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Seeing/hearing and sighted/blind tests
Michael Scarpitti wrote:
wrote in message news:G5L0c.92162$Xp.418678@attbi_s54...
"Unfortunately, some of the members of this forum, while intellectually
understanding it, have a difficult time differentiating between "sight
*may*
provide a bias that overrides true differences" with "sight *always*
overrides true differences and makes your comparison invalid". They
should
know better, but they don't seem to be able to allow even the possibility
that there are real differences and that you might have heard them."
We don't prove a hypothesis, we fail to unprove it,ie. after time and
enough effort has been put into a hypothesis and it continues to be
unsupported, we turn to more fruitfull lines of questions. The above
hypothesis is one such. After decades of tests in humans the idea of
there being no expectation bias has failed to be supported. The
continuing hope that one more test will suddenly confirm there is no such
bias is very slim and we can't really put any faith into it. But if one
insists, it would be an easy test to do it once again with amps in a
structured blind test in the hopes that finally results will tend away
from random.
If (in separate, isolated trials) seven test subjects are are left
alone in a room with 7 different amps and a Stax Lambda and SRD-7
connected to a high-quality source (I owned the Stax cartidge at the
time, on a Magnepan arm and Thorens turntable), with familiarity of
how to connect these to the amps, and after these subjects are given
however long they want to listen to the set-ups, and all the test
subjects report that the Bryston sounds dull and the PS Audio sounds
bright, and the Harmon Kardon sounds kind of flat and lifeless, and
the Hafler sounds kind of flabby, and the Denon sounds good in most
respects but not outstanding in any, would that be good enough for
you?
No.
After they have listened to all the amps long enough to be sure they
can thell them apart they have to listen to the amps again without
knowing which is which and then tell correctly which is which based
on the sound alone.
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