I have noticed the pervasive faith that people in this forum have in double-blind testing of audio equipment. This is interesting to me, as I have usually associated audiophiles with faith in the subjective. I mean honestly, I'm surprised to see people who love Axiom speakers yet believe that almost all the other components are barely differentiable. How do the skeptics justify or prove the excellent performance of their speakers? Apparently any personal observations are so inaccurate and variable as to be useless.
Does that mean that there are skeptics here who bought speakers based purely on frequency response curves and other measurements? Or is it because of trust in Axiom's use of double-blind testing to confirm performance traits? But that brings me to my point: double-blind testing is useful at getting gross statistical information about listener reactions, but it has severe limitations. An argument commonly put forth in Stereophile is: "Audio equipment is for listening, not comparing." That is to say that most people simply want to enjoy the music through their equipment: that is the only goal.
See no evil
The implication would then be: if the equipment sounds enjoyable enough to justify the price, then it doesn't matter if the measurements are terrible. What would skeptics do in this situation? Conclude that they were under some delusion, that their ears were going bad? Similarly, if double-blind tests indicate that "no difference" is heard, will that prevent you from making a purchase? Welcome to low-fi, mass produced audio equipment for the masses. Ignorance is bliss, and much less expensive too!
Because blind testing is subjective, I will tend to agree generally with the results. What's dangerous to me is to come to some conclusion when no difference is detected. Or when no study was ever done, as with most audio equipment. That does not prove anything; rather, it indicates a failure to gather decisive data. I believe that most pieces of audio gear are audibly distinguishable, but it depends entirely on the experience of the listener. Once you have listened critically to various equipment, and once you know what to listen for, you can vastly improve your signal to noise ratio.
So what if the experiment subjects don't share my scrutiny of the mid-treble region, what if they prefer a bass hump at 100Hz, what if they don't know the recording, or what if they just didn't listen long enough? I don't pick up on more subtle characteristics until listening to dozens of different CDs on the same equipment. Likewise, what if the measurements taken don't cover the traits I'm interested in? Namely, my musical enjoyability. I don't "enjoy" a response curve, I don't "savor" high impedances, nor do I cry because of a speaker resonance.
Chocolate
Example: in a psychology class on perception, we set up blind taste tests of two different chocolate bars: Hershey Special Dark versus Lindt dark chocolate. Most students could not consistently distinguish between them, but I had a 100% hit rate and only one or two false positives. Experiments are great, but there's an infinity of variables to control for, and you're limited to a) what you can anticipate, b) what's practical, and c) the subjects' abilities. Theory will always fall short of reality because it is a synthetic reconstruction. Trying to measure all aspects of audio equipment's performance is like trying to make a perfect circle on the beach using pebbles.
-Cooper
