magiccarpetride wrote: > I think you're missing the point. In a more hardcore testing situation, > such as testing a life saving drug, the test subject is not asked > afterwards to give his/her opinion/evaluation. The results of the test > are gathered by doing blood analysis, or by measuring other similar > non-subjective factors that can easily and non-abmbiguously be measured, > not by test subjects filling out a questionnaire.
There are plenty of other blind situations where our subjects could be "stressed" by the lack of comfort in making a choice that is in line with the selection they would make in a "sighted" situation. There has been a lot of psychological research done over the years and the only place the "stress" issue in blind testing consistently arises is from audiophiles who seek to explain or discount the change in results compared to sighted testing. Even in the famous "Judgement of Paris" wine competition where the French lost to California wines for the first time, there were lots of complaints about methodology and statistics, but "stress" was not one of the excuses. Eventually most in the wine world accepted that the prior conventional wisdom regarding wine quality had been rightly upset. In short, we have a whiny excuse that only surfaces when audiophiles are embarrassed that they can't spot those "enormous" differences in situations where their conscious or subconscious have lost the ability to manipulate the situation. Guess we'll just have to disagree. In your case, any situation where a listener is deprived of the opportunity to confirm their conscious or unconscious sighted bias, results can be discarded due to "stress". I'm of the opinion that blind testing often illustrates that those "enormous" differences aren't quite as big as originally thought. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mlsstl's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9598 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=94418 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
