Harry Lavo wrote:
"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...

The only problem was that the cables I was changing were not in
fact
the ones carrying the signal. The real cables remained unchanged
throughout the test.

So without the pressure of blind testing, the participants were all
relaxed enough to hear the differences easily. Shame really that
there
were no differences to hear.


Yep...the first conclusion you can draw from this is that people
don't
expect to be lied to.

The second is that people can easily imagine differences where none
exist
*IF* they have a reason to believe such differences should exist.

And isn't this exactly the problem with all sighted evaluations? Any
visual difference, or any known difference between the units under
test, establishes a reason to believe [audible] differences would
exist. You can't reject Don's experiment on this logic without
rejecting every sighted comparison you have ever done.

None of this proves that people can't hear real differences sighted.

Why would we need to prove this?

Nor does it prove that blinding does not remove some real differences
that
are perceived under different listening conditions.

Since when is it anyone else's job to disprove your baseless
hypothesis?

This is why blind testing really works, and why the results it
gives
can be trusted.

Yep, seems logical on the face. But not proven via controlled
testing,

Tell that to the folks in the Psychology Department of your local
university. They could use a good laugh.

especially as regards to something as slippery as open ended
evaluation of
audio components.

The reason it's slippery is that it involves not just sound, but also
the mental state of the listener. The whole point of blind testing is
to eliminate--to the extent possible--mental states as a factor.
Designers of audio equipment should want to do this, because they
cannot engineer for mental states.

bob