Hello, I have always thought, even before starting to read about ASR, that the only way to choose my audio correctly is to blindly test the various components without being influenced by preconceptions.
Recently, however, I have also had some doubts, if there really exist nuances that we cannot grasp in instant ABX but that could have long-term influence in listening? I'm not asking because I'm against science, but on the contrary, because I like to check every statement.
I therefore thought of a possible ABX test of the ABX tests, let's take it for granted that if we cannot distinguish two songs performed with some difference in ABX obviously we must consider them equivalently for us, and therefore adding various modifications, each of them not differentiable in ABX, the result should always be the same.
Let's start from the listening file, take a good file in flac and compare in ABX with gradually worse lossy files (mp3 320, 256, 125, 96 etc ...) and find out which is the first file in which we can distinguish the difference and let's go to the next higher step (if we can see the difference in the mp3 at 256, we will take the mp3 320 as a good file for the test)
We pass to the next level, the transmission of the file to a dac, I used or as a reference the cable and then we test the bluetooth ldac 990, then aptx HD, then apts / aac then sbc, also in this case we identify the level at which we can hear the difference and we go to the next step, if we hear difference with aptx hd then we will take LDAC as protocol for the test.
Let's go to the Dac, we will use a definitely transparent dac and then we will gradually try less performing dacs until we get to the poorest and worst measured converters from a few euros that are found on amazon, also here the same procedure, we will use the poorest among the unrecognizable ones.
Finally we go to the amp, starting with something that is certainly excellent (perhaps a hypex module) and gradually descending among the many small amps that many of us surely have at home, arriving at the worst implementation of TDA 7498 or similar.
At this point we create a listening chain that has everything at the highest level (flac file, cable connection, transparent dac, top amplifier) and on the other side the chain with all the poorest elements but that I cannot identify in abx (mp3 320kbs, ldac, 45 euro nobsound dac, breeze amp with tpa3116d2 .... For example) and we send everything to the same speakers used for the other single tests.
At that point we proceed to the real test, accumulating all these differences, are the two listening chains still indistinguishable? If yes, then we can be reasonably sure our abx tests are worth it, but what if we could feel the difference? We should take into consideration the possibility that there are nuances that we cannot immediately or individually grasp but which add up to make an audible difference. At that point what should we do
Do you think it makes sense? Could you try?