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On 1 Oct 2005 19:43:15 GMT, wrote:

Steven Sullivan wrote:
wrote:
Stewart Pinkerton wrote:
On 30 Sep 2005 02:51:38 GMT, wrote:

wrote:
wrote:

P.S. How often has anybody done a blind test in which they listened for
days? Let's say 4 switches per trial, 2 days per switch, 20 trials:
that's 160 days. Has this ever happened? Ever?

No one who understands human hearing perception would waste his time on
such an endeavor. It's nonsensical (as well as being a bad test).

How would we know what the result would be if we haven't done it?

In exactly the same way that we know that you will never run a
3-minute mile.

Your statement here, and Bob's statement about "elephants that can
fly", are statements about performance. Can my body *perform* to that
level; does an elephant have the *ability* to fly?

Quite so - and the answer is that you cannot run a 3-minute mile. You
can also not hear differences among cables, because the human body
cannot perform to that level.

This seems to reflect the basic assumption in your paradigm: that the
performance of the test subject in discriminating A & B is a good way
to understand perception.

Whereas I ask, not how the ear/brain "performs," but simply: do the
different sounds A & B produce different experiences? And then I
investigate how one might go about determining if they do or do not.

How about asking yourself this question instead: do the different
experiences arise from objective differences in the sounds? Or, as is
possible, do they arise purely from subjective errors in perception?

That is the precise question I ask myself. That why I wrote "do the
different SOUNDS produce different experiences?"

Do you not even understand what you just wrote above? You stated "do
the different SOUNDS produce different experiences?", which contains a
clear presumption that the sounds were in fact different.

By the way, you use the word "error". If listening to the same thing
twice produces different subjective impressions, I don't conclude that
necessarily there has been an "error" in perception. I suggest that
context affects perception.

So what? The sounds were demonstrably *not* different, which is the
root of this debate.
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Stewart Pinkerton | Music is Art - Audio is Engineering