Blind fold hearing test

I can imagine the perfect credibility destroying nightmare scenario.

You come into the room sit down settle in and have a good listen and then proclaim the system to be running large speakers off giant monoblocks. It must be so because the bandwidth and imagery are both huge.

Then the blindfold is removed and lo and behold - you are a facing a midi system!

Identifying systems will be hard enough, never mind individual brands. 

@8th-note, now that is surprising.

I guess that until the differences become as large as those between Pepsi (smoother) and Coke (harsher/ more bite) we're just deceiving ourselves, or  shooting in the dark in you prefer a pun. 

Perhaps we audiophiles are not seeing the wood for the trees.

Perhaps most of the so-called huge, night and day differences in performance we often read about are in fact barely perceptible?

I recall being struck by the sheer honesty when I heard that McIntosh themselves claimed no sonic advantages of any of their lovely amplifiers.

Anyway, as I’ve just ordered a copy of West Side Story CD (1957 original Broadway cast) it will be interesting to discover just how much better this Sony Mastersound SBM version is than the stock issue. I do think it’s telling that one of popular music’s most dynamic recordings was done over 60 years ago!

As is the fact that another highly regarded audiophile album, (the Cowboy Junkies much feted Trinity Session) was recorded on a Sony Betamax SL-2000 video cassette deck, albeit with a super duper microphone.

@jssmith, "I've been in blind amp tests and I can emphatically say "No", I can't tell the difference in amps. I seriously doubt if anyone could tell speaker brands unless they've been repeatedly exposed to those speakers, have material they're familiar with, know which brands are in the test and there's a "tell" about them. For instance, put my Paradigms and Maggies side-by-side and yeah, it's easy. Especially on metal or acoustic."

Thanks for that. It concurs with the opinion of many users and virtually all of the data.

When it comes to amps, the main factor, above any infinitesimal sound quality differences, is their ability to drive the matched speakers. 

With easy to drive loudspeakers there is no obvious difference. Even sighted tests wouldn't change that fact, only the illusion.