Harry Lavo wrote:
" wrote in message
...
Found this JAES report that I thought some mioght find interesting, and
some
will not be happy about.

Better to be informed than to guess.

Find it he
http://www.hfm-detmold.de/eti/projek...paper_6086.pdf

This is the second time I have seen the article. It is certainly a test
that probably is as good an abx test as could be done. And I suppose it's
origin arose out of the DVD-A vs. DSD wars that permeated 2001-2003. It
would have been more interesting if either had been compared to ordinary CD.

Two things strike me after having read the article this second time:

* The authors are obviously believers in abx. Accordingly they downplay the
fact that there are differences as evidenced by four responders. But they
fail to follow up by extending the test for these four, thereby giving a
possible excuse as per standard abx practice.(a) Instead, they choose to
emphasize that 141 could hear no difference and they conclude that there is
little difference between the technologies. It would be more accurate to
say either a) there is a difference apparently, but most listeners can't
hear the difference, or b) the testing methodology used doesn't allow most
listeners to hear the difference, either of which could be true.

* They comment upon the stress and confusion of the test, but do their best
to try to twist this into something positive, instead of reporting it for
what it was...a stressful situation for the testers.

(a) Notice that these four are at the tail-end of a near-Poisson
distribution,
not a Bell curve. So this is unlikely a case of simply being wide
dispersion of listening abilities, a speculation further supported by their
being drawn from a fairly
coherent population of musicians in training. So even though additional
testing was not done, it is reasonable to assume that these four truly did
hear differences.

But because there were switching noises involved, as discussed at
length on page 8, one has to question whether the difference heard by those four,
only when doing stereo headphone
listening, was between DSD and PCM per se, or whether they were being cued
by the noises.

Apparently the four 'successes' are discussed at even greater length
in the German master's thesis. The authors in the preprint certainly
do not rule out hte possibility that the four heard a real difference.

But basically, given the extraordinary performance of four out of 145
similar listeners, the authors need to retest those four, under
conditions where switching noise is not a factor, before they
can make a claim of difference stronger than tham they have.



--
-S
"The most appealing intuitive argument for atheism is the mindblowing stupidity of religious
fundamentalists." -- Ginger Yellow