It is my belief that the use of blind testing to assess audible differences in audio components is a flawed process because human hearing is an adaptive system.
Try this experiment. Get some foam ear plugs at your local drug store, the kind used to protect your hearing from damage by loud noise. Insert only one plug in one ear according to the instructions, and wear it for twenty to thirty minutes while listening to music, television, or any kind of background noise. When you remove the plug, you'll find that everything now sounds louder in that ear than in the other. Your brain has "turned up the volume" on that ear to compensate for the loss caused by the plug. This phenomenon occurs not only with loudness but with tonal balance and other factors as well. Switching too rapidly between components in a blind test does not allow your hearing to fully adjust to or "learn" the characteristics of the sound, thereby masking differences in sound quality.
Has the following ever happened to you? The telephone rings. You answer and the person on the other end of the line begins to speak. It's obvious that they know you, but you don't recognize the voice. Finally you ask "Who is this?" The moment you learn the person's identity the voice snaps into focus and you wonder why you didn't recognize it right away. Your mind was denied the identity of the source of the sound, and could not properly assemble all of the information in that sound to make the identification. Similarly, concealing the identity of the components in a blind test inhibits your ability to distinguish between them.
I know this is a controversial topic, and I look forward to reading the opinions of the members of this community.
It is my belief that the use of blind testing to assess audible differences in audio components is a flawed process because human hearing is an adaptive system.
Try this experiment. Get some foam ear plugs at your local drug store, the kind used to protect your hearing from damage by loud noise. Insert only one plug in one ear according to the instructions, and wear it for twenty to thirty minutes while listening to music, television, or any kind of background noise. When you remove the plug, you'll find that everything now sounds louder in that ear than in the other. Your brain has "turned up the volume" on that ear to compensate for the loss caused by the plug. This phenomenon occurs not only with loudness but with tonal balance and other factors as well. Switching too rapidly between components in a blind test does not allow your hearing to fully adjust to or "learn" the characteristics of the sound, thereby masking differences in sound quality.
Has the following ever happened to you? The telephone rings. You answer and the person on the other end of the line begins to speak. It's obvious that they know you, but you don't recognize the voice. Finally you ask "Who is this?" The moment you learn the person's identity the voice snaps into focus and you wonder why you didn't recognize it right away. Your mind was denied the identity of the source of the sound, and could not properly assemble all of the information in that sound to make the identification. Similarly, concealing the identity of the components in a blind test inhibits your ability to distinguish between them.
I know this is a controversial topic, and I look forward to reading the opinions of the members of this community.