Audiophile objections to blind testing - an attempt from a layman

Dec 17, 2024 at 4:09 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 128

AudioThief

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This was originally posted on ASR just now, but I really want the sound science users take on it. Particularly @gregorio , @castleofargh and @bigshot .

Hello everyone. First, a bit of preamble that hopefully will make sense once I come around to the point I'm trying to make at the end.

I am a former subjectivist - read my story here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/repentant-subjectivist.22411/

I have recently come back to the hobby after years of absence "just" owning a "poverty entry level" rig of Stax L500 mk2 > 006t > modi 3. Because of better listening conditions in our new home, I am returning and got the 007mk2/L700mk2 > 727II > Eversolo Z8 DAC going. This newfound interest has of course once again subjected me to the classic audiophile discourse. But it has also subjected me to my own bias' and how I interpret the different equipment. I am doing my best to remain rational in a field where I understand very little.

When I changed the 006t amplifier to the 727II amplifier on the L700, I didn't expect to hear any changes. However, I certaintly did. The subjectivist in me wants to say that the sound became a bit brighter, a bit more detailed and a bit more engaging. For better or worse, as the L700 through the 006t was a serene and relaxing listening experience that, although less "resolving" sounded fantastic. Now I'm sure this effect is most likely due to either higher listening volumes or just expectation bias etc.

I EQ all my headphones through roon after oratory1990 settings to Harman target. It is obvious to me that while the headphones post EQ might measure very similar, they don't actually sound similar. I am very confident that I would be able to discern between different headphones EQ'ed to the same curve in a double blind test. If only there was a way to not tell by the sensation of the headphones on my head. Either way, this tells me that surely there must be other measurements than just distortion figures and frequency response that explains the sound difference. Size and shape of the driver, earpad thickness etc surely plays a role.

One of the main reasons for me evening "seeing the light" and understanding that the audiophile hobby is mostly a combination of psychoacoustics and dopamine addiction is the topic of electrostatic amplifiers. When I bought a pair of Stax SR-007mk1 and paired it with a 727II, I kept reading about how this was a bad sounding combination and that I needed a $ 6000 USD third party amplifier to drive the headphones. This to me seemed so ridiculous that I started questioning it, and it led me down the path I am still on to this day. My thinking is that if the SR-007 sounds vastly improved through the Mjolnir Carbon (6k third party amp) compared to the Stax SRM-727II amp, there should be a way to measure it. But as I understand it, the frequency response will actually be the same no matter what amp you run it through. However it is also clear that a severely underpowered electrostatic headphone will sound very bad. My personal experience putting the 007 into the entry level 252s amp sounded terrible - broken almost. I would be confident I could easily discern between the 252s and 727II. This might come down to distortion, but I don't know.

Anyways, my thought has always been that if the difference is as big as the "stax mafia" proclaims - why would they not produce measurements or tests that actually prove this difference? Many of these people own a ridiculous amount of gear, have the necessary knowledge to pull of measurement/tests and would clearly have an interest - sometimes even commercial interest, possibly. So when they don't do that, it makes me think they just don't want to know the results. And that may very well be the case.

So, to the point of blind tests. When I was still a gung ho subjectivist, I remember having some opinions on the limits of blind tests. These opinions weren't very well developed, but there was something in me intuitively that told me that blind testing was very limited. I remember thinking something along the lines of - "well, if I can't "put the sound on a mental coat rack so to speak", then I can't properly interpret it." And I suppose this might be correct, and my opinion on blind tests in a way coming down to me not understand what "objective" even means - just acknowledging the interpretation part should've made me realize that I needed to read up on psychoacoustics.

I'm largely confused about it all, but I saw something I found interesting on TV the other day. Basically, there is a Norwegian christmas advent calendar show on the state channel that has celebrities go through various christmas related challenges. In one of the challenges, they were tasked to identify various food items from a christmas cold table with limited senses.

