The sighted listening effect (SLE) is stronger than most people are likely to accept without it being proven to them personally via experimental participation. Hence the never-ending resistance online...because so few people will have that opportunity to experience it personally in a validly constructed experiment.
As you know, I have conducted plenty of blind tests, and I am personally familiar with the experience of my sighted impressions being undermined by the blind test results.
Everything I say on the matter of evaluating gear comes with the caveats that bias effects could be playing a role.
If the Chinese speaker had the rising response, it would be unsurprising if it were described in sighted listening comparisons as relatively tinny, sharp, and anaemic in the bass, whereas the audiophile speaker might be described as solid and smooth with high liquidity and musicality.
In other words, even in your own attempt at an anecdote, the essential differences between the Sonic profile of those loudspeakers could be perceived, even if the preference is spun differently.
After all if speakers measuring differently like that had no predictive value whatsoever as to how the sound would be perceived… again…. What’s the relevance measure measurements?
That is the order of magnitude of SLE strength that we need to account for. To pretend that we can be immune to it is wishful thinking. Maybe even denialism.
None of this has anything to do with being immune to the “SLE.”
It has to do with the fact that in every day life we’re not able to evaluate things under scientific conditions, and so we have to understand what type of tentative conclusions are reasonable to draw under lower confidence levels.
Unbalanced scepticism about informal listening impressions, taken to an extreme, ruling out people usefully communicating about hearing similar sonic properties, looks more like denialism.
It becomes like fixating on examples from the science of optical illusions to conclude it’s never reasonable to draw inferences using our sight in every day life.
At one point you really do have to start to put together a coherent epistemology on this, that doesn’t look like you are “ appealing to optical illusions to wave away the reasonableness of anybody referencing their sighted impressions.”
So for instance, if you’ve paid attention to Erin’s reviews you could notice how his informal listening impressions before he measures lined up quite well usually with the measurements in terms of dispersion characteristics, imaging character characteristics, frequency response profiles, etc.
Now, if you and Erin sat down and listened to the B&W and Talon speakers depicted earlier, how likely or not do you think it that Erin would be able to articulate certain differences in sonic character between the two, that you would recognize in what you perceive as well?
Is it your view that even in this case, it would have to be a total crapshoot and you’d have no expectation of perceiving anything like the same thing?
If so, again that has some pretty strange consequences for the relevance of any speaker measurements at all in terms of how speakers are normally used by listeners.
