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RE: ASR forums, Toole and Olive. When science creates a religious cult

There are two parts to blind testing

Validity: A system under test needs to be as close as possible to how that item under test is used in the real world.

A Mono speaker in the middle of a room on a shuffler with listeners who are "trained" by the testers (a corporation "Harman" - who are in the business of SELLING you speakers) on what to hear/think is not REMOTELY the same as the end-users who are buying stereo speakers for their room in their home.

The tests miss the mark of Validity by an ocean. Validity was also referred to as the "range rule" back in the day. This is what happens when you let engineers run tests that should be run by psychologists.

Reliability: This is how repeatable the results are - the number of trials that support the result. Again most DBTs fail here because they often use the 0.05 level of Statistical Significance so if you can select A over B 9/10 times then you have "proven" that you can distinguish A from B better than chance, therefore; you can tell the difference.

With audio (unlike medical where the DBT began) - it is profoundly different than a physiological reaction to a drug. Audio requires an ear/brain interaction which layers a slew of psychological issues. At the very least more trials would be needed to improve the reliability factor.

Statistically, 6/10 ten times with one miss for a 59/100 score would ALSO mean that the listeners meets the 0.05 level of significance meaning that this person can tell A from B to the SAME standard as the person who got 9/10. So a person who gets 6/10 is deemed a failure by the tester - when that's not the case. It's bad science to draw that conclusion.

Ultimately, there is also the "Conflict of Interest" issue here - if a major company selling the product makes up the tests and draws a conclusion that 'naturally' concludes their product is the best product - does anyone just take this at their word? Big Tobacco concluded their cigarettes were safe - the same scientists are the ones who say MMCC is not real. See "Merchants of Doubt" for actual internal documents from Exon and the like whose own scientists brought it up and then were shut down.

Why would anyone take Harman International at their word? Single speaker on a shuffler - I mean seriously?




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