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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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In Reply to: John Atkinson's Rebuttal of Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" posted by bjh on April 22, 2006 at 10:49:11:
I believe that we get hung up on this issue of DBT because we are discussing things about the scientific paradigm that philosophers and thinkers have gotten behind decades ago.DBT should not be proposed as a scientific means to assess the superiority of a component (that is obviously impractical in most cases), but, quite the opposite to what I've read postulated here, it should be used as a way to reduce the number of variables at play and hence the potential for error in a recognizedly subjective evaluation. For instance, professional wine evaluations, whether DBT or not, are not science nor do they claim to be. But they certainly reduce the potential judgemental "error" due to extraneous variables (eg. the wine label, the brand or model in the case of audio, which can be somewhat neutralized with DBT). By the way, these tests are rarely "double blind", and usually "single blind" (tasters know a new wine is coming).
So I suggest we forget this whole discussion about science. If not, we need to recognize that DBT, whether practical or not, is the ONLY way of conducting listening tests that could conceivably have any scientific value (think about the all-important placebo in medical tests). Which is why audio science usually relies on other things such as measurements and inference from what we know about human hearing.
These considerations aside, if DBT were practically feasible it could be really useful to increase our understanding of what a component is doing to the chain. Yet I agree that DBT has a limited practical applicability for a number of reasons:
1. In the case of very small differences in sound quality (eg. most amplifier tests), for listeners to confirm and report their preferences may require listening to many musical sources over an extended period of time. Differences can be heard right away but it takes a while to decide which is preferred as more natural. Few real world DBT tests can properly deal with this situation.
2. I suspect listeners can become confused by DBT to the point of reacting psycologically and corrupting the results of the test. For instance when unable to recognize preference patterns or to discriminate between components, many listeners may simply report haphazard results.
3. For many types of components creating a DBT can be very costly (eg. speakers).
4. A DBT would have to allow listeners to go back to the live music reference periodically within the test to avoid phenomena such as settling down with a particular unrealistic sound pattern. This is a pretty obvious problem in normal reviewing with people and critics who do not regularly listen to live, unamplified music. Acoustic memory is tricky, even when you have something to remember.
5. DBT would only be valid for immediate equipment comparisons and not for overall rankings, for the same reason discussed above.
On the other hand I believe DBT would be very useful to asess the effects of certain components, such as cables. I wish some audio magazine had the guts to at least try and do a real DBT cable test using their top cable advertisers (wink). A test could be constructed using mainstream electronics, or even varying some of the electronics. Many tweaks could be tested in this way with minimum cost.
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Follow Ups
- DBT and science - hexenboden 21:19:31 04/27/06 (2)
- Re: DBT and science - bjh 07:46:59 04/28/06 (1)
- Audio politics - hexenboden 08:15:26 04/28/06 (0)
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