Do you guys Enjoy or Extremely Dislike A/B Testing?

[amirm]

Cool little switcher! How much was the cost of this box alone? $150?

 

[MarinJim]

To be somewhat simplistic, I love to a/b when a improvement is made and heard.

 

[audioguy]

Cool little switcher! How much was the cost of this box alone? $150?

I think you can find them for a bit less. If I recall, they are made in Australia. Well built; passive and it does exactly what I needed. I will assure you that if you use this blind (for two channel stuff) you will be both amazed and depressed. Since I used it to compare preamps, I could get the preamp output levels to be EXACT. I just ran a frequency sweeps through both preamps and adjusted the gains until both lined up perfectly on the output plot (REW or OmniMic or ...). I expanded the output plot so each line was as granular as possible. Since many preamps have limitations of .5 db granularity in volume control (the two I used did), it would be possible to NOT have them with the exact gain. But it happened to work out. Preamps like those built by Jeff Rowland have increments of 0.1 db gain so should not be an issue.

The person doing the operation of the box, before we started the formal listening, just hit the soft switch button a number of times to switch back and forth so only he (hence not double blind) knew what was playing. I could listen as long as I liked, or instantly switch; play a whole track, a whole album or just portions of tracks. No stress since I controlled how long I would listen to whatever I was listening to. We used cell phones so I could tell him when to switch since he was out of sight and hearing range (behind a wall). Actually, there was some stress based upon my expectation bias. I REALLY wanted to hear substantive differences between the two and could not consistently.

 

[amirm]

Boy you went the extra mile with the cellphone connection! Kudos for trying to do it right. I am OK with single blind tests when done right and you did it right.

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

I despise A/B testing, but it has saved me a lot of money. But because I am so subject to expectation bias, I only do so blind (speakers not included). I found this device that allows me to do blind testing as all of my equipment is in the room just behind my front wall. It has a button to switch between the two inputs and another individual pushes the button so I can not see what I am listening to. Is this box perfectly transparent? Probably not but then neither is anything else. And I have gotten to the point where if the differences between two components is masked by whatever lack of transparency is in this box, I wouldn't buy it anyway.



It works for anything that uses XLR cables (DAC's, preamps, amps, etc)

I discovered this little box when I was looking for a way to (blindly) compare two 7.1 SSP's so assembled a "Rube Goldberg" device consisting of 4 of them and a spring-loaded bar that would activate all of them at the same time. Worked like a champ. (This device is now for sale should anyone be interested. Cost of parts was just over $600). The unpainted wood part is the base and the black handle is the spring loaded push bar.

Here is an alternative for 8 channel switching of balanced interconnects.

http://whirlwindusa.com/catalog/bla...st-switchers/ab-8-8-channel-mic-line-switcher

Street price starts at about $350. But, you need 3 x DB25 "Snake" cables for the conversion from XLR to the 25-pin Pro connectors.

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

I only do A/B testing with various vinyl pressings.