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
Exactly. And given that this is a hobbyist’s group and not a scientific forum, the nonsense and insults from the fundamentalist naysaying measurementalists here is really getting old and becoming an obstacle to conversation.
Which is their wont. They are, after all, zealots.

All the best,
Nonoise



This keyboard warrior likes to war on interwebs and putz around with testing.

Nerds and their testing. I guess if you cant get a date; youve got to so something lol
djones51, and others, I wouldn't say that blind testing is a test methodology, but, rather, an experimental design control for confounding variables. Another option is to include those variables in the analysis and test for their effects directly. I sometimes do this with demographic factors such as participants' age, gender, level of education, cultural identity and such. But, all of this aligns with the multivariate research methodologies I like to use, which correlate information across multiple products and participants. Comparing only two things necessarily confounds any potentially relevant variables.
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