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In Reply to: RE: All I know is that he was a real pissant who was very rarely stable (nt) posted by 13th Duke of Wymbourne on November 17, 2014 at 16:02:54
Infinitely less
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nt
Some years ago, Stereophile conducted several blind speaker tests. Over several days, a panel of reviewers would listen to various speakers which were priced about the same.
IIRC, the results were fairly inconclusive. For example on day one, Speaker A would be named the fourth best speaker and described in one set of terms. One day two, Speaker A would be named the sixth best speaker and described in another set of terms.
Kudos to them for attempting this. If someone remembers more details, please join in.
> Some years ago, Stereophile conducted several blind speaker tests. Over
> several days, a panel of reviewers would listen to various speakers which
> were priced about the same. IIRC, the results were fairly inconclusive.
After the first series of tests, where we had 5 listeners in the room for
each blind test, it became apparent from examining each listener's
results on subsequent days that the position of the listener was a major
interfering variable. So for the next set of tests, we restricted the
number of listeners to just 2 (IIRC) listeners at a time, one sitting
behind the other on the center line. This gave much better consistency
but doubled the amount of time the tests took. We could achieve even
better consistency by having just one listener in the room at a time,
which would double the overall time again.
After the second set of tests, we realized that the curtain draped across
the room to keep listeners from seeing the speakers was also an interfering
variable, in that it damped the room acoustics so much that the speakers
that did best under blind testing were the ones that actually had too much
treble. (The curtain was Snell grille cloth.) For the third and final set
of tests, Tom Norton arranged for each speaker to be obscured with a
cylinder of grille cloth, which didn't damp the room acoustics to any
serious degree.
This just left us with the conundrum that each pair of speakers was
positioned in the same place, which benefited some models but not others.
Overall, had we addressed all the interfering variables, to perform a set
of blind tests that gave reliable results would have taken longer than was
practicable given our monthly publishing schedule. There was also the
fact that despite the time and resources we expended on these blind
tests, there was insufficient interest in the reviews from our readers to
justify continuing them.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Thank you for providing the details and you obviously put a lot of time and effort into the project. It's a pity that readers were not more interested.
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