"Harry Lavo" wrote in message
...
" 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.

That puts them in line with the restof the scientific community doing audio
research.

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.

Those 4 did only with head phones, without them they did no better than
anyone else.

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.


It would be more appropriate to say there might be a better chance of
hearing such differences, with headphones.

* 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.


I don't see anybody doing any twisting, unless it's you commentign on the
"beleif in ABX." ABX and ABC/hr are SOP for audio testing.

(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.

Nobody is claiming they didn't only that for the vast majority of people,
such differences are unlikely to be heard without headphones. They didn't
do further testing because they got very good results and while I can't say
for certain, there probably were time and money constraints.

The bottom line seems to be that about 97-98% of people are not likely to
hear any differences between the 2 formats.