Task 1 was to identify the food without seeing or otherwise touching it, while being spoon fed it. They were fed "pultost", a matured sour milk cheese.
Task 2 was to identify the food by smell only. The food was pickled herring.
Task 3 was to identify food in a opaque container by shaking the container. The food was rice porridge.
Task 4 was to identify the food by touch only. The food was beetroot salad.
Task 5 was to identify the food by sight only, except it was placed a far distance from them. The food was a slab of pork ribs.
Task 6 was to use their "6th sense" by essentially guessing what hid under a lid without having any way of inspecting what was under. The food was cabaret.

Most if not all of these food items is something adult norwegians will have a close relationship with, having eaten it most every christmas for their entire lives. To my surprise, almost none of the contestants could identify the items. The most interesting test to me was the pickled herring smell test. Pickled herring is extremely popular and has a quite distinct smell which most if not all contestants would be familiar with. Yet only 1 or 2 out of about 14-15 contestants managed to correctly identify it as pickled herring.

This made me think about a claim I have often heard when it comes to blind testing: "If you can't hear a difference in a blind test, then for all intents and purposes there is no difference in actual sound to that person".

I can't remember exactly what the contestants on the show said they believed the smell from the pickled herring was, but there was a lot of different responses from things that certaintly smells nothing like pickled herring. We can assume that since they wrongly identified the pickled herring from these items, they may be unable to differentiate pickled herring from things smelling very different in a blind test. My question then is, would this mean that in terms of smell - there isn't actually a difference because we wouldn't be able to differentiate it between a blind test? Surely not, right?

I can imagine someone knowledgeable reading this and laughing their ass of, since it probably shows a big lack of understanding in basically everything I'm talking about. But my idea here is basically that identifying something from smell looked to become almost impossible when not getting to see the foods. Same with taste and feel. This tells me that our senses of taste and smell is incredibly bad - bordering on useless - without the aid of sight. If this is true to some extent in regards to hearing, wouldn't this mean that blind testing is in fact almost useless because of our reliance on other senses to interpret sound?

Basically, if our senses of hearing is so lost if we isolate it - how useful is it to ascertain that we can't differentiate between gear in a blind test? All it would tell us is essentially that humans sense of hearing sucks. It doesn't seem to say a whole lot about whether or not there actually is a difference in sound, but rather that we can't discern a difference in a blind test. But in the same way I would hesitatet to say that the difference in smell between lets say pickled herring and beetroot salad is just bias and voodoo because a person couldn't smell the difference in a blind test - and thus no difference in smell actually exists - , I wouldn't say that a lack of discernment between equipment in blind test means that there isn't any difference in sound.

Of course where something measures the same, it must also sound the same objectively. But it feels like there are limitations to this, re: same frequency response but different sounds etc.

Okay I guess I'll stop typing and pray that I've made sense to some degree.
 
Dec 17, 2024 at 5:06 AM Post #2 of 128
I would suggest that the only other sense that is significantly involved with sound is sight and that only matters when we are listening and watching someone speak or sing either live or in a video medium such that we can pick up other triggers that indicate nuances in meaning and intent. There is no change in the sound that hits our ears but we can interpret more from the added stimulus from the persons behaviour, facial expression etc that are directly related to the sound.

With recorded sound with no visual content there are no visual cues only sound so anything that is visible to us while listening to the recorded sound can only distract us from the reality of the sound since it played no part in the sound that was recorded.

Close your eyes and that is purely the music with no other stimulus except mood, temperature, physical wellness, intoxication etc.

Open your eyes and look at the expensive new headphone cable, amplifier and DAC and you introduce other stimuli that can alter the perception of sound but do so by distracting from reality not playing a part in reality in the manner that sight, smell and taste are all part of the reality of food consumption and enjoyment that you discussed.
 
Dec 17, 2024 at 5:54 AM Post #3 of 128
There are many foods which smell (or taste) confusing or different when tested blind because they have a lot of chemical compounds in common.

A blind test doesn't have to be literally 'blind' as far as I know. E.g. comparing two speaker cables you can still have the cables on display to the listener as long as they don't get any clues whatsoever as to which cable is actually plugged in behind the speaker or amp.

