I think you're dodging the more pressing question. Obviously the listener will be more familiar with their own home. Why is Harman's approach incorrect? Or why will it produce results that can't be trusted?
I understand that yours may be more pressing but you didn't reply to mine. I don't think that Harman's A/B/X approach incorrect, only that it is insuficient to characterise audible performance, just as the Spinorama on its own is insuficient to characterise measured performance.
If you read the paper or listen to Lund's talks you'll note that the consumer is brought up only a few time, and then only as a sort of goal. What he does address about openly and at length is that certain acoustic phenomena become consciously audible once you are familiar with them (like the point about linguistic phonemes). The link I quoted was to another psychoacoustic study altogether. I just wanted you to have a non-Harman source making the general point that listener reliability is different and that subjects have to be assessed that way as part of the research. It's great insight to for research to clearly state why a certain subject performs poorly, since that would suggest how to make someone perform better. Familiarity with listening circumstances, which you emphasize heavily, I think for personal reasons rather than reasons found in Lund's paper, is a smaller part of the equation than the recognition of audible phenomena and the work it takes to do so well.
Toole sometimes addressed manufacturers, sometimes consumers. His output is very large. His book specifically is meant both for professionals and anyone interested.
The anyone interested is valid for both Lund's and Toole's.
I think you're missing his specifics in favour of the general point. The paper is not written to support long listening sessions as methods of assessment in lieu of measurements.
I never said that I support long listening sessions as methods of assessment in lieu of anything. I merely pointed out that they could be complementary to ABX (and by extension listening to complement measurements in case of speakers).
Point taken (link
here for others). I was wrong there. But, the only way that statement works to your end is if you take it in isolation, where it could refer to any old audiophile.
Again your words not mine. Anyone can perform A/B/X, anyone can perform long-term listening assessment. In both cases the trained listener will perform better.
The topic of that paragraph was already excellent mastering engineers and the time it took them to gain that excellence. And I still don't think the paper supports your next point, which looks like your central argument:
This has been the audiophile method for a long time.
I disagree. From what I observed over 15 years of participating in forums in different languages and countries is that most people do not perform objective critical listening assessment from an observationist perspective. What they, and many reviewers do is tasting sessions or preference evaluations.
I don't think excellent hearing comes without a good understanding of the underlying phenomena or gear.
I agree that listening training is crucial, as is technical understanding. I use listening to the best of my abilities to identify issues and by correlating this with available measurements I then try to identify possible causes that can be addressed with an upgrade.
Somewhat related, one of the foundational texts in modern singing was Richard Miller's The Structure of Singing, which combined anatomy with traditional musicology and vocal techniques. The book begins by criticizing traditional approaches which favor a loose vocabulary and unclear or inconsistent methods, and produce poorer singers than if they were informed by a personal knowledge of the actions between throat, lungs, stomach and so on. Adele's technique, self-taught, caused her to have surgery multiple times. By analogy, Lund's example is that professionals who sometimes listen to music 8 hours or more a day undergo fatigue (wherein their decisions become worse) and eventually hearing damage. Some knowledge of the hearing system is sure to prevent it, like how to set levels and why mixing decisions have to be understood in the context of a certain level.
The perceptually self-sufficient approach seems anything but that. It requires other people to figure out how sound works, from physics to biophysics to psychophysics. But as we've seen it's possible to develop whole narratives based on what you don't know without ever feeling the urge to look something up.
I agree. The more I learn about the science the better I understand my limitations as human and which/why some measureable effects and issues are audible and others aren't. Scientists gather and interpret data in an attempt to explain phenomena; sometimes that interpretation lacks logic (i.e. Toole's interpretation of mono vs. stereo sound quality). Toole & Olive's research is ripe with words like "tend", "can", "likely", "may", "should", "seems to imply" or "persuasive evidence points to", yet it is often taken as gospel.
Listening fatigue is one of the criticisms often made of A/B comparisons, certainly one that I make.
I find those comparisons tedious and avoid them when possible. When I tried the Philips Golden Ear challenge I gave up when I passed silver level. Couldn't stand listening to that tune(s?) any longer, nor spend any single minute of my time striving to find audible differences.
Echoic memory duration makes matters worse because one is forced to concentrate for a very limited amount of time many times.
I would expect training to make one more resilient and also improve our focus on the matter at hand.
I remember strugling to hear differences between high bit-rate mp3 and 16/44.1 iirc. (I suspect that their choice of track was partly to be blamed)
The big one had a big display I could read from across the room. Not so with the small one. I literally have to get down on my knees to read the display on the small one. To the extent budget is not a limitation, there is a good market for higher end products with better usability, nicer looks, pride of ownership, etc.
