opaqueice;176844 Wrote: > > Point being, I, personally, don't understand how you can be an > audiophile and not want to find out which tweaks/components matter and > which don't, unless it's because you're afraid of the answers.
I think for those audiophiles who are not physicists or electrical/mechanical engineers, the thing that we trust the most is our hearing. The only way to evaluate something is to try it and see what our hearing tells us. So that's what most of us do...we try things (even the most ridiculous things!) and see if we can hear an effect. Now your response is surely going to be "a double-blind test is the only way to really be sure that you are really hearing what you think you are hearing"...and this might be absolutely true. But for many of us, sometimes the differences heard are so significant that the idea that a DBT would be needed to confirm the change would be like saying you needed a lab test to verify that Coke tastes different from Pepsi, or that leather felt different from vinyl. And the results are consistent and repeatable in single-blind tests to our own ears. One thing I'd like to see when someone cites a DBT that results in something like "50% of the participants couldn't tell a difference" is some measurable way of evaluating the quality of each participant's hearing. In the same way that DBT proponents are skeptical of non-DBT testing methods, I'm skeptical that DBT are accounting for the various levels of hearing ability and "listening training" of the participants. And don't take this as me saying "you need golden ears"...but there's no question in my mind that people do have different hearing ability, and this should be taken into account as much as testing methods... -- PhilNYC Sonic Spirits Inc. http://www.sonicspirits.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PhilNYC's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=837 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32301 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