Basically, if our senses of hearing is so lost if we isolate it - how useful is it to ascertain that we can't differentiate between gear in a blind test? All it would tell us is essentially that humans sense of hearing sucks. It doesn't seem to say a whole lot about whether or not there actually is a difference in sound, but rather that we can't discern a difference in a blind test.
Well, that is the point of a blind test: to ascertain whether we can discern a difference in sound. In order to ascertain whether there actually is a difference in sound we need sound measurements.
 
Dec 17, 2024 at 7:13 AM Post #4 of 128
I think there are 2 possible approaches to this:
A/ you learn about the testing method most trusted and used in research and just accept that those guys know why they're using the complicated, annoying, more expensive methods. Then follow the rule and standard of such a test. And maybe just as important, and what many audiophiles don't get, learn which type of test should be used to answer which question. Because we still get 2 or 3 times a year, someone trying to say that ABX is flawed because it's not good at telling what he prefers... Well duh! It's testing if we can consistently perceive a sound difference, preference was never considered. For taste, you have other methods like MOS or MUSHRA where you attribute a value to each sample and the criterion could then be preference.

Or B/ You learn about psychology and psychoacoustic, and start to see why some variables must be removed or at least kept stable while we test for some other variable. What you describe about people having a harder time when some of their senses are blocked is fairly typical, because our experience of reality is never just sound, just look, just smell, the brain has learned to identify things using all the methods available, and then just relying on patterns+prediction to handle most situations. If a clear visual cue can tell you as much as a tricky audio cue, why would the brain waste time and efforts on sound? It's all about achieving quick decision-making. If a lifetime of experiences has correlated price and quality, your brain will use that whether you want to or not because for the brain that's a most reliable variable.

To match your TV show, you can waste your time on some "what's in the box" videos(most are straight up moronic, rehearsed, or not so disguised advertising, but the concept is similar to what you brought up). Back in the day in France, we had a game show with silly challenges, and one of them was to go find a big key in one of the jars in a room. One or 2 would be made of glass and show mice or whatever, just to prime you into expecting nasty stuff in the opaque ones and hopefully for the show, get scared of touching a feather or some lukewarm milk. Obviously it wasn't anything crazy and the level of danger was guaranteed to be zero, but touching various unknown things while not seeing them, still managed to be stressful and get screams from a few challengers.
Here we're dealing with a different issue because the predictive part of the brain takes over almost entirely and the stress is a direct result of your own imagination ^_^. Reality is still the same, what's in the jars is still the same. You're just tripping on bad prediction.

But doesn't it further support the fact that what we think of as smell, taste and various senses in our interpretation of reality, are false? What destabilizes the brain are the missing cheating tools it's used to have. If food looks nice and fancy, it will "taste" better than if it looks like someone just puked it back into the plate.
And yes, when having to pass a test, we're well out of our comfort zone. We worry about failing, we're unhappy, we aren't finding the easy "sound differences" that our eyes and knowledge are so used to "hearing" with ease.
The best way to deal with that is simple repetition. If you run listening tests many times, the brain will understand that there is no danger, no heavy sentencing at the end, no reason to stress over it. Ask anybody who has done many ABX for codecs or whatever else, almost all of them felt some pressure the first few times, and none of them is feeling any stress or fear anymore. Now they're more likely bored out of their mind, instead of afraid to fail.
And there is nothing against training to better recognize certain differences in sound. So long as the actual test is done properly, that's all good. The result will tell you about your success while trained, instead of your success with your initial ability to notice those audio cues. So it's a slightly different question we're answering.

Ultimately, you write down a clear question and stick to trying to answer it no matter what. Not guessing it, not agreeing with yourself on what you already decided was the truth, not seeking validation, and not answering a different easier question instead(your brain will try to do just that! It's always trying to do exactly that, and often without us noticing the substitution. It's the very cause of us hearing with our eyes so much, vision has more neurons, more obvious distinctions, it's an easier question to answer how something sounds). If you're looking for your ability to hear sound differences, then you must remove all the ways your brain usually helps itself to make you imagine sound.


