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Oh fun, another one of _these_!
So I actually think that Currawong and Wavoman are both right here, and both make good points. Since everyone here seems to like Wavoman's, I'll just focus on Currawong's.
Currawong's point, as I take it, is to say that when DBT is introduced, it quickly becomes established as the ultimate, sine-qua-non of judgment about any given item, as if there is a a coherent and universally-agree-upon methodology for conducting DBT. This turns many people off DBT, because as Wavoman states, there isn't. Now if we want to make small statements like, when testing, you should listen to each blind, or if you can't tell a big difference between items, you should say so, or something else, no one would argue. But DBT proponents, and many on the Sound Science Forums I've read, even here, go far beyond such commonsense propositions.
They believe - yes, "believe" is the correct term here - in Science with a capital S. Science "proves" things, establishes "facts" that are simply no longer disputable.
Academically speaking, that's just not correct. But even without getting into the dreaded "philosophical discussion", I think most people will recognize that this sort of thing simply does not obtain in daily life. Science is great - we have much to thank it for. But the problem I believe Currawong is bringing up is a real and valid one: it's the worship of Science by those who are not themselves scientists, and don't really understand how complicated science actually is. It's almost never a matter of having some Big Question that we need Science to answer, and then conducting some tests, and then getting The Answer and then no longer needing to discuss anything anymore. Just think about it, if that was the case, why would scientists disagree? Why would there be paradigm shifts every couple of decades where everything that was "established knowledge" within a given sub-field has to get thrown out based on a new model? But perhaps most of all, you're never going to have anything resembling this hagiographic conception of "Science" when it comes to human beings. Because human beings are INFINITELY more complicated than anything else we've ever encountered. And real scientists are not like those hollywood or storybook scientists who are these Leonardo Da Vinci generalists who seem to know everything about everything. Real science only makes progress by dividing everything up into such infinitely tiny spheres of consideration that virtually anything that anyone ever "proves" about anything is almost entirely meaningless in terms of definitively answering any "real world" question, unless and until we put together with tons of other individual "proofs" which by that very fact of addition becomes contestable, such that by the time you build up a grand theory of anything (esp anything human) based on science, it's no longer really "science" at all, but has a large component of "faith" in the sense I believe Currawong was trying to suggest. (we could also say, guesswork, or inductive logic.)
Economics thinks of itself as a science. Yeah, right. We've seen how that turned out. There are tons of "social sciences" like political science, sociology, etc. Marxism supposedly provides the most scientific and rational account of human socioeconomic development. It's not exactly universally accepted. Now even if you're going to throw all of those out, and say, those aren't "real" science, ok, but what about biology? Neuroscience? I can't tell you how many ridiculous articles clog up the world's papers every week discussing some new neuroscientific investigation. The investigations themselves, outside of a contextualizing discussion relating them to human sociology, culture, etc., are almost entirely meaningless, and the scientists themselves are smart enough to know never to make any real claims for them, but since that wouldn't sell papers, we get endless science reporters who tell us how "X is related to Y batch of cells" or "Z chromosome" as if that means anything, and nine times out of 10, you'll find it all traced back to the "amygdala, the primitive center of the brain that is the seat of emotion."
The only "fact" is, the human animal, for all our insane amount of research, simply gets more and more complex the further in we go, and while it's certainly possible to say a great many things that we weren't able to before, there are precious few answers to any of the big questions that people most want to know about. How does this related to audio? Well, one thing is that you've got electrical engineers on one side, who know very well how to build circuits. But on the other, you don't have anywhere near a perfect understanding of how human hearing works, whether for musical reproduction or just in general. Because before the 19th century, people thought we got sense data through our eyes or our ears or our hands, and then all of a sudden, everything went haywire, because the 19th century physiologists realized that more than 90% of our sensory perception was actually happening in our brain, which we know practically nothing about. Any philosophy has been trying to recover ever since.
As I said before to Crazy Carl in the Sparrow thread, I've read a lot of good reviews on this site where the reviewer will stress that the differences between A and B are incredibly, incredibly minor. Now if someone chooses to ignore that and go ahead and buy the more expensive one, that's their own fault. I think the biggest problem on the forum is actually reviewers having the moral hazard wavoman talked about, and I don't know an easy way to deal with that.
But you're never going to convince people that DBT should be the only legitimate way of analyzing gear simply by repeating the words "fact," "science," "rational," etc., over and over and using all caps. Because, even if they're not egotistical maniacs who have $100k of gear and need to justify their own purchases, and even if they're not making money off of the products you're questioning, just as regular human beings they're smart enough to know that just because you listen to A and listen to B and can't immediately discern a difference between them doesn't mean there isn't a difference to be found. To many people, all coffee and all wine taste the same. They learn there are differences only after much training and time. And it's much easier to say, well look, you can save a lot of money by _not learning_ those differences!
As I think ProgRockMan stated earlier, DBT ultimately proves _far too much_ because it quickly leads to Crazy Carl's position that everything basically sounds the same. Which I think is true - everything does, at some level of generalization, sound _basically_ the same. And listening to a great song with friends out of a crappy boom box or an old car stereo while having an amazing time is going to "sound" great. Even though the SQ, in some abstract sense, would be incredibly poor.
I think the better reviews around head-fi already make use of blind testing, but I think it would be difficult to chide them for not doing it in an absolutely standardized way, since there's no accepted standard by which it would be done. And given our present understanding of the human brain and thus the human sensory system, I doubt there could be.
)) Isn't it weird that this 'DBT FREE' is proclaimed in the section where there is obviously most snake oil flowing around? 
