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Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

RE: That clears up a lot!

Okay, this is fast becoming pointless, IMHO. You keep insisting that our work was useless if we didn’t make our subjects do enough trials to prove to a 95% confidence level they weren’t hearing anything. We were in large part responding to statements published in the same refereed journal describing in some detail the many alleged audible advantages of high-bit audio. We thought it would be interesting to try to determine how audible these were, since according to digital coding theory they should not be. There might have been something new in psychoacoustics to report.

In case anyone like you didn’t have faith in any one system we used, we did experiments with several, including a high-end setup with all expensive components and two professional monitoring systems. Not one subject, on any of the four systems, with any of our source material, ever produced a positive ID.

We found this result significant and relevant to the debate, and so did the editorial staff of the JAES, who decided to publish it. They know me to be a careful experimenter and we provided more information in response to the reviewers who saw the manuscript. It has now been almost two years since we published the paper and not one person has come forward with any controlled test results to contradict our findings. From the published descriptions and the blithe assurances of people like you, it should be easy.

Instead we get shrill dismissals by people who haven’t done any testing and are somehow above too far above it all to be bothered. The ABX test is the most powerful way to document audible differences that I know, but it is not central to this discussion in any way. The only important element is that the test be blind. You say that “subjects who fail ABX tests still persist in their reports of hearing differences under other test conditions.” If what you want is for the test not to be blind, you’re not interested in any scientific approach and we have nothing to discuss, since it's well-documented that people sometimes hear differences that aren't there. If you’re claiming that some blind tests reveal things that people miss when they do their switching with the 0.5-0hm relays in an ABX box, you’re making it up as you go along.

I’m not sure what your other intended insults actually mean. Is there a Carver amp in one of my systems? Yes. I await with interest your theory of how that affects anyone’s ability to hear differences on musical material – it should be groundbreaking. (This amp was of course perfectly adequate to reveal the noise differences we DID hear on the very quiet recordings.) And as I said, only some of the tests were done using it. Using very expensive equipment did not change the outcome.

“Are you still claiming that all CD players sound the same?” This I can’t respond to, because I never said it and can’t think why anyone would. I’ve certainly seen reviews of some audibly bad players.

My measurements of Clark’s and my systems were done using a real-time analyzer and both spatial and time averaging, both at the listening position and in close proximity to the speakers, so I could get a general picture of their response, and the room’s, to confirm what my ears told me. The technique is complicated, born of long practice and many repetitions, and it’s pretty reliable, though not detailed or repeatable enough for the raw results to be published. I’ve listened to and measured hundreds of systems and I stand by my statements about the two in question, sketchy as they (appropriately) are.



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