Back to your post, IDK that assuming some feelings are expectation bias or volume differences is much better than assuming you're hearing things exactly how they are. Most of the time we don't know, and not knowing shouldn't be a bad thing. It is much wiser to admit we lack proof than to take an unjustified stand. I'm a proud member of mostly not knowing things. It's not how you impress people on the web, but if it's the truth, there is no shame in sticking with it IMO.
I EQ all my headphones through roon after oratory1990 settings to Harman target. It is obvious to me that while the headphones post EQ might measure very similar, they don't actually sound similar. I am very confident that I would be able to discern between different headphones EQ'ed to the same curve in a double blind test. If only there was a way to not tell by the sensation of the headphones on my head. Either way, this tells me that surely there must be other measurements than just distortion figures and frequency response that explains the sound difference. Size and shape of the driver, earpad thickness etc surely plays a role.
If the frequency response is the same on a dummy head with a certain placement, you can be fairly confident that it will not be the same at your eardrum on your own head with the way you placed the headphone for comfort. It is a false assumption about frequency response and one we often see, I talked about that maybe a week ago. The same reason why we always tell people not to draw relations between graphs from 2 different places, is why you won't get the FR that's measured on a given dummy head. Different heads and ears are different and have different reflections and resonances. And that is not something solved with a one time EQ because a different headphone has a driver of a different size, it is placed at a different distance from the ear, the internal volume is different... So the resulting FR is also different. Both the headphones and the heads interact in ways that are specific. And then there are other issues with seal quality and how the smallest placement difference greatly alters high frequencies which, while not much of the music content, remain audible.
My point is you are not hearing the same FR between headphones EQed to match on some rig.
 
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Dec 17, 2024 at 8:39 AM Post #6 of 128
We can assume that since they wrongly identified the pickled herring from these items, they may be unable to differentiate pickled herring from things smelling very different in a blind test.
I don't see how we can assume that. "Name the thing that smells like this" seems entirely different from "does the thing you smell now, smell like the other thing you smell now".
 
Dec 17, 2024 at 8:07 PM Post #7 of 128
The majority of the taste sensation is smell, just ask anyone who has lost their sense of smell. In fact, blind tests for things like wine tasting (or indeed audio) do not remove our senses from the test, they just remove identification of the product, e.g. different amps, 16/44 v 24/96 and so on.
 
Dec 18, 2024 at 3:24 AM Post #8 of 128
I don't see how we can assume that. "Name the thing that smells like this" seems entirely different from "does the thing you smell now, smell like the other thing you smell now".
I agree that there certaintly isn't a 1:1 relationship there - far from it. But would you say that if we took two things that smelled different, but only slightly so, that it would be far fetched to think it would be problematic smelling there being a difference if quickly switched back and forth under our noses?

I mean, I might be totally wrong in my assumption. I know nothing about this stuff at all.
 
Dec 18, 2024 at 5:33 AM Post #9 of 128
I’ll try to answer in few words… I’m not going to talk about food, because we aren’t dealing with that in this forum. We are interested in sound, not the other senses. Food is entirely different and comparisons between sound and taste is like comparing a rock to a hampster.

You’re confusing your perception with fidelity. None of us here will tell you what your senses tell you that you hear. That involves all sorts of mental interpretations that only you can possibly know. What we CAN tell you is if two things are indistinguishable from each other as objective sound. Fidelity is about accuracy. Is the sound produced by the DAC the sound that it was intended to produce? Is the output of this DAC the same as that DAC? Does the wire that connects components change the sound? These questions aren’t about your perceptions. They are about fidelity.

Your mind is capable of making two identical sounds seem to sound different to you. That is a given. In order to determine if the sounds actually ARE different (and how different they are) you need to measure the signals objectively and compare, or do a controlled listening test that isolates you from your perceptual error, bias or other subjective influences. That’s how you judge fidelity and accuracy.

All we can ask from a box full of electronics is to do its job accurately. We can’t ask it to make us happy. Once you’ve determined that it is accurate, then perceiving is up to your mind. Your accurate equipment gives you a baseline of fidelity. If accuracy doesn’t make you happy, then you can address making your mental perception happy with a rainbow of coloration and fancy jewel encrusted boxes. That’s fair. Feel free to please yourself. But it isn’t fair to attribute differences due to bias and perceptual error to the fidelity of a component.

