver that emotion to you in a way that maximizes your enjoyment?”. Like a long discussion in another recent thread where @millercarbon hit the nail on the head, this hobby isn’t just about your ears. You feel the music all over your body as it literally washes over you with your ears being a primary, but not only component. I look at all of the performance graphs I can take in my FIbre Channel Data Centre switch related career “day” job. I’m frankly not interested in it at all when it comes to music and my system. I recognize only emotional, visceral enjoyment is what has kept me enamored with music and high-end audio constantly for my entire life. I’ll continue to exercise the other half of my brain more when it comes to choosing the combination of gear for my other main hobby of considerable expense - Astrophotography :). Then again, I’m also much less comfortable with Astrophotography since it is a new hobby for me. Maybe all of this graph obsession some have with audio is a manifestation of insecurity, not yet feeling totally grounded in the hobby like I certainly feel currently with telescopes, Astro-cameras, myriad of hardware accessories, photo stacking/post processing software, etc. I don’t know. We all have our own paths to take in life.
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