[Audio Empire]

On Sat, 2 Apr 2011 06:29:48 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message


We are TALKING
about the fact that the average listener is NOT an
audiophile. That's the whole point of my bringing up the
fact that most young people don't care about sound. If
they did, they wouldn't be satisfied listening to low
bit-rate MP3s.

I agree.

When this type of "listener" is pressed
into service to participate in a listening DBT, I don't
wonder that they return a null result.

Who is silly enough to do that?

They likely don't
even understand what they are supposed to be listening
FOR, and probably wouldn't recognize these differences
even if they existed.


Who actually wastes their time doing that?

THAT'S THE POINT.

My point is that we never used people like that in our ABX tests, and AFAIK
neither does anybody else if sensitive results are the goal.

Looks like a straw man argument to me!

Tell that to Meyer/Moran. Many of their participants were just university
students (although most were Boston Audio Society members, and that's to the
good). The paper made no differentiation between experienced listeners and
non-experienced except to say that in their tests, it didn't seem to matter.




There has been a major explosion in sales of high priced
and in some cases high quality earphones and headphones.
Traditional vendors like Sennheiser and Etymotics are
bringing out new extremely expensive high performance
headphones and earphones. Non-traditional vendors are
doing similar things in even greater volumes. If not for
the young, mobile music listener, then who?

You are assuming that these expensive headphones are
bought by people who encode their ripped music at the
lowest possible data rate (thereby expanding their
iPod-like device's capacity).

Not at all. I'm saying that people who go to all that trouble and expense
are often far more demanding of their program material.

The fact of the matter is that even a minimal 2 GB Sansa Clip ( a device
with 24 GB max capacity today) can hold enough lossless FLAC files in 2G to
be a very enjoyable listening tool.

And that is simply not in
evidence. Every audiophile I know has an iPod or similar
device. They DO NOT use MP3 they use FLAC or ALC and
trade ultimate storage capacity for quality. They also
tend to listen with expensive headphones and many have
outboard headphone amplifiers which accompany their iPod
devices

Then we agree.

Only if you concede that the average iPod toting teen wouldn't know decent
sound if it came up and bit them in the arse!

I have a number of friends with teenaged and
college aged kids with iPod-like devices. They listen to
them constantly. When I ask them what bit-rate they use,
the answer is always the same: "The one that allows me
to put the most songs in the available space". I.E.
quantity instead of quality.

These are choices that they get to make. This is also
just the mass market, not the already large and rapidly
emerging market for high quality mobile listening
experiences. Remember that most of our parents were
happy listening to AM radios when they were young, and
as a rule they had no viable alternatives until the
1950s.

This just reinforces my point about the quality of
listeners that take part in these university level DBT
studies such as the Meyer/Moran paper that you are so
fond of.

The Meyer Moran tests were done "With the help of about 60 members of the
Boston Audio Society and many other interested parties.."

(quote from page one of the Meyer JAES Peer-reviewed paper.

Your claim is totally flasified.

The paper also says that they used over one hundred participants, "of widely
varying ages, activities, and levels of musical and audio experience.'

BTW the rest of the sentence I quoted said:

"a series of double-blind (A/B/X) listening tests were held over a period of
about a year"

Yep.


Thus we have recent confirmation of the validity of ABX testing in a
peer-reviewed paper.

I didn't see the peer-review info noted in that paper.