magiccarpetride wrote: > Yes, that's a good correction. By 'blind' testing I mean subjecting the > testers to some sort of a harness. In other words, placing them in some > kind of unnatural situation where they tend to lose their sense as to > which way is up. Often times such testers pretty much mentally toss a > coin in their heads as to which side of the test, A or B, do they > prefer. They do that just so that they cold quickly reach the > end-of-job. People under any kind of stress, even most minimal stress, > tend to work furiously on ending the situation one way or another, and > will hasten to do anything just to bail out. That's why I think test > harnesses are not good for evaluating our listening experiences.
This is really just prime BS. Anyone with anything resembling an education in science or a capacity for critical thinking can see it for what it is. It's entirely supposition without so much as a single remote kernel of truth at its core. In this context, "blind" testing is simply a mechanism for ensuring that the subject has no way of knowing the nature of the sound source -- the only judgment possible is one that is related ONLY to the sound itself, not to some pre-existing supposition about what a source is supposed to sound like. It's a way of ensuring that subjective judgments are made based on actual auditory experience, as distinct from magical thinking. It's not really a question of subjective vs objective -- experience is subjective, always, but that does NOT mean that it is unknowable or unmeasurable. We can actually understand what gives rise to subjective experience; separating the elements of experience that are related to actual physical events (e.g. actual sound) from those that are related to expectation, bias or magic, is what this kind of testing is about. One's ENJOYMENT of sound can be the result of many factors, including, for those exceptionally weak of mind, perceived but mythical results of meaningless hardware tweaking; it doesn't mean that the perceived differences are actually real. Personally, I'll go for real, and leave the mythical to the weak of mind. R. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RonM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17029 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94418 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
