[Scott[_6_]]

On Nov 27, 7:19=A0am, "Arny Krueger" wrote:
"Scott" wrote in message

...
On Nov 22, 7:11 pm, "Arny Krueger" wrote:









"Audio_Empire" wrote in message

...

My point was simply that there can be biases AGAINST some things
sounding different as well as biases in favor of the proposition. The=
n
the test would be free of that type of bias.

The above ignores a well known aspect of human nature which is to strive
for
a positive result from any activity that requires substantial effort.
An ABX test requires substantial effort on the part of listeners so the
listeners w ill follow their human nature and strive for a positive res=
ult
simply because they are expending the effort and don't want the outcome=
to
be futile.

The above ignores all the research on psychoacoustics and the profound
effects of bias on our perceptions. You are basically saying that
listeners can and do "will away" a bias of same sound.

I said nothing of the sort. What I did say is that an inherent component =
of
the human personality will often assert itself and modify the outcome.

In effect you did. Audio Empire points out this *fact* in his post
above "While DBT and ABX will remove the bias in tests where the
participants DO believe, for instance that cables all sound
different , but it won't remove the bias from people who DON'T believe
it - unless, of course, as you pointed out, they don't know at all
what they are listening to."

You assert above that quoted *fact* "ignores a well known aspect of
human nature which is to strive for a positive result from any
activity that requires substantial effort. An ABX test requires
substantial effort on the part of listeners so the listeners w ill
follow their human nature and strive for a positive result simply
because they are expending the effort and don't want the outcome to be
futile."

So you absolutely are in effect asserting that the "modified outcome"
is that one can will away their same sound biases in an ABX DBT due to
the effort involved in doing such a test. And that does fly in the
face of all the research done on bias effects in audio. Effort does
not make bias effects go away. You are totally mischaracterizing human
nature. We know what human nature is from the research on bias
effects. Human nature is that you can't make bias effects go away just
because one is investing their time and efforts into an ABX DBT or any
other endeavor. Heck one could say exactly the same thing about any
sighted test. I could just as easily say that dismissing sighted tests
based on bias effects ignores a well known aspect of human nature
which is to strive for a positive result from any activity that
requires substantial effort. A sighted test test requires substantial
effort on the part of listeners so the listeners will follow their
human nature and strive for an accurate result simply because they are
expending the effort and don't want the outcome to be futile. But we
know from mountains of research on psychoacoustics that this simply is
not true and is not human nature at all. Your assertion about human
nature and it's effects on human bias is plainly wrong and flies in
the face of all the research on psychoacoustics.

And what we can deduce from this is that *any* ABX DBT that allows the
subjects to know what A and B are ahead of time either needs to have
some extra controls for same sound bias or may suffer from the effect
of same sound bias. If no such controls were implemented in such a
test and the result was a null we have no way of knowing if the result
was due to bias effects or not. Any such test is completely corrupted
by the lack of bias controls and is worthless as scientific data.