The flaws of blind listening tests

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1 hour ago, Blackmorec said:

Then, I’ve encountered many situations where adding an extremely well reviewed item simply hasn’t brought the hoped for results.  This is often to do with the other components you’re ‘mixing’ it with. 

 

Sorry my post is OT but just pointing out the common practice among audiophiles. 

 

I don’t inderstand why you have to mix in the first place. There are many manufacturer who make all the equipment and yet audiophiles prefer to mix them with other brands. Somehow, the manufacturer who designed the preamp and amplifier missed the magical combination. Strange. 

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11 minutes ago, Blackmorec said:

Manufacturers making all components is very common at the consumer level...Denon, Sony, Panasonic, Technics etc. But rarely the case at the specialist audiophile level....Magico, Rockport,  YG Acoustics, Tannoy, Constellation, Boulder, BAT, Devialet, Innuos, Nordost,  Synergistic Research, Shunyata, Entreq etc etc. 

 

...but i have also seen some mixing up despite having all separates. Recent visit to all Traingle Art Master Reference setup but speakers from different manufacturer. IMO, the Triangle Art speakers were the best of last years AV show that I attended. 

 

And you also have suggestion from experts that best combination should tube preamps and SS amps. Some mix to have their preferred flavour. 

 

Once, i replaced my Classe preamp with Supratek. Yes...that tube sound which was....,nice. 

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3 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The limitation in what you're saying is that the psychoacoustic element is largely ignored, or inadequately understood. Only the most recent research into human hearing is getting a better handle on how the brain operates, with explanations for "how" tied up in the whole 'mystery' of human awareness.

 

What my first "competent" rig did was to throw up a completely convincing sound field - it was literally impossible for me to make myself register that the speakers were the source of what I was hearing - the 'illusion' was rock, solid. Now, this exact same setup could 10 minutes later fall off this high perch, and sound just like an ordinary hifi, just another pretty decent audio combo - and nothing obvious had altered in this time frame. So, what the hell was going on here?!! ... and to this day I still haven't got a fully comprehensive answer.

 

Part of the answer is that the mind "fills the gaps"; when the sound is good enough, the brain adds the extra needed to complete the picture, and a 'mirage' fully forms. But to comprehensively explain that, with a fully technical explanation, is still some time off ...

 

This is wrong. The better the system is the minor flaws will be more noticable. Which psychoacoustic literature you are referring to?

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38 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

That's the conventional thinking ... however, what actually happens is that the flaws in the recording, and the detail of the actual recorded event are more clearly presented, projected. What is needed is to 'trick' the brain into only registering that greater detail of what the mic's picked up, and to discard the recording, mastering, etc, flaws - this is the Cocktail Party Effect being actively exploited; you are aiming to have the brain ignore what is not interesting - all the "defects" in the recording.

 

 

This is irrelevant to what you raised. Cocktail effect is the functioning of the brain to filter out unnecessary sound and focus on the sound you want to hear. It is nowhere says that you brain could somehow magically tinker with a bad recording to make it sound better. 

 

38 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Again, this is Auditory Scene Analysis research; this has evolved to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_auditory_scene_analysis, which is making machines mimic the automatic processing that humans do.

 

Totally irrelevant to what you are claiming is possible. This involves algorithm which will not materialize by resoldering the wires like you do AND hardware which the NAD which you are working on is even capable of.

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, fas42 said:

I've had systems slip in and out of the required state hundreds and hundreds of times - when one can literally make it happen, on cue, then you've got something ...

 

If you are slipping in and out then it got nothing to do with engineering (or the magical tweak as you call them). The beauty of engineering is that when you slip out you just revert to the previous state. Not very difficult and will not take 30 years to do that. The stuff you are describing is more appropriate under human psychology forum discussion. 

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25 minutes ago, Jud said:

@John Dyson and @March Audio: For example, are you familiar with this academic research that is quite relevant to how one ought to set up a listening test (presumably blinded)?: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=209  A quote from this page:

 

 

The conditions that caused the worst recall for music in the experiment were playing a tone, playing intervening tones, then trying to remember the initial tone.  Sounds a great deal like sequential A/B listening comparisons, doesn't it?

 

Are you familiar with work by the same researcher and many others that shows we hear surprisingly differently from each other, affected by both nature and nurture?  http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=201  A quote from this page:

 

 

There is other research on such things as what factors are most important in distinguishing instruments from each other.  Seminal work on this dates back to the 1960s.  Capturing the initial inharmonic attack of an instrument has been found to be extremely important.  When designing digital filters, is due emphasis placed on this capability?

 

So: (1) The usual method of testing, including blinded testing, makes use of a procedure shown to be bad for musical memory.  (2) When we talk to each other about what we are hearing, we cannot even be sure, based on our genes and upbringing, whether we are hearing the same thing in the same way.  (3) I personally haven't read engineers discuss the work on criticality of initial inharmonic attack to recognition of musical sounds and instruments in talking about design of such things as filters for DACs, or amps, but perhaps it goes on and I'm not privy to it.

 

And these are just for starters.    Yes, I agree the way forward is through engineering.  However, I feel that perhaps we still have a way to go to get to an ultimate understanding of what makes things sound "real" to each of us as individuals, and how to achieve that semblance of reality.

 

Lately, I am inclined to believe that DBT may not be that reliable for some types of comparisons.  

 

Recently, made a binaural recording of another system and comapred with mine. When listened through headphones, the preferenace was system A and when listened through loudspeakers the preferance was system B.  Although, it could be explained but this illustrated how some blindtests conducted by different system may give a different results. 

 

However, the important point to note here is this was about preference and difference. 

 

There are also situations where our hearing mechanism adapt to filter out certain sound which cannot be reliably distinguished under blind tests. This Is actually related to how human hearing sometimes takes about twenty minutes to normalize. It was an interesting discovery where the sequence of the blind test determines the outcome.