I see your point, but if you read A's statement it doesn't sound quite so ridiculous. Lets consider musical memory, aural, visual and muscle memory from a musicians viewpoint. I memorize pieces quickly. If Ihave a piece memorized for a week and then don't play it for a week I lose most of all 3 types of memory. Conversely, a piece I have played for years will stay in all types of memory for months.
In university, music students have aural dictation tests where they have to write out a melody they hear or harmonies they hear(melodic and harmonic dictation) This is a skill that is developed with practice. This skill is based on aural memory. The musician must remember that a particular note he hears is the note he must write on the page. To hone my memory I write out the pieces I play from my aural memory without the guitar in front of me. The performance of a piece of music is an act of remembering the future, if we don't don't know where the piece ends we can't play the beginning with insight ( I am speaking hear of interpreting a through composed piece) My point is .not all aural memry is fleeting. The more and longer we hear something the longer we retain it in our memory . when I auditioned a new amp for my system I chose a few recordings I knew very well. I had analyzed the compositional structure and was very aware of the articulation of different lines. I heard a big difference. Rythmic articulation was clearer, inner voices easier to hear etc. If I had listened to unfamiliar recordings I think it would have been harder to hear those differences. So, is it possible that much blind testing relies on short term aural retention rather than long term. Perhaps a blind test which uses recordings testers are intimately familiar with on that system could yield different results? I don't have an opinion on that, just curious. So listening to a composition for many months increases the long term aural retention of the composition and could lead to a greater degree of acuity evaluation prcess. I only mean to say that this could be one factor in A's differing results. There may be an aural component to this and not ONLY other factors. opaqueice;144037 Wrote: > You're right on both counts - and it's never gonna happen. There's a > quote somewhere by John Atkinson about how in a blind test he couldn't > distinguish between two amplifiers he regarded as very different. I > really love this quote, because it demonstrates such total > irrationality - he concludes there must be something wrong with blind > testing. Not that the amps might sound the same - impossible! - but > somehow that blind testing conceals differences. Quite scary, since > all of our drugs, medical treatments etc. are tested that way. And > completely ridiculous, since we have massive amounts of data that the > opposite is the case - not to mention simple logic. > > So if reviewers used blind testing and concluded that essentially all > amps sound the same, the industry would fall apart - or at least suffer > a major blow. And any publication responsible for that would lose most > of its advertising revenue and go under. > > The quote is here, half way down or so: > > http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_11_4/feature-article-blind-test-power-cords-12-2004.html -- tomjtx ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tomjtx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7449 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=28368 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
