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In Reply to: Re: Jeff... posted by Mahatma Kane Jeeves on December 13, 2006 at 06:53:50:
If you look at what I've said so far, you'll see I agree with you and even mentioned many of these things in my own postings.Apparently the point of my story wasn't obvious, so I'll put it more directly.
On the one hand, Jeff's anecdote shows clearly why uncontrolled experiments are useless. On the other hand, he asks us to take his word, given his uncontrolled self-tests, that he can hear absolute polarity like "duck soup".
There are two very distinct issues here. The first is the audibility of absolute polarity, which is a given and not in question. The second is the credibility of audiophile claims and the robustness of their methods (or lack thereof).
There is a profound logical fallacy here, which is that if scientific testing shows some effect is audible, then every time an audiophile claims to hear this effect, the perception must be valid.
This doesn't follow at all. The world is awash in examples of how valid scientific results are misconstrued and offered as proof of all kinds of fallacious claims. And other cases where valid claims are discounted because of misconstrued "scientific controversy".
The story is intended to show the absurdity of making a claim on the basis of a test in which the data are unknown. In this case, the "correct" polarity of a recording.
I often read about how audiophiles like Clark Johnson instantly identify the correct polarity of a recording, but I never see how they determine what the correct polarity is.
Maybe absolute polarity is quite audible, but perhaps sometimes the "correct" polarity sounds better and other times it actually sounds worse. Maybe the "better" sounding polarity isn't always the one that most accurately captures the sound of the original performance.
Or maybe it is.
Without careful controls, these anecdotal reports are meaningless. It's not harming anyone, but you can't look seriously and objectively at these claims and draw any firm conclusions, when the people doing these experiments don't even know whether or not the polarity on the recordings is correct in the first place...
No doubt, proper experiments have been done. Again (and again, and again) that's NOT the point I'm trying to make here, in this context.
-Henry
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Follow Ups
- Re: Jeff... - Henry Pasternack 07:58:14 12/13/06 (0)
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