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RE: I still haven't heard a satisfactory explanation:

Suppose Dave says that SACDs sound better than CDs in his system, and in particular there's this hybrid SACD where both the SACD and CD layers were equivalently mastered, and it's really easy to hear the superiority of SACD on track 1. Now suppose Brad says that he's listened to SACDs before, including this one, and he can't hear a difference between the SACD and an equivalently mastered CD. Who is right? They both are - they simply hear what they hear.

Now imagine there are 100 DBTs conducted involving 1000 different audiophiles using high end and some SOTA systems, where the protocol was chosen to be as sensitive as possible. And the results of all 100 tests are null. Do you think Dave is suddenly going to stop hearing that improvement in the SACD layer over the CD layer? Do you think Dave is going to be able to successfully talk himself out of hearing the difference and stop buying SACDs, or that he would even want to?

Conversely, suppose one or more of the DBTs has a statistically significant positive result, and others are able to duplicate the positive results with the same protocol. Is Brad going to suddently start hearing a difference where previously he could not? Is he going to start buying SACDs anyway even though he doesn't hear a difference, just because a blind test demonstrated that some other people could hear it?

DBTs in audio are conducted to win arguments.


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