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Showing results for tags 'blind testing'.
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Speak to a guru and he will tell you that human consciousness has many different levels, which are possible to experience through meditation. Listening also has several different levels. Listen while not really concentrating and what you hear is the homogination of all the voices and instruments. Concentrate and depending on what you concentrate on, you may hear the tune and timbre of an individual instrument or if you concentrate on the music, you’ll hear all the instruments and their interplay, with your attention jumping from instrument to instrument as each catches your attention. The problems with blind listening are several fold. Let’s say you are evaluating a new cable. You listen to the original cable and then to what may be the original or new cable, the test being whether you can actually hear a difference. Here’s the problem. Your baseline comprises the sum of the original music, the changes made to it by the recording process and the changes made to it by the replay system. You now listen to the second playing. What you are hearing is the music, the changes made to it by the recording, the changes made by the replay system and the changes, if any made by removing the old cable and replacing it with the new cable. Now that’s already pretty complex but combine that with the way we listen by concentrating on different things within the music and its no surprise that confusion reigns in blind testing. There are simply far too many variables. The evaluated subject matter (music) is overly complex and the test process is subject to emotions and the flighty, spotlighting nature of human concentration. In my experience the best way I’ve found to test anything related to audio is human voice and spoken word. We are very practiced at hearing voices (the joke’s too obvious to be funny), very attuned to minor changes in pitch, cadence, emphasis, tone etc. Get a good recording of human voice and familiarise yourself with all its characteristics, then use that in blind testing. You’ll find that even quite subtle differences are easy to hear because there is only 1 thing to concentrate on and you are very skilled at analysing human voice. You’ll also notice that while human voice is centred around a fairly narrow frequency range, changes to response at frequency extremes are still clearly heard (chestiness, foundation, body, sparkle, mouth sounds, sibilance, presence etc). I have just spent several months tuning and Improving my network streaming supply which involved adding components like PSUs and cables then waiting for them to run in. By far the most useful tool in evaluating progress was spoken word. Coloration was particularly easy to hear, added treble (sibilance), bass emphasis (chestiness) and it was easy to pinpoint when the system had fully run in (a natural sounding voice with no apparent colouration or anomalies). Obviously your source has to be reliable and not subject to its own instabilities.
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https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/Arnold-Krueger-obituary?pid=188925019&view=guestbook Arny Krueger was well know for his ABX comparator, championing blind / bias controlled evaluation, making the ever popular files with injected jitter and distortion components, and being unyielding to subjective anecdote that lacked any meaningful data to back it up. He is already missed and we are all the poorer for it.
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