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? - Quoraedgewound67 posts 04-29-2021 12:21pmHarman Int'l uses blind testing quite frequently to develop cost effective products that the market will consume. Fear and ignorance. |
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That would explain why the food industry places so much emphasis on tests equivalent to ABX testing if not much more rigorous. They have whole societies and technical disciplines in place for the science of testing, and they use blind tests almost exclusively for taste. Pepsi Challenge anyone ... |
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. |
@cleeds 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. This is Paul McGowan's of PS Audio POV. Yes, he uses blind tests in design, but not in listening to music Blind audio testing – PS Audio |
