Audio Blind Testing

[Ron Scubadiver]

There is a well known blind test which showed people could not tell the difference between SACD's and CD's.  Now either they cheated somehow, or a lot of people are wasting money on SACD's.  You can find this on the Wikipedia page for SACD. There is another one where one set of gear was a consumer DVD player hooked up to $200 class AB amplifier (A500) with a $5 interconnect and the other set of gear was $12k of high end CD transport and so forth.  A slight preference was shown for the DVD player and about a third of the subjects had no preference.  Some nice stand mounts were used as speakers.  Note the input level controls were used on the A500 instead of a preamp and these have documented measurable problems with introducing distortion.

 

It kind of makes me wonder...

[Ron Scubadiver]

8 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

Ron - do a search for SACD + meta-analysis here for a cite I posted some time ago.  It appears there a marginal improvement with SACDs over CDs.

 

 

 

I honestly don't think that SACD study is the alpha and omega on SACD vs Redbook, but it might be like coffee after an evening of drinking.  I like the way DSD files play on my system, and now we have high res downloads to entertain us as well.

[Ron Scubadiver]

2 hours ago, firedog said:

The "well known blind test" you are referring to is apparently the Meyer Moran study. It was shown to be full of holes - one of which is that much of the "hi-res" material they used were SACDs produced from upsampled Redbook or other content that wasn't recorded in hi-res in the first place, so they were making a false comparison. 

More recently, try the meta analysis which says studies show an ability for listeners to perceive hi-res:

http://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20180108/18296.pdf

Yes and no.  The SACD's were not the best, but they were SACD's.  That's a problem with the industry, not the format.  Likewise, there are upsampled high res downloads for sale.  There are all sorts of criticisms of blind testing.