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The best way to do a preference based blind test

Posted by RGA on March 28, 2022 at 18:57:43:
Would be to first attack the extreme ends of audio and get relatively unbiased listeners.

So you take out two hotel rooms of identical size and are deemed "good" rooms in terms of mirroring the average home-sized living room.

Room A: Has the best measuring gear that no one would question as being deemed good measuring - so the speakers where JA says something like "this is great engineering" ditto for amplifiers and say a CD player - whatever the best measuring SS amp/CD player that has ever existed.

All this in room A.

Room B has some well liked system with bad measuring amplifiers TUUUUBES or SETs(to make it even worse) then with well reviewed well liked speakers that don't measure too well and the worst measuring CD players (Non Oversampling with TUUUUUBES - gee sounds like Audio Note - but whatever - a horn etc.

Then you black out the two rooms such that no one can see the stereo - you play at say 75dB at the listening chair. The same CD playing the same music in both rooms on repeat.

You go to the local university - you get 30 students in the music program who are young enough to still be able to hear stuff properly.

You pay them $40 and offer a free lunch over several days - one at a time they listen to the two rooms as much as they like - they each have a card - they each drop the card in the box of the room they felt resembled real music.

The reason these tests are not done is in the end they will still only tell you what other people heard and in those systems in those rooms.

Let's say the scoring after such tests were 25-5. That still doesn't help you because for all you know you hear it like one of the 5. The stats can tell you'd be more 'likely' to like one system over the other but that's about as useful as movies.

93% of the critics recommended Power of the Dog - I did not. 93% of listeners can like a Paradigm speaker - I am meh.