Dynaudio Owner's Thread - Page 590

Well, I don't make significant purchase decisions in a dealers showroom. I take gear home and audition it in the comfort of my listening room, where I am in a familiar environment, and don't have external interference or influence.

I had too much trouble following your run-on sentence to see where you demonstrate a non sequitur, but it doesn't matter. I still don't buy the argument for double blind tests, at least not where listening to music is concerned.

Sorry that compound sentences are difficult for you. I'll simply ask my first question again. How is a double blind test in any way stressful? It's arbitrary and has nothing riding on it.

That just the way I am. I have no explanation for it, but I don't require your belief of it either.

Compound sentences are not difficult for me, if the prose is reasonably well written.

So if a test that has nothing riding on it and should be easy to pass by audiophile standards gets you so stressed out that it causes you to fail, how on earth do you manage to make any meaningful day to day decisions? Wouldn't the stress just be too unbearable?

I'm not interested in arguing with you, so let's give it a rest.

And with that I'll say QED to my original post; the logic doesn't follow.

Good for you. You win the pissing match. Gloat in good health.

Man, it's getting a little chippy around here lately.

Sure is. Folks need to pour a good stiff drink, put a record on the turntable and chillax...

I'm sorry but it's you who's not following the logic. Double Blind tests are a flawed methodology simply because it introduces a "test" element that forces a right or wrong response that fails to simulate how we naturally listen to music. When we listen to music it's in the comfort of our homes and at our own time and space, and usually it's a solitary pursuit for most of us.

A double blind test, is usually in an unfamiliar system, under test conditions, with other people in the room monitoring your hearing subtle differences between similar components. It just doesn't work. Because it's so different from the way we listen for pleasure.

Take the technician and the test parameters, and the right/wrong expectation and listen from the comfort of your home. We pick up and respond to subtleties best when we are relaxed. Double or even triple blind tests are not relaxing, the only blind test that works is if the participant doesn't know he's in a test.

A DBT should be no more difficult than taking your wife/GF to a mattress store and asking her to strip and make out with you in the show room. She should perform the same as in the bed room. You should also rise to the occasion with no assistance from a little pill. ABSOLUTELY NO PRESSURE SINCE YOU DO IT REGULARLY WITH HER. Just like making everyday decisions.

MUDCAT I thought about using this analogy haha, oh yes, we must rise to the occasion.

I wish I had thought of that. That's really good.

Again, what is stressful about listening to piece a, listening to piece b, and saying I like a, and then repeating that process? Don't we all claim to enjoy listening to music? Wouldn't this be a fun test to see if what we claim to hear is indeed there? And it isn't a flawed methodology. It's accepted by not only the audio industry, but by the greater scientific community outside of the audio world. The only ones to seem to think it's somehow flawed are audiophiles chasing magic.
Great analogy, because that clearly is a scenario that plays out on a regular basis and has a total basis in reality. A dbt for listening to audio doesn't result in possible jail time, whereas your extreme position does. Nice use of reductio ad absurdum.

I think that part of the problem with tests (not just blind) is the way they're being set-up.

this is a more general problem of some fields of science. when psychologists, doctors etc set-up some sort of experiment in order to (dis)prove a certain hypothesis, they're making assumptions. assumptions about how a subject is influenced by the test factors. those assumptions have an influence on the way the test itself, test environment etc are being devised. and that influences the test results.
for instance, I was reading a study that was supposed to determine if listening to the music with the eyes closed has an influence on how we perceive it (d'oh, it has and I know it). very small (seconds) portions of songs were used. how stupid is that, how can someone expect an emotional response based on seconds of music? it takes more than a few notes to provoke a response, otherwise we'd have 3-second songs.
second mistake was to use only certain types of music. for instance, I hardly even listen to opera. how can I be a good subject if opera music is used in a test?
third, subjects are generally chosen randomly. it's like having someone who doesn't even have a driver's license evaluate F1 cars.

it's the same with dbt tests. someone else makes the rules. to continue the F1 analogy, it's like forcing a professional driver evaluate a car while being forced not to switch gears.

but I still think that once properly set-up (long listening sessions, no forced a/b switching, familiar environment, familiar music, repeated sessions to eliminate the possibility of external factors being at play, no stress factors involved) blind tests can be meaningful.

a friend of mine told me once that in his opinion tests should be devised this way: they don't have to be blind but people should be forced to take notes on the sound and those notes be compared at the end of the test. and I agree. the reason he told me that is that he once participated at a cable comparison in a very high-end system (above ~100k total price). one of the guys that participated insisted that a certain cable brought a major improvement, while all the other people didn't hear a thing. the guy who "heard" the difference was good friends with the dealer that had set-up the test. coincidence or not, but it's enough to question if the guy just wanted to please the dealer.

what some miss is that while blind tests have problems, non-blind tests have their own problems too and they are affected by "noise" the same way blind tests are. I need to repeat myself: there is no black or white, only shades of gray.
Edited by gn77b - 11/7/12 at 6:43am

Tests can be stressful as can public speaking. Many students who have average testing ability outperform the test geniuses in work application. Most of us speak in public daily without stress. However, many will become stressed if they have to speak to an audience.
Is there a flaw in using a test as suggested by Dynero? I was challenged by another member a few years back. He wanted to set up a DBT as the usual. I made a proposal identical to Dynaro's and he wanted no part of it.
If one listens to his system in his home and has only a remote to control volume without knowing what he is controlling he can report if he notices any difference from the previous session. This could continue for days with another either switching components or not switching. The listener would be blind to the system during any session.

