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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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Showing 8 responses by cleeds

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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
jerkface
I volunteered for an ABX speaker wire test at Klipsch HQ ... My accuracy, as the test continued, began to deteriorate, as my ears desensitized to the source material and it all began to blur together ...
I’ve had similar experiences as an ABX subject. I still think blind testing has value, even though it’s not likely to be of much use to audiophiles.

Here’s another scholarly, objective evaluation that explores the frailty of blind testing in audio (referenced in the Stereophile article):

" The conventional .05 significance level used to analyze typical listening tests can produce a much larger risk of concluding that audible differences are inaudible than concluding that inaudible differences are audible ... resulting in strong systematic bias against those who believe differences are clearly audible between well designed components that are spectrally equated and not overdriven."
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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
The notion that blind testing for audio is an absolute test is absurd, and on so many levels. There is abundant literature (although not enough) on the frailty and limitations of blind testing in all matters of research. (That doesn’t mean that blind testing doesn’t have its place in audio, but it’s useless for most audiophiles. It’s tedious. Time consuming. Boring. And still prone to errors.)

One of the best examinations of blind testing is: "Intentional Ignorance: A History of Blind Assessment and Placebo Controls in Medicine" by Ted J. Kaptchuk, published by John Hopkins University Press. In recounting the history he explores some of the nuances of scientific testing in general. This is a scholarly, peer-reviewed article, so there’s not much point debating it here. But he concludes with this:

"The adoption of blind assessment in medicine has had as much to do with shifting political, moral, and rhetorical agendas and technical research design issues as with scientific standards of evidence ... blind assessment has also been a vehicle to confer social authority and moral legitimacy ...


He writes that blind testing has a "concealed history" and that part of its "shadowy past is the intense fervor and absolute authority with which modern biomedicine advocates it ... the justification is ’self-authenticating.’ Concealed history augments the appearance of an obvious transcendent truth. Questions are discouraged. It becomes less something molded by interests, and more an unquestioned resource upon which any interest must draw, if it ever hopes for an accolade of objectivity."

The eternal chorus of those who demand that users here submit to blind testing are merely exercising their religious beliefs. If they were truly interested in science, they’d be discussing blind testing in scientific forums, where content such as I cited here is germane.

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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
dletch2
No, there is not abundant literature that says blind testing is bad.
I don’t think anyone has claimed that, and it’s interesting that you equate "frailty and limitations" with "bad."

There is abundant literature that details the fallibility of blind testing, some of which has been linked in this thread. For the measurementalists here, blind testing is a religion; it is perfect and absolute. The results, oddly, are to be accepted on "blind faith." That was Kaptchuk’s point - which you’d understand if you actually read his paper.
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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
jerkface
The more discerning ears of the audiophile are far more useful in ABX tests.
Maybe. But this has not been shown in any of the legitimate, scientific blind listening tests with which I'm familiar. However, it has been consistently shown that trained listeners - those who were instructed in advance what to listen for - were more likely to be able to detect differences.
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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
audition__audio
dletch2 ... Just because you seem to find solace in double blind tests doesnt mean that our observations without are any less viable. Those of us who have been around the block more than once are comfortable with our decisions and your validation mean nothing. At least not to me. Nothing helps critical listening more than experience and detailed comparisons between components sighted or not.
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.
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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
peguinpower
the biggest irony with these testing nerds is that they are usually the ones with the least exposure to a wide and varied spectrum of equipment ...
I don't know if that's true or not, but I've long suspected it.
Its not even a question of affordability, but in most cases, its a dogmatic view of the hobby and refusal to listen.
Yes, exactly. And what we see recently on A'gon are proselytizing  fundamentalist measurementalists - a noisy few - trying to reduce every discussion to blind testing. It's absurd. (And this thread has shown that science recognizes blind testing is not infallible even when conducted by experts - and the measurementalists here are obviously not experts.)
... that being the case ... they fail to observe.
Incredible, isn't it?
 
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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
millercarbon
... if you utter the words "double blind" in anything other than mockery and derision then YOU are the ape trying to fix the helicopter with a hammer. YOU need to drop the BS step away from the keyboard go out and DO and HEAR and LEARN- on your own.
Let's please not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Scientific listening tests have value - though that value is limited - and they have their place. But they are not infallible nor are they reason to dismiss empirical results with a wave of the hand, which is what has begun to happen here. It's even worse when the demand for some sort of blind testing is accompanied with the accusation that a listener is insane, deluded, retarded, etc. - all of which has happened here.
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cleeds
5,645 posts
 
edgewound
... actual engineer's posts removed because they don't agree with the narrative.
I'm pretty sure he was no engineer.
That's pretty juvenile, and petty. It's actually pretty disgusting.
What was juvenile and petty were the personal attacks in the posts he made - just as he did under his previously-banned user names.
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