Are there any audiophile magazines or websites that actually double blind test the products? Sometime in the future I will want to buy a great and moderatly expensive stereo, and it would be useful to know what is actually worth going for.
Double blind test what against what? Would you suggest that the magazines establish “reference components” to compare other systems to?
Beyond purely scientific audio reproduction tests and signal analyses, the determination of which component “sounds best” is subjective. I know many people who immediately glom onto the newest technology, as well as people who would say that nothing beats a high end phonograph and tube amplifier.
There might be some independent sites that do double blind tests (DBTs). But there’s really no incentive for a magazine to do them. Audiophile magazines derive a large part of their income through advertising, and performing DBTs would only serve to piss off some other advertising clients.
[IMHO]
Besides, DBTs are pretty much useless for evaluating most audiophile components. Technology has advanced to the point where it is next to impossible to hear differences between amplifiers, CD players, and cables. For all practical purposes, all high quality amplifiers, signal sources, and cables are transparent to 99.99% of listeners when operated within specifications. Any difference you might hear during a DBT is very likely due to systematic errors in the testing, such as mismatched loading and signal levels.
The only time comparison testing is of value is when comparing speakers.
[/IMHO]
If you have to depend on someone else’s evaluation to tell you if a stereo sounds good or not does it really matter?
I have to agree with Crafter man that you probably won’t find any detectable difference in most electronic components and whatever speakers you choose will sound different in your flat than they do in Julian Hirsch’s listening room.
Does he still write for Stereo Review?
Hirsch retired a few years back, but contributed occasionally for a while.
Stereo Review itself is no more, having changed it’s name (and to a degree, it’s mission statement) to Sound & Vision a couple of years ago. They are no longer focusing on audio, but rather on audio and video, mostly to the tune of home theater systems. I finally let my subscription lapse last year after over 20 years.
For my money, Stereo Review was the most unbiased of the lot. I had a lot of respect for Hirsch and the crew.
Tom Noussaine (sp?) was a semi-regular contributor to SR and some of the others, and is a great voice of reason in the audio discussion groups and magazines. He has done double blind tests on amps, CD players, tuners, etc. Search out his articles for good solid equipment reviews.
Also check out newsgroups rec.audio.high-end and rec.audio,tech for good discussions by many people in the know, and a few total dipsticks.
Well, it’s not like you have the ability to listen to all the different equipment before you buy it, so reviews is an easy way to narrow down your choices.
Those magazines also tend to review mainly on features and lab tests, and then throw in some anecdotal data from the writer that’s presented as such.
Far more likely you can listen to all the candidate speakers in the stores than for magazines to have reviewed all of them in recent issues with subjective reviews. Aside from annual buyer’s guides which are nothing more than a spreadsheed of basic specifications from manufacturers they can only review a small number of items in detail per year.
Yea, you can go in a store and listen to all the speakers. But it won’t be a valid test unless you bring a SPL meter with you.
Each speaker has an efficiency rating (a.k.a. sensitivity rating). This rating has nothing to do with sound quality; it’s just an efficiency rating.
Let’s say you hook up two speakers to an A-B speaker selector switch:
Speaker A: A very high quality ($5000) speaker with an efficiency rating of 88 dB/W/m
Speaker B: A $100 speaker (that you bought from a guy driving a white van) with an efficiency rating of 91 dB/W/m
You hook the selector switch to the output of an amplifier, then you play some music through a CD player.
You switch between A and B.
I can guarantee you most people will think speaker B is “better.” Why? Because it will be louder than speaker A. Most people will subconsciously associate “louder” with “better.”
In order to compare two different sets of speakers, you must adjust the amplifier’s gain so that they have the same SPL. This is because different sets of speakers will have different efficiency ratings, and efficiency has nothing to do with sound quality.