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Re: Stereophile tells readers and manufacturers what they want to hear

> But the same can be said for wine tasting, when a critic is
> attempting to determine whether French Nevers oak enhances the wine
> to a greater degree than American oak...I fail to see how the wine
> critic's task would be any easier than that of the audio critic.

Good point, regmac. But my argument stands I believe. While the
identification the wine critic has to make is indeed an abstraction,
it does depend on hard-wired input in that the 4 (or 5) taste
receptors on the tongue and the much larger number of smell receptors
in the nose respond _directly_ to the stimuli present in the wine.
There is thus just _one_ level of abstraction involved.

(Doesn't mean it's easy. I recommend reading the book written about
the development of "New Coke" in the 1980s to examine how poorly
designed blind testing of taste can lead the researchers astray.)

By contrast, the perception of music involves multiple levels of
abstraction, as I wrote in the essay at www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/406awsi .
All we can measure are properties of the sound, not the perception,
and designing a blind test of that perception that is truly
scientific is neither trivial nor easy. Unless, of course, you merely
wish to "prove" that everything sounds the same.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile



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