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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: That clears up a lot!

"many mistakenly mistook the study as a scientific investigation"

I'm not sure whether you're deliberately misunderstanding the situation, just to be provocative. If so, I shouldn't dignify your post with a response. From your post, I don't think you have read the paper, in which case I really shouldn't waste my time answering you. At any rate I'm going to assume that at least some people here would like to hear a few more details.

Of course this is a scientific paper; it's been published in a refereed journal, where people of demonstrated competence pick it apart and demand whatever they think it needs before they allow it to go to publication. The methodology is sound and the work has stood up to the challenges the reviewers posed, which were few, because we knew what we were doing. They wanted a bit more data reduction, which we supplied, and they otherwise pretty much appreciated our thoroughness.

Subjective publications become obsessed with specific makes and models of equipment used, but in a serious test you can use what is known to be competently designed equipment and everyone understands that your experiment is good. It hasn't been compromised just because we failed to conform to some tweako fashion of the month. The A/D/A link is not a secret; it was an HHB CDR 850, a very highly regarded pro CD recorder that some really fussy engineers have used as their main A/D for acoustic sessions. What you seem not to get is that if we hadn't used a good deck, our subjects would have spotted the difference between it and the high-bit source, which we gave them every opportunity to do successfully. That they didn't means that the codec is good enough.

The audiophile test session you denigrated was part of our experiment precisely because the system conformed completely to standards espoused in the subjective journals. Professional studios rarely use electrostatic loudspeakers because they won't play loud enough and are not sufficiently reliable for professional use. But it was a near certainty that someone in that part of the industry would claim that with a "real audiophile system" the differences would have been obvious. So we found such a system and gave its owner and his friends a chance. We conducted that test with the same rigor as the others; levels of the two signals were matched within 0.1 dB at 1 kHz, and then the subjects were asked to choose their best material and listen however they usually do, to maximize their aural acuity.

I'm not sure why you think our doing that somehow compromises the test (if in fact you do), but I would guess that almost everyone else here understands that it strengthens our conclusions significantly.

Are our results unassailable? Nope. If someone comes up with a cogent objection or spots a flaw in our procedures or conclusions, we or someone will investigate further. The nature of this process is that nothing is final. There could be someone out there who can hear these differences on music at normal levels, in which case we'd love to have him or her prove it, and if possible teach us to hear the difference as well. But we tried hard to find such a person, and failed, so far. For now, if someone disagrees with our results, it falls to that person to do another experiment and prove the contrary case. -- E. Brad Meyer


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