No, ASR and its ilk take psychoacoustic s very seriously, and that’s why we are skeptical...nay pedantic..about Separating what is audible sound and the horribly muddled world of subjective listener perception.
The market measures preference, not *strictly audible qualities”. People don’t like expensive wristwatches because they tell time better, and people don’t like high end audio strictly because it *sounds better*. There are lots of markets where successful products aren’t best suited to task. And that is what is important to us, and what we expect when people say “it sounds better, and I can hear it”.
It’s interesting that most of your preceding remarks underscore how important rapid, unsighted, level-matched comparisons are. While reading your description, I couldn’t stop thinking about the actual evidence regarding audio memory. Pay close attention to the part about taking the black box home and inserting it in their own system, and whether that worked better than immediate comparison:
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...ity-and-reliability-of-abx-blind-testing.186/
Furthermore, consider that all of a 0.2db volume change can make a component sound better (Not to mention the Fletcher-Munson loudness changes). Do you think these swapped-in components level-matched?
When people compare without scientific control, over long periods of time, they open themselves up to these biases of bling, expectation, as well as the issues of variable gain, mood, situation, and positioning.
When I read your words with these facts in mind, it almost sounds like you are talking yourself into the ASR point of view.
We should not dress up subjective preference as if it were automatically an audible improvement in accuracy of the equipment. More often than not, it isn’t. We want to know what is *strictly audible*. And once we do, we are, indeed, amused by the ways we humans fool ourselves. Although people are more than welcome to their preferences. After all, most people look at their equipment, right between the speakers (agains advice) while they listen. that must be meaningful.
But we certainly shouldn’t give credence or status to unscientific nonsense claims by high end manufacturers. That is a bridge too far.
