Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

---

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Propeller Head Plaza ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Re: The Problem With DBT's, ABX's & "Measured Performance"

Posted by tomservo (M) on May 18, 2006 at 09:01:27

In Reply to: The Problem With DBT's, ABX's & "Measured Performance" posted by thetubeguy1954 on May 18, 2006 at 08:05:36:

Hi

Same ans as below.
Your brain is what process all the sensory inputs and delivers an understandable reality out of these senses.
The processing power of ones brain is quite amazing, for example a person is able to “hear” a conversation taking place across a noisy room, this is known as the cocktail party effect.
Your brain delivers an understandable conversation because it can fill in a lot of blanks where parts of a word are missing of masked, you know what the words sound like after all. Your brain also uses visual inputs, if ones vision is blocked, it is much harder to understand than when you can also see. Your brain also uses the posture and mouth movements to help infer what was missing.

The fact is that unless one blocks all the senses but the one under test, one is unavoidably including inputs from all the senses AND like with words, what you expect to hear.
In audio a simple example to ones ears being wrong would be with subwoofers.
If one auditions subwoofers at an equal loudness with a impulsive signal like a Kick drum, the one that wins is usually the one which has the higher low cutoff and /or the greater harmonic distortion.
Why? Your ears expect to hear a kick drum, the sub woofer is actually only suppose to produce the lowest part of it.
The sub which fill in the most missing parts (that it makes up as harmonic distortion) sounds the most like a kick drum.
Add the subwoofer to a complete system and the one with more distortion muddies up the midbass and mid range with the same self generated crap.

You ears can be fooled they are often “looking for something”, you often have an agenda.
When you take a hearing test, you get the best results by closing your eyes and focussing on what you hear.
In addition to the test tone, they specifically do not have a light come on with the tone, or establish a rhythm to the test, or have any other clues BECAUSE they are testing you ears alone.
The same as when you know which is lamp cord and which is $800.00 meter speaker cable, having the light come on WITH the tone will make your hearing acuity seem to be much more impressive than it actually is.

This gets us to your premise, which is I think dead on, if you don’t test “without prior knowledge”, your using a lot more than ears.
If your talking about what you can hear, one must accept how the human sense work as a system and then remove all inputs but the pressure changes detectable in your ears.
Best,

Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---