ABX tests - required or rejected?

[jkeny]

They were very statiscally valid - and clearly demonstrated I could not hear a difference in most cases. The lone exception was a comparison between a new $9000 Levinson amp (don’t recall the model number) and a used $700 Bryston 4B. The Bryston was the far superior amp for my speakers (Dunlavy SC-VI’s). Nothing subtle about the differences - and they were level matched. And not at all surprising was that prior to blind testing when listening sited, the shiny new and cool looking Levinson sounded better than the beat up Bryston!

Was it a preference AB test you did or a difference ABX test?

 

[the sound of Tao]

I was preparing a post on a similar line - A/B or A/B/X are just methods of comparative listening, that can be carried independently of time. Did you get results that were statistically valid in your blind tests?

Microstrip, I’d have thought that comparative listening was absolutely contingent upon the expectation of being able to carry some kind of continuously conscious perception through time. Comparing would require a perceptual thread linking what is remembered as perceived with what is currently perceived. These are just notions I suppose.

Piaget’s notion of sharp change of perceptual state in many ways challenges any simple model or map of perception but certainly the notion that we are sufficiently constant in awareness to then in any way objectively map shifts in perception may well reduce us rather than enhance us at any rate. If this comparing is viewed as a linear thread of experience then it is I suppose fundamentally needing to be anchored in both temporal and spatial continuities. The expected organisation of perceptions along a base of a timeline is perhaps a comfortable assumption that could very well be every much a created perception as any expectation bias.

Without getting too trippy we are travelling along the boundaries of the conceptual notions of phenomenology with the idea of protension, perception and retention being viewed as potentially overlapping perceptual states and also shared points and the notion that the changepoints in the state of what is still recently perceived to what is currently perceived and then what is expected to be perceived can also then perhaps be blurred by an apparent bounce in experience rather than a sequence with perception viewed in some ways more as a bubble to be travelled in rather than our perception as some single point travelling along a line through time. Music itself is a string of correlations that can be experienced in a range of ways or states and change in music clearly can effect change in our perceptual state.

Even colourations like expectation bias could be viewed in some ways as every bit as real or valid as any other listening perception (certainly I’d suggest it is if subjectivity is the actual anchor of experience) and so any expectation can be a sizeable and concrete part of our recent, current and future realities... and perhaps not even necessarily in that order.