I'm not surprised that another hifi rag tries to "debunk" ABX or blind testing TAS have written some confused pseudo science about it decades ago , to justify thier existence.
The fact is that beyond very large and obvius differences the only game in town -is- blind testing ! That's the worlds of professionals in the academia people in the acoustic research field and psychology etc. You simply can't make any sensible conclusion on minute differences in for example DAC's with sighted test where you know what products you handle before hand . All other factors including placebo are magnitudes greater . So typically all sigthed test are useless they don't prove or disprove anything and don't provide much information about the sound. They do provide information about the other aspects of a product that is worthwhile so they can be a part of a good review . But the pure sound thing . And ABX test does not necessarily tell you how anything sounds either or if it's good or bad . It's even simpler it tells of there is a real difference or not to begin with . IF you can spot a difference ( which you can't or should not be able to in most cases ) then it can be worthwhile to quantify this Another fact ( not opinion this is proved over and over again ) all electronics with flat frequency response low noise and low distortion would sound the same ie they are transparent . You have put the performance beyond human capabilities this have already happened in most cases . You can ofcourse enjoy the sound of a non transparent product , like a tube amp , have fun :) What I find objectionable is that makers of such product makes very silly claims about why thier products are "better" ie that's whole mythsos of the high end audio in a nutshell with that FUD comes the ability to charge premium prices . You can't add noise and IM and THD and call it what it is and then charge these prices ? You instead invent some elaborate pseudo explanation on why this is better and spin a tale arond that . Even transparent products can be expensive in high end , overengineering is the name of that game . Then we have the pure fake products . And the purely confused pseudo science stuff . Real high end can be a mix of all of these design trends . For example take some good DAC chips put in expensive box oversize the psu and throw in some tubes and silver wires ugh :/ throw in quantum purifier for good measure ... I don't think like ralphy does that all this is due to pure scamming . Some is in the audiophile culture itself it's created that way it does not question or think critically anything goes just like in alternative medicine some of the charlatans actually believe this stuff themselves . But they are many con artist never the less . Another interesting fact is how data can be interpreted differently : Stereophile does both subjective sighted "evaluation " and measurements and the results are not very well correlated .The listening impression they got by the sigthed test can't very often predict the measurements or the other way around . It can in some rare case but not often . There are two main ways to interpret these results ( in reality it can get a bit messy not so clean cut ,but you get my idea ) 1. The woo woo way , that there is some hidden intangible dimension that can't be seen in these simplistic measurements .. 2. Or the that the sigthed listening are junk data and don't really tell you much ! This is the most likely case by a good margin until a very convincing case can be made to disprove this . But how to run a magazine under this premise ? That's why I think the editors of stereophile are dishonest , they must have seen the writing on the wall for decades , but still they persists . -------------------------------------------------------------------- Main hifi: Touch + CIA PS +MeridianG68J MeridianHD621 MeridianG98DH 2 x MeridianDSP5200 MeridianDSP5200HC 2 xMeridianDSP3100 +Rel Stadium 3 sub. Bedroom/Office: Boom Kitchen: Touch + powered Fostex PM0.4 Misc use: Radio (with battery) iPad1 with iPengHD & SqueezePad (in storage SB3, reciever ,controller ) server HP proliant micro server N36L with ClearOS Linux http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=102330 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
