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RE: Number of reasons, not the last of which...

"I'm still hoping someone could explain to me how ANY test, be it blind, sighted, single or double, performed by persons A1, A2, A3... on system X, is in any way relevant for a person B, listening to system Y"

It's not relevant. It really only helps the individual to try and discerene between things that are actually perceived rather than believed to be perceived. The only reason why a DBT would need to be done with a sample set (number of people = n) would be to get some statistical data to see if there are any useful trends. That's it. If there are no anticipated trends, it could well mean that there was something wrong with the experiment. Another problem is that if the sounds compared in the DBT are very very close and are down in the range of the threshold of audibility, then it's probably not a good idea to look at this data without taking that into consideration. Using ten people with ten different hearing curves and different thresholds for different things is not often discussed at all. Definitive results mean that the group all could hear the difference and identify it with a predetermined amount of consistency. Random results, however, could have at least three different causalities that I can think of:

a) the test setup was screwed up
b) the sonic differences were audible by only a portion of the group, due to different thresholds of audibility
c) there were no sonic differences explaining "guess" accuracy

But what if (in a group of ten say) you have a couple of guys that are CONSISTENTLY getting far better than guess accuracy? If you melt their individual results into a large enough group, the potential is there to miss out on something. If EVERYONE is getting guess accuracy consistency that's one matter. But with ten tests, and ten guys, and you get two guys that score consistently higher or higher on specific tests, they may well have different thresholds of audibility than the other participants. It may even be "training" related. What I am saying is that the data needs to be analysed in more than just averages - trends like performance of individual participants would need to be looked at. I think the problem with DBTs (from what i have read about them) is not the test setups per se, but the way the data is analysed and the way the results are published. It's what is inferred by a DBT tests that causes such polarized viewpoints on the subject. Tests are only valuable if they try to answer the right question by providing relevant data.

But to answer your original question, the DBT is no more irrelevant to Person B on System Y than sighted tests and subjective listening impressions would be. Following this logic, this would mean the entire AA community is wasting time discussing audio, since we're all unique listers with unique systems.

As such, you've single-handedly solved the audio riddle, and AA will now be permanently closed.

Nice going! ;)

Cheers,
Presto

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