When it comes to home audio electronics, measuring the same IS sounding the same. We can’t ask measure differences in DACs and amps that no human could possibly hear. The signal is made up of frequencies, amplitudes and time. If a DAC can produce those things to a level of accuracy that is beyond your human ears’ ability to hear, then it’s going to sound exactly the same as any other properly functioning DAC. This isn’t true of transducers, because when sound enters the physical world, there are many more variables and compromises involved.
 
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Dec 18, 2024 at 7:57 AM Post #10 of 128
Close your eyes and that is purely the music with no other stimulus except mood, temperature, physical wellness, intoxication etc.

Open your eyes and look at the expensive new headphone cable, amplifier and DAC and you introduce other stimuli that can alter the perception of sound but do so by distracting from reality not playing a part in reality in the manner that sight, smell and taste are all part of the reality of food consumption and enjoyment that you discussed.
Precisely.
 
Dec 18, 2024 at 4:23 PM Post #11 of 128
I EQ all my headphones through roon after oratory1990 settings to Harman target. It is obvious to me that while the headphones post EQ might measure very similar, they don't actually sound similar. I am very confident that I would be able to discern between different headphones EQ'ed to the same curve in a double blind test.
This is true, but is actually only the case because headphones don't measure the same on all heads.

Your own HRTF will be different than that of the rig, and even once HRTF effects of the rig and comparison head are subtracted, there are still other ways in which a headphone will interact in less predictable ways called HpTF.

This for instance is a graph showing how the Heddphone 2 GT measures, but rather than just measuring once on a rig, it's measured several times on several rigs, with the inherent HRTF of the rigs all subtracted, and the shaded area then shows where things varied between heads.

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So for some people, there might be an objectionable peak at about 11khz, for others it might simply not be there at all.


An EQ preset unfortunately cannot be universal because everyone's HRTF is different, and they'll experience different HpTF effects.
This in practice means even if you EQ two headphones to Harman on a particular rig, it's likely that neither of them would measure exactly Harman on your head, and also very unlikely that they will measure the same on your head, they'd still sound different not because there's something outside the FR causing a difference, but simply because they ARE both providing different FRs on your head.

This is also one of the reasons why generally it's best not to try to EQ your headphones to a target above about 2-3khz, since things get very very variable there.
Below 2khz you're good, but above that it's best to do it manually and use the existing measurements as a bit of a guide, but manually check whether the adjustments you're making are helping or not.

Applying a full 'correction' all the way up to 20khz will more often than not cause issues on your head ESPECIALLY above 10khz.

Anyways, my thought has always been that if the difference is as big as the "stax mafia" proclaims - why would they not produce measurements or tests that actually prove this difference?
Mostly because measuring energizers is quite difficult and requires different equipment than measuring standard amplifiers. So even if someone has an audio precision, and a normal dummy load, they'd still need to go get a bunch of other equipment to test the energizers safely and accurately

I'm largely confused about it all, but I saw something I found interesting on TV the other day. Basically, there is a Norwegian christmas advent calendar show on the state channel that has celebrities go through various christmas related challenges. In one of the challenges, they were tasked to identify various food items from a christmas cold table with limited senses.

Task 1 was to identify the food without seeing or otherwise touching it, while being spoon fed it. They were fed "pultost", a matured sour milk cheese.
Task 2 was to identify the food by smell only. The food was pickled herring.
Task 3 was to identify food in a opaque container by shaking the container. The food was rice porridge.
Task 4 was to identify the food by touch only. The food was beetroot salad.
Task 5 was to identify the food by sight only, except it was placed a far distance from them. The food was a slab of pork ribs.
Task 6 was to use their "6th sense" by essentially guessing what hid under a lid without having any way of inspecting what was under. The food was cabaret.

Most if not all of these food items is something adult norwegians will have a close relationship with, having eaten it most every christmas for their entire lives. To my surprise, almost none of the contestants could identify the items. The most interesting test to me was the pickled herring smell test. Pickled herring is extremely popular and has a quite distinct smell which most if not all contestants would be familiar with. Yet only 1 or 2 out of about 14-15 contestants managed to correctly identify it as pickled herring.

