Here is an example of one (self-admitted) non-technical guy not being able to show a statistically significant difference between USB cables in two different blind tests, then making up stories of why that happened, and finally declaring that blind tests are as fallible as sighted tests and even as measurements since "stuff happens that we do not know, like a brain region lighting up on MRI when the subject is exposed to ultrasonic content" (scroll to 9:45 or so into the video):
Blind Testing USB Cables - A discussion of what went wrong
In another video, which I currently cannot locate, the same dude was comparing 16- and 24-bit recordings played by a DAC, captured by an ADC (RME, as I recall), than lining them up manually in Audacity software by eyeballing zoomed-in samples, inverting one of the waveforms, summing them up and, voila, Sting was playing in the difference signal. Which is exactly what I believe @amirm was talking about when he discussed the need to sync the DAC and ADC clocks, normalize volume, and use software like DeltaWave to automatically time-align captured signals at the subsample level.
The moral of those stories: an "objie-wannabe subie" with tools but no in-depth knowledge is actually more misleading than a plain "poet subie" without tools. Unfortunately, tools are becoming more affordable, so if the current ASR-inspired trend to include "measurements" in "subie" reviews continues, we can expect "subies" to make even more damage.
Blind Testing USB Cables - A discussion of what went wrong
In another video, which I currently cannot locate, the same dude was comparing 16- and 24-bit recordings played by a DAC, captured by an ADC (RME, as I recall), than lining them up manually in Audacity software by eyeballing zoomed-in samples, inverting one of the waveforms, summing them up and, voila, Sting was playing in the difference signal. Which is exactly what I believe @amirm was talking about when he discussed the need to sync the DAC and ADC clocks, normalize volume, and use software like DeltaWave to automatically time-align captured signals at the subsample level.
The moral of those stories: an "objie-wannabe subie" with tools but no in-depth knowledge is actually more misleading than a plain "poet subie" without tools. Unfortunately, tools are becoming more affordable, so if the current ASR-inspired trend to include "measurements" in "subie" reviews continues, we can expect "subies" to make even more damage.