Sighted vs blind vs ABX.

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hammill

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professorhat said:
hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

I drink a reasonable amount of wine, but couldn't tell by taste anything about it. There are others who could, from one taste, tell you the region and the vintage. Yet in a blind taste test, both of our opinions would be equally valid.
Indeed they would. Which is why I tend not to find other peoples opinion on wine useful. At the heart of the matter is whether you consider HiFi to be more like wine or vacuum cleaners - I tend to the latter but again that is a matter of opinion.
 

The_Lhc

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This looks like a thread that needs my delicate input!

Nah, just kidding!
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chebby

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hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

Maybe the folk in white coats don't realise that food and drink is best enjoyed when all the senses are engaged and when you aren't wired up with electrodes with a random bunch of other 'guinea pigs' in a lab by a bunch of undergrad researchers who think 10 pints of cheap, supermarket brand, canned lager and a cold take-away pizza represents the finest achievable experience in eating and drinking!

There is a streak of joylessness running through this thread. People who want to prove to other people that they cannot really - scientifically - be enjoying their hifi/musical pleasures because they have not submitted themselves (or their audio systems) to some kind of approved and rigorous testing geared towards exposing them - and their enjoyment of their music and hifi - as somehow 'fraudulent'.
 

Craig M.

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Gerrardasnails said:
Have you noticed how the sceptics use science, graphs, surveys but never their ears. IDC, how many of these ABX events have you attended? Anyone that believes all amps sound the same might as well give up the hobby!

that's funny - at a blind abx test they use nothing but their ears. and look where that gets them...
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Cold Roses

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hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

While we're on this subject and if anyone wants something interesting to listen to, check out the Freakonomics Radio podcast entitled "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?": http://freakonomicsradio.com/do-more-expensive-wines-taste-better.html. Also available on Itunes, I believe.
 

professorhat

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hammill said:
professorhat said:
hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

I drink a reasonable amount of wine, but couldn't tell by taste anything about it. There are others who could, from one taste, tell you the region and the vintage. Yet in a blind taste test, both of our opinions would be equally valid.
Indeed they would. Which is why I tend not to find other peoples opinion on wine useful.

Fair point - and why tasting / auditioning is important. But it should be fun, that's really my point about the whole hobby thing. I find drinking and tasting wine is fun, and I also find both listening to music and watching movies fun - either on my own system or on a different system I happen to be testing. Start getting scientific with either and the fun soon stops and it becomes a laborious task. Obviously this is my opinion, I'm sure some people love spending their spare time setting up strict ABX listening conditions, and reading scientific papers on the various measurements taken when passing electricity through different kinds of audio cables. It's just not for me thanks.

Anyway, point made I think, so enough from me o/
 

hammill

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chebby said:
hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

Maybe the folk in white coats don't realise that food and drink is best enjoyed when all the senses are engaged and when you aren't wired up with electrodes with a random bunch of other 'guinea pigs' in a lab by a bunch of undergrad researchers who think 10 pints of cheap, supermarket brand, canned lager and a cold take-away pizza represents the finest achievable experience in eating and drinking!

There is a streak of joylessness running through this thread. People who want to prove to other people that they cannot really - scientifically - be enjoying their hifi/musical pleasures because they have not submitted themselves (or their audio systems) to some kind of approved and rigorous testing geared towards exposing them - and their enjoyment of their music and hifi - as somehow 'fraudulent'.
You have missed the point by a mile as is often the case. I greatly enjoy music and wine. I think it is joyful that the £5 wine I drink will probably taste just as good to me as £25 wine and I do not have to waste my money. It would also be a boon to me to know definitively whether buying a new HDMI cable makes a difference to my system - currently I don't trust the information I have and that is what the argument is about. I doubt that any of us who would like to see more rigour in testing sit at home with an oscilloscope - we want other people to do it for us whilst we sit listening to music
smiley-smile.gif
 

hammill

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Cold Roses said:
hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

While we're on this subject and if anyone wants something interesting to listen to, check out the Freakonomics Radio podcast entitled "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?": http://freakonomicsradio.com/do-more-expensive-wines-taste-better.html. Also available on Itunes, I believe.
Not found I am afraid.
 

Craig M.

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hammill said:
chebby said:
hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

Maybe the folk in white coats don't realise that food and drink is best enjoyed when all the senses are engaged and when you aren't wired up with electrodes with a random bunch of other 'guinea pigs' in a lab by a bunch of undergrad researchers who think 10 pints of cheap, supermarket brand, canned lager and a cold take-away pizza represents the finest achievable experience in eating and drinking!