This made me think about a claim I have often heard when it comes to blind testing: "If you can't hear a difference in a blind test, then for all intents and purposes there is no difference in actual sound to that person".

I can't remember exactly what the contestants on the show said they believed the smell from the pickled herring was, but there was a lot of different responses from things that certaintly smells nothing like pickled herring. We can assume that since they wrongly identified the pickled herring from these items, they may be unable to differentiate pickled herring from things smelling very different in a blind test. My question then is, would this mean that in terms of smell - there isn't actually a difference because we wouldn't be able to differentiate it between a blind test? Surely not, right?

I can imagine someone knowledgeable reading this and laughing their ass of, since it probably shows a big lack of understanding in basically everything I'm talking about. But my idea here is basically that identifying something from smell looked to become almost impossible when not getting to see the foods. Same with taste and feel. This tells me that our senses of taste and smell is incredibly bad - bordering on useless - without the aid of sight. If this is true to some extent in regards to hearing, wouldn't this mean that blind testing is in fact almost useless because of our reliance on other senses to interpret sound?
Is blind testing limited? Yes absolutely, our ability to taste or hear or otherwise discern something blind is often hampered even if just due to the stress/pressure of the test situation itself.

Does that make it useless? No absolutely not.

The point of blind tests is that it is the only way to provide a conclusive and controlled answer that "Yes, that thing is audible because we've removed any way for you to tell via other means such as sight".

It is true that your ability to audibly discern something MAY be hampered in a blind test situation for various physical or psychological reasons, but that's ok. 'Failing' a blind test does NOT mean something is NOT audible. It is not a way to prove a negative.
Failing a blind test just means that we don't yet have evidence to say something is true, not that we have evidence something is false.

But the powerful thing about the properly controlled blind test is that if you can pass (assuming it's set up and controlled properly which people often mess up), then it conclusively says "There is no other answer except that this is audible".

Blind tests may be a somewhat imperfect solution, but sighted testing is far less perfect since it can never give us a conclusive answer anyway.
A less than perfect solution does not mean it should be ignored. Blind tests are powerful tools
 
Dec 18, 2024 at 10:22 PM Post #13 of 128
I agree that there certaintly isn't a 1:1 relationship there - far from it. But would you say that if we took two things that smelled different, but only slightly so, that it would be far fetched to think it would be problematic smelling there being a difference if quickly switched back and forth under our noses?
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I agree that quickly switching could help but whether "it would be far fetched to think it would be problematic"? That depends on how slight is "slightly" :-). At some point you just hit the threshold of human senses. Then, even though the two things emit slightly different molecules, they will smell the same to us. But probably still different to dogs.
 
Dec 19, 2024 at 3:33 AM Post #14 of 128
Whenever someone argues a scientific point by comparing brand names and specific products, you can be sure they are getting their information from spurious sources. Head fi trains people to be parrots reciting advertorial in thread after thread.

Take two paint swatches that are very very close in color. Hold them up next to each other and flick your eyes back and forth between them and see if you can tell the difference between them. Then take the same paint colors and paint a room in each one on opposite ends of your house. Walk from one to the other and try to tell. Go ahead. Sit down in the room and live there a while. Can you tell the difference better now?

The way to compare two similar things is a direct A/B comparison with no delay between.
 
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Dec 19, 2024 at 5:13 AM Post #15 of 128
If this is true to some extent in regards to hearing, wouldn't this mean that blind testing is in fact almost useless because of our reliance on other senses to interpret sound?

Basically, if our senses of hearing is so lost if we isolate it - how useful is it to ascertain that we can't differentiate between gear in a blind test?
Hmmm, you covered quite a lot of ground in your post, seemed to confuse a few things and extrapolated without sufficient reason/evidence. For example, you seem to have confused a game show where contestants couldn’t see what they were smelling with an actual double blind test. The term “blind test” can be ambiguous outside the realm of science, hence why here we tend to specify a DBT (Double Blind Test) or ABX (which is a type of DBT) because a DBT indicates/implies a controlled, scientific test rather than just any old uncontrolled test where you can’t see what you’re testing.

