Paul Davis wrote:
doesn't really matter. it was established as much as 80 years ago (and possibly longer) that non-blind or even single-blind testing infallibly distorts the results of any kind of evaluation, whether its house paint, toothpaste, shoe comfort, chili powder or audio quality. any time you want to establish that something is subjectively better than something else, you owe it to yourself to figure out how to do that using double blind techniques. its not about you, or the thing being tested. its about the way human perception and psychology work.
Y'know, I've never done any double blind testing. I agree that it's significantly better for the reasons you've stated, but it's very difficult to set up. You have to be able to switch between choices randomly, with perfect level matching (louder always sounds better). A proper double blind setup is generally out of the reach of most mortals, which leaves us with our usual more subjective means. We have what we have to work with, and in my case, I'm still going to experiment with the different sampling and bit rates. I've done a lot of careful listening to audio gear over the past 35 years I've been an audio hobbyist and feel I've got a good idea of what to listen for. It's not ideal, but it seems to work for me. Fortunately I have a very revealing home system to listen on, as opposed to the computer based speakers, or even so-called studio monitors that most recording engineers use, so perhaps the differences between sampling and bit rates will be more apparent for me.
Or not... There's something to be said for living in a world of self-delusion! If it works for the White House, why not for me?! ;-)
Russ _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
