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

RE: Please respond to this old post

Ole;

I appreciate your experience in audio, and I remember Poul Ladegaard from my days at Bolt Beranek and Newman, where we used Bruel and Kjaer equipment for lots of measurements.

It is certainly very easy to see differences between the things we were testing with an Audio Precision test setup, and it is easy to hear them as well, if you crank up the gain.

Our test is, I think, more powerful because we confined ourselves to a single comparison. I too have spent quite a lot of time listening to microphone feeds, and I remain firm in my opinion that the CD standard is perfectly adequate to transmit faithfully the mike feeds of the vast majority of acoustical events.

Your tests of multiple encoders have been performed in many places at different times. What you do not specify is whether they were done blind, and by this I mean both the subjects and the test giver. This has been proven numerous times to be important, and this fact is not a reflection on anyone's integrity. It just happens much more often that a roomful of people listen, non-blind, and come to an agreement on what they are hearing. This is not the same thing at all.

Of course you are correct that null results are much less powerful than positive correlations. But we did our homework, and looked diligently for positive results from any quarter, and the fact that we came up with null results is significant. Besides testing audiophiles on expensive home systems, we included in our subject population full-time recording and mastering engineers, listening in a leisurely fashion (in the evening, after work) to their own projects, on their own giant monitoring systems.

If someone else can get positive results we would be very interested to know about them, and to try to duplicate them. But non-blind tests, or tests in which the levels of the sources are not rigidly controlled (and this means within 0.1 dB), do not contradict our findings. -- E. Brad Meyer


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