Read Castleofargh’s post, there’s a lot of wisdom there about how the data from our senses combine inside our brains, which then throw’s out 90% of that data and effectively jumps to a quick conclusion/interpretation. This process is called “heuristics” and jumping to a quick conclusion is an evolutionary advantage. For example, it’s obviously better to quickly jump to the conclusion that you’re being stalked by a predator and be wrong, than it is to still be working out what the sound is while you’re already being eaten! It’s a trade-off though, this quick heuristic perception/interpretation of reality is more prone to error and easily fooled/mislead. While that’s a nuisance when trying to determine certain questions of audibility, it’s also actually useful because we’ve learned to take advantage of the fact that our perception is easily fooled and often predictably so, which allows us to create illusions. Music itself is an ancient example of this and virtually all modern commercial audio recordings are reliant on it.

The problem with the audiophile community is that it is now effectively ruled by audiophile marketers, because of course without audiophile products there wouldn’t be an audiophile community, and particularly over the last 35-40 years, the audiophile marketers have successfully isolated the audiophile community from both the audio science/scientists and the pro-audio community. Typically, the only exceptions are those scientists and pro-audio workers who have effectively been bought by the audiophile marketers or have jumped on the audiophile bandwagon of their own volition, seduced by the gullibility of it’s membership and the relatively huge profit margins on offer. This is how the marketers effectively now rule, because the audiophile community is now largely isolated from those who would call out their marketing BS. The problem facing the average audiophile is two-fold:

Firstly, the audio world does not revolve around audiophiles, it revolves around the over half a trillion dollar entertainment industry that employs audio (TV, Film, radio and music recording, although the latter only accounts for a few percent of that total) but even more so around the multi-trillion dollar telecoms industry. And both these industries have pumped huge resources into R&D, starting around 130 years ago and particularly in the last 90 or so, resulting in masses of science that has obviously become more advanced and complex over time and which is therefore not trivial for amateurs or laymen to grasp. That makes it difficult enough to start with but then audiophiles are hit with the second, “double whammy”:

Secondly, any of that masses of science which would contradict false marketing claims has to be deliberately confused, misrepresented or just blatantly lied about or omitted by the marketers. The two most obvious areas of science that would contradict false marketing claims are measurements and the gold standard of hearing perception testing the controlled DBT. So that’s two areas marketers have aggressively targeted and tried to confuse/misrepresent, which isn’t difficult because both are highly developed and therefore quite complex areas of science. The most common tactic with measurements is to claim they’re effectively useless because they don’t measure something they’re not designed to measure. Akin to me falsely claiming that the ubiquitous 0-100kph measurement for car acceleration is actually useless because it doesn’t tell me anything about the brand of coffee I prefer. Well duh, of course it doesn’t, that’s not what it’s measuring. We all know this and would instantly recognise the claim as ludicrous but audiophiles commonly don’t take the audiophile equivalent as ludicrous. For example, the THD+N measurement is useless because it doesn’t tell us whether we will prefer say one DAC over another. “Well duh” is the obvious response, unless you’re an audiophile, in which case the response would often be, that’s true, we can’t really trust this measurement or measurements in general because we can’t measure everything, better to trust your ears. IE. Trust the very thing you’re relying on to be fooled in order to appreciate both audio recordings and music!

The most common tactics with DBT, is to misrepresent any old test where you can’t see what you’re testing as a DBT, to improperly design and run a DBT and to highlight the flaws of DBT while completely omitting the fact that science has not only been aware of those flaws for 80 years or so but what it has done over that time to mitigate or compensate for them. It’s always astonishing to see audiophiles/marketers highlight some relatively obvious flaw/s which they effectively claim tens of thousands of scientists over many decades are blissfully unaware of, because they’re all deaf and of course knowledge, education and intelligence completely stop you from seeing the obvious! Those very personable and believable marketers along with thousands of audiophiles’ common sense (based on that marketing) is far superior; listen for yourself, trust your ears …. anything that disagrees with all this must be wrong!

Sorry, bit of a rant there, :) None of it was aimed at you, I’m just trying to explain the situation and justify why you are confused. It’s very hard to be anything else in the audiophile community, faced with this double whammy. I’ll respond more about your concerns about DBT in my response to GoldenSound later.

G
 
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