[Andrew Haley]

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Double-blind testing works for everything else, as far as I know. I'm
not going to accept any special pleading (sans really good evidence)
that it may not be applicable to audio. How would you prove such a
thing, anyway?

I don't pretend to know. How do you prove that it DOES work for
audio? Since it usually returns a null result, I'd say such
overwhelmingly one-sided results indicates one of two things: either
everything does sound the same (which my experience tells me is
extremely unlikely), or DBTs aren't good at uncovering differences
in audio gear unless they are extremely gross differences. We
certainly know which of those two outcomes the "strict objectivists"
believe in, but how do we prove which is the real answer?

We can't. It's one of the basic assumptions of the scientific method
that any truth about nature can be discovered by means of systematic
observation and experimentation. (This is the assumption that, for
example, bacteria don't behave differently when they are being
observed in the laboratory from the rest of the time.) Without this
assumption there can be no science.

Here's the thing. I suspect that you could build a specific DAC
decoder box, and swap out the D/A chips in the circuit all day
(Burr-Brown for Audio Devices, for SaberDACs, for Wolfson, etc.) and
all of them would sound, essentially, the same. But there are so
many different ways to design the circuit, even the D/A converter
part - Single DACs in switching mode, separate stereo D/A chips,
differential D/A chips, even dual differential chips and even custom
designs like dCS ring-DACs and MSB Ladder DACs, that there are BOUND
to be differences between the various schemes.

Sure, but audible ones? There's the rub. There's only one way to
find out...

Andrew.