Blind fold hearing test

The history of blind listening is pretty consistent. Everybody, including golden ear reviewers, can't hear differences when they can't see the component (this doesn't apply to speakers). @firstnot - you will never see a major magazine do such a test because their reviewers wouldn't participate. After several famous (infamous?) embarrassments where the Emperor was found to be naked Stereophile came out aggressively against blind tests, saying that they aren't valid.

Several audio societies have put together A/B/X blind tests to see if their members could hear the difference between two competitive components. In every case I'm aware of the members failed to statistically identify a difference.

Speaking for myself, the idea that I could blindfolded identify the brands of the components I was listening to is ludicrous. I'm not sure I can even hear any differences between interconnects. I think we hear with our eyes much more than we care to admit.

I realize that this is somewhat off topic but I have to relate a story about identifying different brands of a product, in this case beer. I used to work in the malting industry (malt is the main ingredient in beer). I attended a conference of brewing people who all knew beer very well. Budweiser, Miller, Coors, Pabst, Rainier, Olympia, Henry's, and a few other brands were represented as well as folks from the hops industry. Most of the people in the room (including me) had been through formal taste training. There were about 30 people there. One of the sponsors put together a taste-test to see if we could identify the various brands of regular American beer. I think there were 7 or 8 beers in the test.

The people from the brewing companies all said that they could absolutely identify their own brand of beer and likely the others. There was even a few side bets between competitor friends.

These experts totally bombed this test. Nobody got more than two of of them right. The only beer that was consistently identified was Henry's, due to its distinctive hop flavor. The vast majority of the tasters could not identify their own brand of beer.

To say that this shocked the group is an understatement. My point is that blind testing tends to slay even the most accomplished experts.