tomjtx;152565 Wrote: > > The very fact that you are tested can change the way you hear. And all > you objectivists out there, remember how you were talking about the > subjectivity of hearing(dependency of mood, health etc.) before you > reject that hypothesis) > > so it is not implausible to posit that blind testing itself may > introduce another variable and ABX itself is not a foolproof method of > detecting differences. > I am sure one could take measurably different components and still get > a "no diffrence" result from an ABX test. >
Let's examine this hypothesis for a moment. Let's suppose indeed there is a condition - call it blinditis - that acts to prevent people from hearing differences under blind tests, and proceed via reductio ad absurdum. Immediately there is something strange, because when subjected to blind tests people normally *think* they can hear a difference. I've never heard anyone say that a difference which was clear before became hard to hear during the blind test. So not only does blinditis know to kick in only during blind tests, it's so subtle that it makes people think they can hear the difference just as before when in fact they can't. So blinditis is a pretty clever condition. Let's go a step further - if conditions such as blinditis exist, isn't it possible that other, similar conditions exist? Other conditions that might have similar effects, like making you think you can hear a difference when you actually can't? And how are we to know when those conditions are affecting us and when not? It certainly wasn't obvious that blinditis exists, but now that we know it does, we'd better face the fact that many other such conditions are likely to exist too! So now we are in a very uncomfortable situation - since blind testing is useless, and the rest of the time many other conditions can similarly affect us, we have no way at all to determine anything. And I'm afraid that's the end of the story - if blinditis existed it would mean all research in medicine, studies of new drugs, all psychology, and much of sociology were useless. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29353 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
