Amir and Blind Testing

I read somewhere Amir is a famous Egyptian movie star who grows prize winning watermelons in his spare time. It's a confirmed fact.

Unless one does an actual blind test, every, and I mean every change will only result in a subjective change and won't stand up to scrutiny.

I read somewhere Amir is a famous Egyptian movie star who grows prize winning watermelons in his spare time. It's a confirmed fact.

This anecdote has merit as a credible and verifiable snippet of gossip (for the erudite, technically known as hearsay).

I remember reading somewhere (and now I forget where) that A/B testing relies on our short term memory, which isn't the best method.

Not sure if that's true or not, but I felt it was an interesting point. But that would at least explain why a lot of people like to take their time before making decisions on whether something sounds better/different/worse.

Amir and others on this thread are absolutely right: A/B comparisons are notoriously flawed by expectation bias; that's just how our brains work. In my profession (drug discovery) we therefore use "double-blind" evaluations, where the experimenter (e.g. the audio dealer) and the patient (i.e. the customer) do not know whether they are receiving a new treatment, a standard treatment, or (in non-critical cases) a sugar pill (i.e. placebo). Only such an evaluation would either confirm or put in question Amir's well-intended measurements, in the sense whether or not the data he measures are relevant to human musical enjoyment and thus would indicate - before you buy it - if a particular gear enhances or diminishes such pleasure (which is, I suppose, what this exercise should be all about). The respective measurements would indeed have to track with the "enjoyment score" after listening to a hidden piece of new gear or an old one, while the listener and the dealer would not even know what gear is being listened to. In that sense, Harry Pearson was correct in his criticism of both: lone reliance on measurements and on A/B comparisons. He also knew that a new piece of equipment might sound spectacular at the onset, only to become fatiguing after a few hours or even days, no matter how "good" the measured data were. Psychoacoustics were a budding discipline in his early days, and we are still just beginning to understand how we make esthetic decisions, and what important part THD plays in this puzzle, if any at all.