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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
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ukthunderace
24 posts
 
Interesting thread. Just my two cents, but don’t we all listen in order to choose? I prefer that if I am listening to a couple different things and trying to decide between them, I would rather that I not know which I am listening to in order to take away any bias--I think we all know it works, even if we don’t have graphs etc to back up our findings.

In the end, isn’t is just about choosing what we like to listen to? Even if a person did a AB comparison or a ABX or name your comparison, isn’t that just what sounds good to them? Doesn’t mean I have to like it--maybe I like those $500 speakers instead of the $5000 ones; maybe they are the opposite. I have a friend who likes Marmite, and I think it tastes disgusting. Regardless of any testing, I am never eating that stuff again, even if he tells me over and over that I should like it.

The never ending quest to show that what you have or like is better than what another person likes or owns, or to tell another person that they are morons for purchasing x or y is nothing but pride. It just gets in the way of a community of listeners enjoying the hobby and turns the whole thing into an adversarial mess.
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ukthunderace
24 posts
 
I agree 100%
audition__audio
1,494 posts
 
Setting up a proper blind test is very difficult and must address several issues while other issues with the test cant be controlled. You must guarantee the precise volume and you must have the ability to switch very quickly (seconds). 

One of my friends was flown to participate in one of the Harmon tests involving, I believe, a new Infinity speaker. These new speakers were up against B & W 801s. Output was identical with 3 to 5 second snippets of the same music played between the 2 speakers with preferences tallied by the listeners 20 times. I think that he said it was all in mono and he was the only person to pick the B & W every time.

When I asked him how it was he said that it was actually somewhat stressful and he thought the test flawed on numerous levels. First and foremost he thought that the upstream gear had a significant impact on the sound of the speakers and that this aspect only proved which system configuration sounded better at that moment. 

So even when dletch2 does his informal blind tests, he only proves that in his system and at that moment his taste says that one component betters another. 



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