The above has been generally understood for decades if not more like half a century or more. The controversy has been over what constitutes such a being, and how such beings might come into existence.
It certainly has been decades seeing how ITU BS1116 recommendations has been around for many years. The question then is how come when DIY tests such as Meyer and Moran are done, there are no trained listeners in the group. And there is no training material to familiarize the testers with the flaws and use that screen out people who do not have critical listening skills.
Here is you in the debate thread on this topic:
Well trained ears exist and of course there are a lot of people of all ages with damaged hearing. The idea that there are people with hearing that is orders of magnitude better than that of most people with undamaged hearing and adequate preparation has never developed a lot of experienced-based traction. If you understand how the ears work, they are like the rest of the human body - there are definite limits that aren't that hard to run into during testing.
The last sentence is completely opposed to accepting the notion of expert listeners. The training is not about how the ear works. It is about how the brain works. My ears did not change from prior to being trained to after being a trained just a short few months later. Neither did the "rest of the human body." Yet, my ability to hear small distortions grew exponentially more than non-trained listeners. Witness the 320 kbps MP3 test I post yesterday. Most people can't tell the difference between MP3 and original at 128 kbps. As such, they won't have any ability to hear artifacts in 320 kbps.
I am not saying these things to brag. It simply is a fact that a trained listener, like a trained doctor, can do better than others. Just because you are "human" and have a pair of ears, it doesn't mean you are fit for this task.
Here is you again on this topic:
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/91-au...curate-sound-reproduction-3.html#post22028401
Which just points out that both golden ears and golden brains don't exist. The human body has finite limits, many of which we already know.
I think it is only now, after seeing the results of these tests that we have acceptance of training mattering. And the need for critical listeners in such tests.
But sure, if we are in agreement let's see the list of DBT ABX tests that employed trained listeners in the artifacts they were testing. Do you have any Arny?
Historically, there have been a striking lack of objective means that were used to establish whether or not a certain individual was a trained listener, and for what? Most so-called trained listeners were self-appointed and allegedly proved their mettle by means of sighted evaluations.
So what? A lot of people claim to be audio experts on forums. I don't see anyone rallying to get them all banned from these discussions. On the contrary, totally unqualified people who have never done a single one of these tests in the industry or research, run around and repeat conclusions from tests whose conditions they don't understand.
Ditto. A key requirement for positive results in ABX tests is the existence of an actual audible difference.
That is circular logic Arny. If you know there is actual audible difference then why bother doing the test? It makes no sense to say that.
Since the previous gold standard for listening evaluations was the totally-flawed sighted evaluation method, there has been a lot of confusion about what constitutes an audible difference. Scientists who had been doing reliable listening tests for the better part of a century knew, but audiophiles and audio practitioners had been largely kept in the dark.
Changing the topic to sighted evaluations is a misdirection that is so obvious that we better not resort to it, lest we want to appear to be without answers in the current discussion which is double blind testing with computer control. Double blind tests are not in trial. What is on trial is unskilled people creating and running them.
But yes, you are right that DIY tests by a group of audiophiles can be full of errors because they are not "scientists" (whatever that means in this context). Without any experience in finding small differences, they run headlong into such tests and creating invalid results. Unfortunately upstanding citizens including yourself run with those results if it agrees with their point of view in audio. Witness how you said you had run blind tests and you didn't find people telling the difference between 32 Khz sampling and higher. Even non-trained listeners easily passed that test as reported in the debate thread. That invalidates your testing then, does it not?
