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RE: Funny thing

I've found the same thing of objectivists, though. For example, when someone asked on Hydrogen Audio whether someone had ABX'd DAC's, they were told, no, it wasn't necessary because there's no audible difference. They were violating their own famous TOS.

In truth, I haven't found the huge conflict between subjective and objective conclusions that some others have. Just about everything short of exotic cables and Tice clock-type nonsense can and has been successfully ABX'd -- power amps, op amps, high definition digital.

Not that I haven't seen the kind of silliness to which you referred. A recent example being the claim in TAS that two bit identical files sound different, something that can only happen if the listeners are on drugs, or there's something wrong with their experiment. When I read something of that sort, I conclude that a reviewer isn't credible.

On the other hand, there are some reviewers who in my experience consistently report the same sonic effects that I heard on equipment with which I'm intimately familiar. When a critic does that, it gives me faith that we're both hearing something real. HP would be an example of a critic who has done that repeatedly, even with very subtle phenomena that I was familiar with from long familiarity with equipment I owned. And many of these phenomena wouldn't show up on an ABX test of practical length. (Arnie over at Hydrogen is the only ABX'er I know of who does a solid job of mitigating these flaws in the ABX test, by, for example, listening to components for a long time *before* ABX'ing them so he knows what to listen for.)

I typically find online comments more problematic than published reviews, because I haven't had an opportunity to calibrate the poster. It's a bit frustrating, really, since nine times out of ten, people say completely contradictory things, often I suspect as a consequence of different conditions and associated equipment. I think it's also true that most of us tend to be less than systematic about our auditions, e.g., we'll change two things at once and then not be sure which of them is responsible for a change. (I do that all the time :-| )

Also, I'm a big believer in blind testing. Not ABX'ing, which I find too confusing with complex audio signals, but just blind comparisons. There's solid experimental evidence that even if you have ears like a bat and years of professional experience, you're subject to confirmation bias when deciding which component is better. For example, Harman found that even audio engineers who considered themselves immune to such things consistently ranked a cheap-looking speaker more highly against expensive-looking speakers when they couldn't see it than when they could.

When people listen blind, they'll often tell you that they're surprised that they can't hear a difference between two things that seemed as different as night and day (hello, exotic cables), or that differences that they thought were major are still there, but much subtler (hello, power amps).

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