It's really a depressing question. Why do so many people reject/fear science?
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- ...
- 317 posts total
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." |
It's amazing that you could read this article, though I don't think you did, I think you are quoting others excerpts, and reach this conclusion! THE AUTHOR IS NOT ADVOCATING AGAINST BLIND TESTING! Can I be any more clear? What he is advocating against is poor quality of testing, such that the results are taken as absolute, without any consideration to whether test implication truly met the goals, and the opaqueness that often surrounds these tests! |
i’ve challenged blind testing advocates to show me a system that equals or exceeds the performance of my system using only blind testing as a system building method. all i heard was crickets. zero response. blind testers don’t assemble systems using blind testing. they just have pre-conceived opinions. so why even pay attention to them? i don’t. |
Gee @cleeds , nice selective posting there. You know there are AES members and people with access to research literature here ... This is a convention paper, not a journal paper, which means it does not go through the normal peer review of a formal journal paper. https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/conventions/?elib=11480 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 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. This paper discusses ways to equalize error risks, introduces a quantitative measure of a listening test’s fairness, discusses implications for literature reviewers, and presents a statistical table enabling readers to conduct equal-error analyses without calculations. |
- 317 posts total