Patrick Dixon Wrote: > But you're making an analogy between sound (rather than music) and > colour. You don't enjoy music in an instant, you enjoy it over a > period of time. > > Interestingly, the medical industry (which is often cited as an > equivalent example of the use of blind or double blind testing), would > never dream of conducting a test over a very short period - they > compare the effects of a drug or treatment over weeks or months.
It seems to me the color analogy is rather better than your medical analogy... First, because it's of paramount importance in medical tests that the test be blind (because it's almost universally recognized that otherwise the results are essentially useless due to bias). That's the starting point - the test MUST be blind - and the rest comes after. Second, because the necessity for long tests in medicine is due to the fact that the timescale for most medical illnesses/conditions is weeks or months or years. This is not the case for music, where the timescale is minutes or seconds, and differences in sound quality can reveal themselves immediately. In any case, my personal opinion here is that, because preconception and bias is demonstrably a very powerful force in human perception, the only reliable tests of this sort are blind. That should be the starting point, as it is in your example of medicine. If you believe the test should be long, then the onus is on you to find a way to do a blind test with a long duration, but if it isn't blind I (and this of course is simply my opinion) will not take it very seriously. One point in support of this is that I have seen many audio devices, highly rated by some audio review sites, which to me are clearly pure snake oil (an example is here http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue8/bybee.htm), and conversly blind tests often go against the conventional audiophile wisdom (an example is speaker cable, where very cheap high-gauge cables were rated higher than audiophile grade cables in a blind test; I can dig up the reference if asked). To me, this is good evidence that confirmation bias plays a central role here, and therefore must be controlled for. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22273 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