There is a streak of joylessness running through this thread. People who want to prove to other people that they cannot really - scientifically - be enjoying their hifi/musical pleasures because they have not submitted themselves (or their audio systems) to some kind of approved and rigorous testing geared towards exposing them - and their enjoyment of their music and hifi - as somehow 'fraudulent'.
You have missed the point by a mile as is often the case. I greatly enjoy music and wine. I think it is joyful that the £5 wine I drink will probably taste just as good to me as £25 wine and I do not have to waste my money. It would also be a boon to me to know definitively whether buying a new HDMI cable makes a difference to my system - currently I don't trust the information I have and that is what the argument is about. I doubt that any of us who would like to see more rigour in testing sit at home with an oscilloscope - we want other people to do it for us whilst we sit listening to music
smiley-smile.gif

just what i was thinking. i really can't get my head around some of the responses on this thread.
 

Cold Roses

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hammill said:
Cold Roses said:
hammill said:
Serendipity strikes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745. Maybe wine magazines should try ABX testing too.

While we're on this subject and if anyone wants something interesting to listen to, check out the Freakonomics Radio podcast entitled "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?": http://freakonomicsradio.com/do-more-expensive-wines-taste-better.html. Also available on Itunes, I believe.
Not found I am afraid.

Weird, the link worked a minute ago, but doesn't seem to work for me now either.

Try the Freakonomics website (http://freakonomicsradio.com/) and check the Listen tab, which has all of the podcasts.
 
A

Anonymous

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hammill said:
You have missed the point by a mile as is often the case. I greatly enjoy music and wine. I think it is joyful that the £5 wine I drink will probably taste just as good to me as £25 wine and I do not have to waste my money. It would also be a boon to me to know definitively whether buying a new HDMI cable makes a difference to my system - currently I don't trust the information I have and that is what the argument is about. I doubt that any of us who would like to see more rigour in testing sit at home with an oscilloscope - we want other people to do it for us whilst we sit listening to music
smiley-smile.gif

Truthfully I feel you're missing the point on both counts. I enjoy good wine and abhor bad wine. Sometimes truth a £5 may be as good or better than a £25 wine, but I have rarely found those gems. There is a noticeable difference between those price points as much as in AV. Wile many people don't noticemuch of a difference at first for an uprade, downgrading is often a shock of how bad the quality of lower end gear (and wines) is. Scientifically this should make little sense, but subjectivey from listening (or in the case of wine, tasting) there is a difference.

As for the earlier post regarding jitter, that is easily measured especially if you use HDM1.4a with Ethrenet. A simple packetsniffer can pick out any jitter that occurs, and poor connections or underspecced cabling is likely to introduce jitter or packetloss which, once there is enough, is very noticeable. In case of jitter due to poor connectivity you're also likely to have more errors in the packets than is acceptable, further qorsening the signal. Jitter in sound is much like listening to a broken record and in Video it is often visible as blocky pictures, the same as a high error rate. While true that the difference between different good cabling is not noticeable, substandard cabling is.

However, different gear could certainly have a subjective quality, not measurable with the set we use today simply because terms are used that cannot be easliy defined. How would you define "warm sound"? Is that the same as the person next to you? If not you cannot measure it since you don't even have the same definition of what that subjective experience is.

It has been proven that some persons have a more keenly developed sens of hearing than others, and some have a more developed sense of taste or smell. This could well be part of why we all feel we hear something differently. Or smell. Or taste.
 

hammill

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patrickvanham said:
hammill said:
You have missed the point by a mile as is often the case. I greatly enjoy music and wine. I think it is joyful that the £5 wine I drink will probably taste just as good to me as £25 wine and I do not have to waste my money. It would also be a boon to me to know definitively whether buying a new HDMI cable makes a difference to my system - currently I don't trust the information I have and that is what the argument is about. I doubt that any of us who would like to see more rigour in testing sit at home with an oscilloscope - we want other people to do it for us whilst we sit listening to music
smiley-smile.gif

Truthfully I feel you're missing the point on both counts. I enjoy good wine and abhor bad wine. Sometimes truth a £5 may be as good or better than a £25 wine, but I have rarely found those gems. There is a noticeable difference between those price points as much as in AV. Wile many people don't noticemuch of a difference at first for an uprade, downgrading is often a shock of how bad the quality of lower end gear (and wines) is. Scientifically this should make little sense, but subjectivey from listening (or in the case of wine, tasting) there is a difference.

