opaqueice;221084 Wrote: > Once again, ABX tests - which are the standard methodology - ask > whether X is A or X is B. First you listen to A and B, then you listen > to X, then you listen to A or B again if you want, and you try to > determine whether X is A or B. If you can't do that reliably, you > can't hear the difference. > > No, if you can't do that reliably, then you can't -identify- the difference.
Listening to music is quite different from looking at an object or tasting or smelling something. A piece of music may last many minutes, and some of it may be relatively undemanding in some respects. This is also a troubling aspect in an A/B test, because you have to listen to each long enough to hear all of the 'aspects' of the music, but short enough that you don't forget what you've previously heard. Obviously, it's simple if you reduce audio reproduction to a set of tones (or similar), but that wouldn't really tell you much about an equipment's capacity to play music. The same kinds of problems occur with moving pictures. For years TV engineers used static test signals to measure and evaluate picture quality, but unfortunately the kind of digital picture processing that's been possible for the last 30 years, can look and measure fine on a static signal but have significant artefacts with moving material. It's obviously fairly meaningless to judge picture quality in terms of a horizontal and/or vertical resolution measurement, when it's been significantly transformed in the temporal domain. -- Patrick Dixon www.at-tunes.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Patrick Dixon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=90 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=37553 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
