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? - Quorahow much do you want to know about it? here is a Stereophile article about the highs and lows of Blind Testing. https://www.stereophile.com/features/141/index.html personally i have zero interest in blind testing as tool for system building. but i have plenty of experience with doing it. and it’s very flawed as a process. for 20 years i have been a judge in a speaker building contest every other year with our local audio club. there are 3-4 judges and a curtain is set up and the speakers are set up behind that curtain. we have a sheet where we keep score and run through some cuts. for this event it’s maybe the only process. i can tell you that listening to 8-15 sets of speakers will give you a headache. you are in a forced hearing situation so you are not allowing the music to come to you. how you feel about the music has to be ignored. i would never choose that for my own decision making. i want to be relaxed and allow my mind to settle without any stress and get to my zen state, then i start to pay attention to what i'm feeling about what i'm hearing. if there is an unknown in the chain that fact takes away my complete concentration and ease. |
My only complaint about ABX is that, if the source material does not change, ear fatigue sets in VERY, very quickly. I volunteered for an ABX speaker wire test at Klipsch HQ back in '06. The first five rounds, I was perfect. 5 for 5 identifying the more expensive wire versus the lamp cord. My accuracy, as the test continued, began to deteriorate, as my ears desensitized to the source material and it all began to blur together, hearing the same small segment of the same musical passage over and over again. I finished the test 13/20. So I barely did better than a coin flip on the last 15. Rotating the source material, and also ensuring that the source material is familiar to the listener, can seriously mitigate ear fatigue, making the outcomes more reliable. One of the things not discussed in any of these ABX papers is the subjects. The average person does not care about music nearly as much as, for example, the folks on this forum. Hell, the average person thinks Bose systems sound great. If these are your test subjects, of course ABX isn't going to be a useful test on them, when the differences they are looking for are extremely subtle. |
