opaqueice wrote: > With the help of one other person it's really not hard to conduct > single blind testing, which, if done with some care and in good faith, > is usually good enough for these purposes.
While I do not want to get into what is clearly a theological argument, I can't let this one stand. I believe that in general, blind testing of a lot of things is not easy at all, and saying it does greatly weakens the aguement of DBT or even ABX testing. Even with a fair amount of setup, it is not always "easy" or perhaps even doable. Take my setup. I had a SB connected to a Benchmark DAC-1, optical and coax digital, balanced XLR audio to my Classé integrated amp. It was trivial to do a blind test between toslink and coax, because the Benchmark has a front panel switch that selects input. This is purely a source test, all the DAC and downstream stuff stayed untouched. Then I got a Transporter. If I was to test it, I'd want to use the Transporters XLR output and the Benchmarks' XLR output. But the Classé has only one XLR input, so you can't connect them both at once. No easy switching is possible. Even if the cableing was behind a curtain so you could not see it, the connections will take time, and an important part of testing is to switch quickly between the 'gear under test' because human perception is very time sensitive. You can't compare quality of sound if there is significant time between listening. (how long is long enough to be 'significant' is left as an exercise to the reader). The second major, show stopping problem is that the levels output by the Benchmark and Transporter are different. Matching levels is critical, as others have noted, humans thing "louder" is better. I'm enough of a geek to want to do testing, but I don't see any way to do it. > Furthermore double blind > testing is trivial with a computer - there's at least one free program > (foobar2000 with the ABXY plugin) that does it. It is trivial to write the streams to your computer audio port, using such plugins. But no consumer PC audio port is worthy of being considered in an audiophile context. There are many studio oriented I/O devices that are audiophile quality, I've got 16 channels of 96kHz x 24bit audio in my studio. But very folks have such a setup in an audiophile context. I know I don't, my studio is on a separate floor form my main listening room. Testing ABX with a soundblaster is not worth the waste of electrons in the test. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
