[Audio_Empire[_2_]]

In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:

That's true and to my mind it makes DBT null results more than a
little suspect. This kind of testing [the double-blind test] seems
to have been "borrowed" from the hard sciences (drug testing,
hypothesis testing, etc.) and I don't consider listening a hard
science.

What does this even mean? The question of audibility is a scientific
one, and can be verified scientifically. Are you denying this?

What I'm disputing is the accepted notion that methodologies (such
as DBTs) that work in the hard sciences (such as drug testing) where
the results do not rely on people's abilities to discern something
or upon their opinions are wholly applicable to testing audio gear.

Double-blind testing works for everything else, as far as I know. I'm
not going to accept any special pleading (sans really good evidence)
that it may not be applicable to audio. How would you prove such a
thing, anyway?

I don't pretend to know. How do you prove that it DOES work for audio?
Since it usually returns a null result, I'd say such overwhelmingly one-sided
results indicates one of two things: either everything does sound the
same (which my experience tells me is extremely unlikely), or DBTs aren't
good at uncovering differences in audio gear unless they are
extremely gross differences. We certainly know which of those two
outcomes the "strict objectivists" believe in, but how do we prove which
is the real answer?

OTOH, if the premise of the test is simple enough, (like listening
to wires) I think they are useful when they return a (inevitable)
null result, but for more complex things such as D to A conversion,
amplifier or preamplifier sound, etc., the return of a null result
is far less reliable.

Why should it be? The same tests apply to a DAC (which should be
perfectly transparent in a bypass test)

There's the problem. You say that DACs should be "perfectly
transparent" in a bypass test,

.... given known thresholds of hearing ...

yet there is much evidence that says that they aren't.

I don't believe that, at least not for DACs without faults. (It's
always possible to mess something up, of course.)

Here's the thing. I suspect that you could build a specific DAC decoder
box, and swap out the D/A chips in the circuit all day (Burr-Brown for
Audio Devices, for SaberDACs, for Wolfson, etc.) and all of them would
sound, essentially, the same. But there are so many different ways to
design the circuit, even the D/A converter part - Single DACs in switching
mode, separate stereo D/A chips, differential D/A chips, even dual
differential chips and even custom designs like dCS ring-DACs and MSB
Ladder DACs, that there are BOUND to be differences between the various
schemes. Also , there are other parts of the circuits that are probably just
as important to the audio performance of a DAC as is the method used for
for the D/A conversion. Power supply performance, digital filter design,
analog output design etc.


[quoted text deleted -- deb]