JohnSwenson;572357 Wrote: > Where did this come from?... I (and others) say we can hear the > difference between PCM and FLAC decoding on the Touch. Others > emphatically state this is theoretically impossible... What I was after > was ... test if it is even possible to hear a difference... How wide > spread the capability is and if its applicable to a wide range of music > was not the emphasis ... I think it complicates what I was trying to get > at, can a difference really be heard at all. I have stated before that > its much easier to hear the difference on some songs than on others, so > I don't think I was trying to say that its equally applicable to all > music... at least me it seems that running the test with someone who > says they can hear it, using a song they say shows it well, is a > worthwhile initial test. > ... >
Good questions John - You're right that it can indeed quickly get complicated. It completely depends upon the population about which you are trying to make your "theoretically possible to hear a difference" conclusion. Are you trying to establish non-scientific evidence for something that is *only* applicable to simply yourself and a few others highly nonrepresentative of the general user base? Or, do you wish to find evidence that could reasonably describe the general population of users? If the former, your conclusions statistically speaking will of course be extremely biased and thus not of much use to anybody outside of the "special" group, since for example that group's perceptive abilities may be extraordinarily different from most others, or somehow merely connected to sloppy experiment design/lack of a control group and resulting placebo affect complications. What's more, any number of potential lurking variables can then also have much more than chance likelihood to in reality influence any apparent correlation, instead of the particular connection you are wishing to find evidence for via such a test. If the latter (i.e. you wish the test results to be generalizable to the greater population of users), then all sources of reasonably imaginable bias - e.g. self-selected subjects, special songs, specified listening equipment, etc - must certainly be controlled and minimized to the greatest possible degree, in order for the results to have validity in any statistical sense. You can still perform a test in the absence of these considerations and get collections of numbers/results/etc, but their validity and usefulness can of course be thus compromised. That said, if these concerns don't matter to you or anybody else, then great! But otherwise, I still felt obligated to make these statements regardless, in case anybody else reading this thread might relate to these observations and the associated potential issues with the actual statistical validity of any conclusions drawn. -- NewBuyer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NewBuyer's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7862 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=71321 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
