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Re: The Inquisition Continues

>This was the point of the parable I related at the HE2005 debate,
>reprinted at www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/705awsi.
>The differences between the amplifiers under test had not been
>detected by the formal blind test but had been under normal, >sighted, longer-term listening.

Your little parable demonstrates that detectable differences are not the sole criteria for long term satisfaction of any given device, I can think of a very good example that captured the public interest in the UK. Volkswagen was gearing up to re-launch the Skoda in UK, In the consumer clinic, the car performed excellently until the test clinic subjects were made aware of the brand, needless to say it was downhill from there on. No matter how you cut it, once the identity of the object under test is known, expectation bias becomes an unavoidable skewing factor. If it were not the case, getting reliable results will simply be a matter of conducting blind tests immediately after sighted tests (where valid differences were reported) and the results of the blind test will correlate with the results of the sighted tests, however that is opposite of what is widely obtained in these tests. Expectation bias depends on a priori knowledge, a priori knowledge is always present in a sighted test.

Music making the painting, recording it the photograph

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