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RE: Obvious differences, blind tests and white lies

It isn't necessarily a matter of intention. It's a matter of perception and if one wants to be serious about understanding what one is hearing it is necessary to study what is known about how the human mind works. The mind does a good job of keeping most people alive most of the time, at least until they can reproduce and raise their children, but this includes making snap judgments that don't necessarily stand up in the light of careful investigation.

Any audio engineer who isn't a liar will admit that he has "optomized" the equalization on a recording by careful tweaking of the controls and noticed a large improvement in sound, only to discover after the fact the the component had been inadvertently "bypassed" and all of his knob tweaking had no effect other than as a placebo. No intentions here, just faulty perception. Sometimes it works the other way. I made a change in 16 bit dithering due to cockpit error on my part but didn't hear any change from the day before because I was convinced there were none. That was until my friend who didn't know that "nothing" had changed remarked on the difference. After listening again I noticed what I had missed and verified that indeed the sound had changed. (This comes under the rubic of a "triple blind" experiment where the experimenter didn't even know he was conducting an experiment.)

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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  • RE: Obvious differences, blind tests and white lies - Tony Lauck 13:41:22 03/26/12 (0)

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