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RE: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and WAV files

IMO a self-administered blind test (ABX) for a single person testing different software setup is neither difficult nor expensive.

You're absolutely right: self-administered tests are cheap and cheerful - and can be fun to do. But the information they yield is neither extensive nor reliable. Unfortunately, for the most part, those who think otherwise stick to their belief in defiance of long-established scientific knowledge with an obduracy that would embarrass the most die-hard subjectivist.

People think that tests of this sort are somehow more useful than "initial impressions" or even listening at length because they have a sort of vague air of some kind of, you know, objectivity and stuff about them. However, on closer inspection, they prove to be no better than the most casual of reports.

Any competent experimental psychologist could knock up a study that would "prove" a given tenet, tweak the design a bit, run it again with a comparable batch of subjects and "prove" the opposite. The skill is of course to ensure that doesn't happen. As for doing an experiment on oneself, well, the sky's the limit.

I'd argue that pretendy tests are actually worse than casual reports because few of us take isolated gush-gush stories terribly seriously (I'd certainly never spend money on the basis of one) but nonsense like the show-stand wav-v-flac tests regularly and energetically defended here still seem to have mileage with some.

But they're conducted by people who have not a clue how to set about investigating psychological phenomena and the "conclusions" are, with respect, risibly amateur. That emphatically doesn't make the "experimenter" incompetent in his or her own field nor does it mean that the premise is necessarily wrong but it does show proponents up as pop psychologists without phizz.

If someone reports that this or that tweak works wonders, I may well try it for myself. If it does nothing for me, I've lost little; this is a hobby site, it's fun to try silly things and, every now and then, effective. Besides, many people who submit seemingly casual reports of this and that have in fact often done pretty much what you've done before they post only don't give it a quasi-scientific air.

But many people on this forum, for example, spend a fair old whack of money on large disk drives because they believe that flac-format data are inherently inferior sonically to wav and cite as proof "evidence" that is IMHO fatuous. (Ditto stuff about CD-ROM offsets and different CD drives giving different sounds from identical data. Whenever a newbie asks a perfectly reasonable question here, before you know it the poor sod's being hit all round the room with instructions to buy this or that because it is sonically superior to the other with "DBTs" cited to prove the point.)

Me? I find the entrails of a goose as good a guide as any and have DBT results by the shed load to prove my point.

Dave

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