As for the earlier post regarding jitter, that is easily measured especially if you use HDM1.4a with Ethrenet. A simple packetsniffer can pick out any jitter that occurs, and poor connections or underspecced cabling is likely to introduce jitter or packetloss which, once there is enough, is very noticeable. In case of jitter due to poor connectivity you're also likely to have more errors in the packets than is acceptable, further qorsening the signal. Jitter in sound is much like listening to a broken record and in Video it is often visible as blocky pictures, the same as a high error rate. While true that the difference between different good cabling is not noticeable, substandard cabling is.

However, different gear could certainly have a subjective quality, not measurable with the set we use today simply because terms are used that cannot be easliy defined. How would you define "warm sound"? Is that the same as the person next to you? If not you cannot measure it since you don't even have the same definition of what that subjective experience is.

It has been proven that some persons have a more keenly developed sens of hearing than others, and some have a more developed sense of taste or smell. This could well be part of why we all feel we hear something differently. Or smell. Or taste.
The whole point of this thread is that tests should be conducted in such away that external factors such as price, pretty bottle/speaker cabinet, what the tester expects etc can be discounted. If a difference is then found, I am perfectly happy to accept it. Tests on expensive vs cheap wine (and there are may apart from the recent one I quoted) tend to find that the majority of people cannot tell the difference or they prefer the wine which they are told is the most expensive, even if it is the cheapest. Like everybody I have drunk wine which is quite disgusting but once you get past that price point, wines taste different but not necessarily better. Of couse, people who spend £25 on a bottle of wine or £150 on an HDMI cable don't want to hear that so the people being tested are dupes, or have an inadequate palatte/hearing etc. This phenomenon has been around a long time - see Hans Christian Andersen for more details.
 

chebby

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hammill said:
Of couse, people who spend £25 on a bottle of wine or £150 on an HDMI cable don't want to hear that so the people being tested are dupes, or have an inadequate palatte/hearing etc. This phenomenon has been around a long time - see Hans Christian Andersen for more details.

I prefer the stories of the Grimm brothers.

I dare say the scientifically conducted H.C. Andersen vs Brothers Grimm blind reading test would find 100 percent of subjects couldn't tell which was which from the feel of the paper and conclude that there is no difference between fairy-tales and therefore any subjective preference was bogus.
 
A

Anonymous

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Actually there is a lot of science that goes into wine making, and it makes absolute sense. Anyway, wine isn't a good analogy for HiFi, as it is far more complex than the average HiFi system, and not remotely comparable to cables which contain either copper or silver and that's it.

Mind you, I'm surprised no-one has yet posited that the origin of the copper or silver has an impact on the sound. Does copper mined in Australia produce more bass? Does the copper originating in Finland have a brighter top end? What happens if you biwire with a mix of Chilean and Polish copper?

I'm sure someone at some point with say the differences are night and day...
 
A

Anonymous

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hammill said:
The whole point of this thread is that tests should be conducted in such away that external factors such as price, pretty bottle/speaker cabinet, what the tester expects etc can be discounted. If a difference is then found, I am perfectly happy to accept it.

Since the hearing of music is an inherently subjective experience and many terms to describe what we experience are used that cannot be quantified it is impossible to scientifically measure. What exactly do you feel when you listen to some music? Would the person next to you feel the same, and more importantly, describe it the same way?

ABX testing is far from the holy grail, there is the factor of time and how long we actually keep a feeling. The time to switch system/cabling/component will often take long enough that the experince has faded enough that we cannot compare it 1:1 any more. This means we'd need a quantifiable and measurble set of variables to compare with, which is impossible to do as we're talking about an experience where we all use different ways to describe it. Sometimes the words may be the same, that does not mean we all have the same experience.
 
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Anonymous

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patrickvanham said:
Since the hearing of music is an inherently subjective experience and many terms to describe what we experience are used that cannot be quantified it is impossible to scientifically measure. What exactly do you feel when you listen to some music? Would the person next to you feel the same, and more importantly, describe it the same way?

ABX testing is far from the holy grail, there is the factor of time and how long we actually keep a feeling. The time to switch system/cabling/component will often take long enough that the experince has faded enough that we cannot compare it 1:1 any more. This means we'd need a quantifiable and measurble set of variables to compare with, which is impossible to do as we're talking about an experience where we all use different ways to describe it. Sometimes the words may be the same, that does not mean we all have the same experience.
It is, however, easy to measure the equipment we use to produce music. Our reactions to the music are indeed subjective, but not the means which must in the end obey the laws of science.

