I just need to register my drooling over your system. MBL 101s were a long time aspiration for me.
(Couldn't afford them, but got a deal on a pair of MBL 121s which I owned for many years and loved them).
Researchers Floyd Toole and Dr. Sean Olive have pointed to blind speaker tests with a range of listeners, from novices to professional audio reviewers. The audio reviewers did not score any better than the novices, as I recall.
Not a big enough sample size to be definitive, but to the degree...
Sure.
Take someone who considers themselves to be a "critical listener" and test them. Not a big deal.
The point isn't so much being a critical listener or not: it's finding out whether someone can actually hear what they claim to hear.
So if an audiophile says "I can easily tell cable A...
You mean, I think, if something specific makes a difference....this....
We already know that absorption and diffusion can make audible differences in a room. It's reliable science, the physics and psycho acoustics relatively well understood.
I therefore wouldn't see the need, personally, to...
But, again, that is because the psychological variable is controlled for. And the psychological variables can be in the form of manifesting as actual "physical" feelings/symptoms (your stomach really can get upset) and/or incorrect inferences "the pill caused my stomach upset last night" (where...
Not at all. That's why I said early that obviously we hear real things all the time.
Exactly. That's the point.
IF we are looking for higher confidence levels, then a scientific approach makes sense, in which you control for things like imagination. You could be hearing something real, but...
I'm pretty amazed to see a scientist rejecting the relevance of blind testing, just because "human psychology" is involved.
Blind testing is a standard method in science BECAUSE of human psychology!
To take any of countless examples: My son was part of a study concerning a new treatment for...
Ron, I agree that can be the case. Dogmatic thinking can be found anywhere.
On the other hand, a lot of people using the Golden Ear "trust your ears" approach don't seem to recognize the dogmatism of their own approach.
At least with the "objectivist" take, the point is to actually be open to...
Hi Lee!
Sure, but remember...as I pointed out earlier in the thread...if we are really bringing science in to this, then the scientific method is to first have a reliable way of demonstrating X exists, before you have to go explaining X. That's why science isn't busy "trying to explain why...
Of course it will.
Perceptual biases are well known, well studied, and can be invoked reliably via experiments.
If you have someone listen to an audio device, say a cable, and then have that person listen to EXACTLY the same device, but tell them it's a different device, the listener will...
Yes, that is exactly all you needed to do. ;-)
Which has been my point. It doesn't matter what knowledge someone has, or thinks he has. It's about the method.
Every audiophile tweak ever dreamed up was "confirmed true" by that method, trusting one's ears.
And as I said, it's a subset of...
That depends on the unbeliever and what the claim concerns.
There are plenty of situations in which, yes, anecdotal claims are not reliable evidence. There's a good reason why anecdotal "I saw a perpetual motion machine" claims are far from reliable enough to establish known, reliable physics...