"I had a long conversation during the show with Thorsten Loesch of Abbington Musical Research and IFI. He told me a fascinating story about confirmation bias. That’s when you are so sure of something that even strong evidence to the contrary will not persuade you to change your mind.
Thorsten put together a blind ABX testing where he told participants it was a comparison of two power cables. But when he went behind the curtains, ostensibly to change the power cable, what he actually did was switch the speaker cables on one channel, so the system was playing out of phase. Thorsten had three different types of audiophiles take his test: subjectivists, objectivists, and those who were neither. The subjectivists and neutral listeners heard the effects of the system being thrown out of phase. The objectivists heard no differences. It was a robust test with clearly correlated results.
And how noticeable is having one speaker’s channel out of phase with the other? Ten years ago, at CES I entered a room with an “All Digital System” that had all the DACs and electronics in the loudspeakers. I listened for about ten seconds, then I turned to the gentleman who was giving the presentation and told him, “One of your channels is out of phase with the other.” He told me that was impossible since all the connections were hard-wired. I thanked him and left. A day later he caught me in the hall and explained that indeed one channel had been mis-wired out of phase.
The fact that the objectivists in Thorsten’s test were the ones who were so set in their opinions that it blinded them to the aural facts in front of their ears is a delicious irony. Why? Because those audiophiles who embrace ABX testing with the most fervor are those who believe most strongly in effects of expectation bias, which is why sighted testing is, in their eyes, flawed. Thorsten’s test indicates a strong tendency for objectivists to listen with closed ears whether the test is blind or sighted, which isn’t very objective, is it? "
www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/rmaf-2018-digital/
What do you think of this?
Thorsten put together a blind ABX testing where he told participants it was a comparison of two power cables. But when he went behind the curtains, ostensibly to change the power cable, what he actually did was switch the speaker cables on one channel, so the system was playing out of phase. Thorsten had three different types of audiophiles take his test: subjectivists, objectivists, and those who were neither. The subjectivists and neutral listeners heard the effects of the system being thrown out of phase. The objectivists heard no differences. It was a robust test with clearly correlated results.
And how noticeable is having one speaker’s channel out of phase with the other? Ten years ago, at CES I entered a room with an “All Digital System” that had all the DACs and electronics in the loudspeakers. I listened for about ten seconds, then I turned to the gentleman who was giving the presentation and told him, “One of your channels is out of phase with the other.” He told me that was impossible since all the connections were hard-wired. I thanked him and left. A day later he caught me in the hall and explained that indeed one channel had been mis-wired out of phase.
The fact that the objectivists in Thorsten’s test were the ones who were so set in their opinions that it blinded them to the aural facts in front of their ears is a delicious irony. Why? Because those audiophiles who embrace ABX testing with the most fervor are those who believe most strongly in effects of expectation bias, which is why sighted testing is, in their eyes, flawed. Thorsten’s test indicates a strong tendency for objectivists to listen with closed ears whether the test is blind or sighted, which isn’t very objective, is it? "
www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/rmaf-2018-digital/
What do you think of this?
