AES 2009 Audio Myths Workshop
Reply #280 – 2010-03-25 07:55:15
I think that in some ways we're attempting to do the equivalent of brain surgery with a dull pocketknife. When people using a conventional testing methodology such as ABX say that they can find no perceptual difference between an inexpensive consumer quality converter and a $10,000 mastering converter but an overwhelming majority of professional engineers can pick out work done with each (and unanimously prefer the professional unit) that tells me that there's something wrong with the testing methodology. (I'm not saying that ABX is an invalid or unuseful tool, I'm just saying that it has limitations.) When they make such claims without an ABX test to me it would seem the "engineers" are talking out of their arse. If the difference is so obvious it would be no problem to do it double blinded no? The limitations of an ABX seems to just be that it doesn't give "engineers" and their following their special feeling of being better than the rest.We do not throw out observation simply because it doesn't agree with conventional wisdom, especially when conventional wisdom is to a large degree based on simplification. We do this all this time, it's called placebo affect. Not all observations are equal.The Catholic Church tried that with Galileo. That's funny from someone who falsely started to preach about the limitations about ABX. Make no mistake about it, you are the church here. A real scientist tries to find out those things that he doesn't know. He doesn't simply point to the establish body of knowledge and treat it like scripture. That type of person is a pedant, not a scientist. I think you have shown here you don't know the first thing about scientific method.