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RE: hold on there

I have no issue with listening blind and level matched - this is pretty obvious to take out a myriad of sight and past experience bias. The D and the B in DBT have no problem. It is the T where the problems arise.

To restate - listening blind and level matched removes all kinds of bias that any subject brings with them into the test. Indeed, I had a terrific professor who had all students write a code number for their essays and tests because he said if he knows the students he may favour a student he likes and give them the benefit of the doubt when marking or doing the opposite for a student he didn't like. So when marking he had no clue who anyone was. At the end of the course, you put your name beside your code. Everyone knew they were equally treated. So blind definitely has an advantage.


In medicine, the blind test is set up where 1/2 of the patients get the real drug and the other 1/2 get the placebo.

The medical staff doesn't know which pill is which so they can't inadvertently lead the patient in knowing whether they are getting the real drug or the placebo.

This is a physiological reaction. The pill either works or it doesn't work and it can be measured. Depending on what the illness is it is possible for people who believe in the placebo as the real drug could be affected such that they were actually taking the real drug.


In Audio, there is a myriad of problems because it is no longer a biological or physiological test but has moved into the field of psychology. Biology is - I am sick with X and this pill cured X - it either works or it doesn't work.

Listening falls into a person's ability to transfer a sense into their brain and make something of it. And then spit out the correct answer. In psychology and education, we know about 'test stress'. We know that a student for example can stone-cold know an answer to a problem/question but when they are in the exam setting can't answer it. They freeze. They select the wrong answer and 5 minutes after the test is done - the light goes on and damn - "I knew that." It happens a LOT.

The brain wants to solve problems and move on - it stops the brain from becoming fixated on something - people who suffer from OCD have the opposite problem - they can't let things go until the problem in front of them is solved - their brain can't let it go.

An example of this is merely looking at cloud formation - people stare at the blob of clouds - the brain works to solve it by giving us some familiar shape from our knowledge base - I see a dog you see a dragon - it's a blob of clouds - we see these things because our brains want us to move on and not get stuck trying to solve patterns. It's an unreliable brain/sense interface but it does aid in our evolution because we don't want to be staring at the clouds when the bear is coming to eat us.

So the T is where things fall down. As well as the tabulation of results - for some weird reasons some of these testing outfits add scores from different listeners together. As noted earlier the idea of testing one speaker in the middle of a room - not two in stereo - what about corner-loaded speakers like mine. There needs to be "fairness" to the products in such tests and they need to be independently tested (peer review) to confirm the results.

I am supportive of listening blind and level matched - if you know what I own you know that the only way I can convince people that it sounds better is to have folks listen level matched and blind - I have grown to be a pretty big supporter of it precisely because I want people to LISTEN and not prejudge it because the read the middling measurements or looked how it is set-up in the room. People hear what they want to hear if they are biased for or against something when they walk into the room.

Again - my issue is with the testing parameters and the statistics (ie it needs more trials for subtle differences in auditions).


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