I am not defending the purchase of botique or exorbitant priced gear. I leave that decision to the buyer. Also, being a retired old dumb a$$ I admit to not knowing all the procedures for measuring the output of an amp. It seems to me that the graphs can show a flat or jagged result. Is that the result of only one frequency passing at a time or with all frequencies (such as pass through with music) being fed through? Those tests also seem meaningless when factoring in the speakers reaction (load) on an amp.

The problem here is time. A double blind test works if you give individuals time. Let's say you get to take two systems home for a week and listen to them. Would we be able to differentiate between tubes and SS for example?

Why do I say time?

Because we have learned some things about the brain in the last several years, like how it stores and retrieves information. basically the timed school test is a poor way to evaluate knowledge. Information comes into the brain through sensors and goes from the back integrative cortex to the front integrative cortex and this takes time. If we are rushed (stress) the brain immediately bypasses the integrative process and goes to the Amygdala (its fear center) and often locks up. Think of an individual walking through the woods and stepping on a snake, what happens? Immediately he steps back, thought does not enter into the event until after his instinctive action. Here's an example of pressure, how many times has a famous person come up in a conversation and his name just can't be remembered, "it's on the tip of my tongue", try relaxing and I'll bet the name comes up.

So some people really are poor test takers, not because they don't have the knowledge, but because of the poor criteria we use to evaluate their knowledge. Stress does make for poor decisions.

This goes further, the person in class with the quickest response that might sound correct, in fact, may be totally incorrect and the answer built on time, the important time to evaluate that is often never heard, is usually the better answer. Does this ring a bell? How about Political sound bites designed to stir emotions and not introspective thought.

In short Daniel Tosh's (who is he?) statement is embarrassingly naive.
Edited by robaroni - 11/7/12 at 6:59am

then there is a real problem if a non-blind test of short duration is considered to give relevant results. I've many times heard people praise a certain set-up only after minutes of listening. isn't that as wrong as double testing?

I'd say very possibly, the deciding factor is how stressful ( and we really don't know what's going inside an individual stress wise in any particular situation)

I think listening takes a relatively long time, in fact I've sat down to listen to music after a stressful period and it takes time to adjust to really listening to the point of enjoyment.

Rob

All this makes sense to me, and confirms why I am never comfortable buying something if I haven't taken it home -- for at least a weekend -- to audition in my own comfortable listening environment, without external interference or influence. When I do this I spend the first day just getting past having a new piece of gear. It takes me until at least the second day before I can ignore there is something new to the system, and I settle in to enjoying music and discovering whether it's better, worse, the same, or just different. Until I am there, there isn't much point for me to start making a purchase decision.

I had my Ovation turntable for a couple weeks before I bought it. Ditto for the Contour S3.4s.

I believe you.
I think once people start to understand exactly how we learn and recall along with the factors that determine how we functionn under stress they beging to have a completely different perspective, make better decisions, help their kids in school and even challenge traditional teaching an teachers.People aren't stupid, we just have had some horrible ways of educating them. I know this because I had a terrible time in HS, it wasn't until I got to college and a different learning environment that I really shined and it wasn't until after that, that I started to look into the why of it.

Rob

Anyway, the bottom line to all of this is that I say," it looks good but let me go home and think about it." Maybe I'll come back and listen again but I rarely ever buy anything I haven't really researched, listened too, thought about, etc.regardless of the product. They call it buyer remorse and if you're getting at all you're making decisions without introspection, and that's a very bad way to shop.

Rob

I was barely a C student in high school. My parents pressured me to attend college in town. I didn't do much better. After a few years on my own, I regrouped and went to a college and program of my choosing, and graduated cum laude with a music history B.A.

Do all of the focus line have the esotar2 tweeter or only the 380?

You sound like one of the lucky ones! I'd like to know the degree of carnage educational systems left in their wake, the poor people who never realized their full potential, their talents, abilities and the joys in life they could have experienced but didn't because they simply thought they were too stupid to learn or function under any more than a basic level.

Rob

The high school I went to is actually very well regarded, and has a very high rate of college bound graduates. In my case, it was more that I was brought up by European educated/cultured parents who pushed me towards the math and sciences, where I was really more tuned towards the liberal arts (after my composer grandfather). I just needed to find my calling on my own. Ultimately, it is ironic because I am now a software engineer by profession. However, I got there via music studies, teaching myself to program to solve music theory problems.

Only the 380. The Esotar2 alone are about $1800/pair at retail.

since this has largely transformed into an off-topic rant...
I'm currently listening to the hi-res remix/remaster of King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic. it sounds glorious on the Dyns, this could easily be a very demanding test album. detail, imaging, complex mix of instruments, dynamics, bass, it's all there. IMO any prog-rock fan should get the 2012 version of this album.

Since we are back to love of music, I just ordered an OOP copy of the Speakers Corner 180g reissue of George Solti and the LSO performing Mahler's 3rd Symphony. Should be here tomorrow, just in time to help me start breaking in my Esotar2 upgrade.

have they arrived yet?