Your comments about ABX testing reinforces the need for proper scientific testing. Do remember, however, that subjective is always reaction to what you hear, not the physics of it. For example, if you turn on a light and find it too bright, that's your reaction to it and has nothing to do with the laws that govern how the lighht was produced. Those laws, however, do allow us to look at the wattage of a light bulb and determine how bright it will be. The figure on the box is, of course, the result of scientific, not subjective, testing.
 
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Grottyash said:
It is, however, easy to measure the equipment we use to produce music. Our reactions to the music are indeed subjective, but not the means which must in the end obey the laws of science.

The question is then, what would you measure? If we look at the different measurements that are made such as using SPL meters, that only tells us what the soundlevel for a given frequency is. It does not tell us any subjective things that may or may not be influenced by the choice of music to be played and any emotions that may be attached to that choice. It also does not show anything about sound appearing for example clinical. Nor does it say if it is a good reproduction of what was played in the studio or concert hall since both the media it is stored on may or may not impose limits, nor any of the colouring the analogue circuitry may introduce (intended or otherwise). Scientific and measurable quantities are fair but do not give the whole picture. Even more, a piece of kit may sound different at home due to the constarints of the room, RF that may interefre with the electronic circuitry etc.

This is why demoing is important, preferably at home. A piece of kit may be 5-star almost everywhere but if you don't like the sound it's not for you. Same thing with measurements, I have seen measurements that were close to perfect yet the reviewers gave it only 3 stars or a comparable verdict. Why? The reasons are as many as there are listeners. AV is too subjective to rely on labs alone. And humanity is simply too forgetful to reliably perform ABX testing
 
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Anonymous

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al7478 said:
al7478 said:
Grottyash said:
applying stringent laboratory tests could provide definitive answers.

What would such tests look like?

My point being that tests can show that a 320kbps MP3 is 1091.2 times "worse" than a WAV file, but people can't always hear that difference.
True, but that doesn't stop the mp3 being inferior nor invalidate what people hear, if you know what I mean..

patrickvanham, I fear you've missed the point
 

Alec

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Grottyash said:
al7478 said:
al7478 said:
Grottyash said:
applying stringent laboratory tests could provide definitive answers.

What would such tests look like?

My point being that tests can show that a 320kbps MP3 is 1091.2 times "worse" than a WAV file, but people can't always hear that difference.
True, but that doesn't stop the mp3 being inferior nor invalidate what people hear, if you know what I mean..

patrickvanham, I fear you've missed the point

Precisely, ansd this is largely academic with hdd space so cheap, but whilst mp3 is technically inferior, it may not matter to some. I just mean measurements dont tell the whole story.
 

idc

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Reading the various responses here has made me think of a better way of putting over my point to all of this -

What tells us the most about hifi, sighted, blind or ABX listening?

For me sighted tells us that looks, image, specifications, price, reviews are as important as sound quality.

Blind testing further confirms the importance of looks, image etc as when you remove them some products now do surprisingly well and vice versa.

Then do ABX and you discover that many claims about sound quality do not stand up to scrutiny. So ABX is the most revealing form of listening.

To answer some points made so far, I have never proposed to turn hifi media into some sort of science corner full of measurements. You can describe all sorts of listening tests in a fun and imformative way, WHF do it all the time.

I do not think that WHF do ABX testing, and if they do I am not aware of the methods and the results being published. That is true of most hifi media and hifi makers. They say they do blind listening, which is different from ABX listening. And as I am arguing ABX is the most revealing for of listening.

ABX testing has found that amps are far harder to differentiate that you would expect. But there have been ABX tests which have shown some amps can be differentiated.
 

idc

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I am sure this is mixing up blind listening with ABX. From your second link, Clare said

"As i've said on many, many threads on the subject, it's standard ABX methodology. One person is responsible for the cable switching, while team (three, typically) of WHF testers independently note their verdicts on sound and vision"

Noting their verdicts does not suggest they are being asked to identify whether X is A or B. If they are being asked to identify which is which, (as opposed to their thoughts on what thye are hearing) there will be plenty of test results to publish.
 

Gerrardasnails

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idc said:
I am sure this is mixing up blind listening with ABX. From your second link, Clare said

"As i've said on many, many threads on the subject, it's standard ABX methodology. One person is responsible for the cable switching, while team (three, typically) of WHF testers independently note their verdicts on sound and vision"

Noting their verdicts does not suggest they are being asked to identify whether X is A or B. If they are being asked to identify which is which, (as opposed to their thoughts on what thye are hearing) there will be plenty of test results to publish.

This latest riposte clearly shows that you do not listen to any other points and have your mind made up and will not change it. If this is the case, why not stop starting threads in which you pretend to be interested in others views.
 

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