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Listening Tests and how length of time spent listening alters perception ex.

3db

3db

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I grew up on a farm nestled near the top of Steve's Mountain in NB. The house was so old it still had a water cistern in the basement on top of a dirt floor. Electricity was clearly an after thought when it was installed. Insulation if any was rock wool blown in behind slats covered with horse hair and plaster. To say the house was cold in the winter time was an understatement. Without slippers, my feet would get so cold they hurt. The house was barely warm enough to keep the water from freezing in the pipes when temperatures dipped into the -30s C without the wind. Sitting on top of the mountain meant there was always wind. Sorry for the preamble but I needed it to set the stage.

Well one day, the furnace konked out and my parents sent us over to the next door neighbours to keep warm and out of their way so they could fix the furnace and bring heat back into the house. After playing outside with the neighbour's kids, we headed inside to watch black and white TV. I was between 6 & 7 at the time and had no clue about audio. The first thing I noticed is how different everything sounded from our TV at home. Everything from the fully violent and uncensored Bugs Bunny Cartoons (Mel Blanc deserves a Pulitzer prize!!) to commercials. It struck me as odd that things sounded different because the source material was the same. However, after some time had passed, (I cant remember how much time), everything suddenly sounded the same as the TV at home. Being a kid, I never thought too much about it and just accepted my perception.

My point behind this story is that the human brain is very powerful and will shift or alter your perception of what you are hearing if given time. My immediate perceptions were indeed correct that the the neighbours TV sounded different (for a myriad of reasons which Im not going into) from my TV at home. But after long term listening, it sounded the same. I had no preconceived ideas about audio at the time. Audiophiles always poopoo controlled blind listening tests and one of the reasons they give is that the tests are too short to hear any differences. They require longer listening sessions to hear the differences. That longer time is when the brain steps in and begins to alter the perception of what they are hearing and report it as differences. For me, my brain made the two TVs sound the same.
 
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Yes, there's a lot of psychology involved in listening and system evaluation. The brain tends to even-out frequency response anomalies in the same way it evens out differences in the colour of the light within different rooms. A quick A/B between two different pairs of speakers can show quite striking differences in tonal balance, but in the longer term those differences become less of an issue.
Personally, I find the difference in tonal balance between speakers to be of minor importance. More important is the resolution that good gear can achieve, but even then the brain can fool you. Having heard, for example, some indistinct words on a high-res system, you'll be able to hear them on a low-res system. If you heard them on a low-res system without hearing the high-res system first, you'd struggle to hear those words. The psychology of hearing (and all other senses) is complex stuff.
 
Even discerning high and low resolution components is pretty apt to confusion. I've noticed that with components with peaks in frequencies (obviously this is usually the speakers), you can hear specific details that are clarified (or come to your attention) by being louder - even though only the sounds at those frequencies are clearer, your mind seizes on those moments and extrapolates outward. And after that, when you don't hear those details yelling at you, the impression is of low resolution.
I tend to think that longish term listening, which admittedly does let our minds sort out (or smother or ignore) differences is the only reliable guide, even though our short term startle reaction seems to dominate our judgement.
I have to say that I think the reaction of my wallet is pretty important short and long term, and that I have noticed that I can listen happily to music on all sorts of compromised systems. I like good sound, but I can settle for not terrible sound. I believe I have a good sounding system, but buying new, or even fancy priced used is not to my taste. Of course I put a fair amount of time into looking for audio stuff, so I find things cheap. So things come and go, and I enjoy most of them, but when something special shows up, it tends to stay.
 
Take it to the extreme. If you were to view the world upside down, over time the brain would adapt and you would "see" things right side up.
 
This is the argument used against the "long term listening is the only legitimate way of telling the difference" crowd. You "get used" to (your brain adapts to) the sound of any given system and it thus invalidates your ability to actually hear the differences. That crowd insists they are immune to that kind of "nonsense", however.

Doug
 
With regard to seeing the world upside down, of course that is actually the way you do see it. Our the lens in our eyes acts like a converging lens and the image on our retina is upside down and reversed. And, of course, there is a big blank area in the middle of the image where the blood vessels go through. So our vision, like all of our senses, is highly processed - there isn't any direct apprehension.

It occurs to me that we have all probably noticed that if you taste one wine or beer after another, the initial impression is dominated by the differences between the previous taste and the current taste. That is why people who make their living by tasting (or simply want to make sure they aren't wasting their money when they pay for one vintage rather than another) cleanse their palates with a saltine or water or the like. (Of course, they also spit out the wine lest they get sozzled as they do their tasting - my impression is that this wouldn't go over so big with many listeners.)
This comparison raises (to my mind, at least) some questions: When we do listening tests, does a similar phenomenon occur? I assume it does, since, in my experience which I suspect is normal, differences are accentuated by going from one source to another. But does that initial impression wear away quickly, or does it bias our evaluation for a while? Is that why long term evaluation often disagrees with immediate ones?
I believe it is pretty well accepted that some tasters have excellent memory for tastes, which is why they can make comparisons not only after the short delay of palate cleansing, but with previous taste tests. If this weren't so who would pay for their services? Is there similar agreement about hearing?
(Not to muddy the waters even further, but apparently there have been blind tests of wine tasters which haven't exactly encouraged confidence in at least some of their abilities - there was a test in which the tasters couldn't even tell between red and white, after which the tasters refused to participate in any more blind tests).
 
It's been proven that even the power of suggestion can alter our perceptions. Like others have said, it's complex. It's interesting to talk about and no one can say for sure what goes on when we grow accustomed to sights and sounds.
 
Yes, based on my experience, I think that to some extent the brain can adjust to some differences in sound quality, such as tonal balance. I own approximately 2 dozen amps, and when I begin a listening session with an amp that I haven’t listened to in a while, it will strike me as sounding different. Then, after a while, it sounds “normal”. (Of course, there is a limit to this phenomenon.)

My guess is that this phenomenon is in play to some extent when people talk about a new piece of equipment (or component such as a capacitor) changing sound quality after it “breaks in”. To what extent is the perceived change in sound quality due to changes in electrical properties of a component during "break in", vs. the listener's brain becoming accustomed to the different sound quality of a new component?
 
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grillebilly said:
It's been proven that even the power of suggestion can alter our perceptions. Like others have said, it's complex. It's interesting to talk about and no one can say for sure what goes on when we grow accustomed to sights and sounds.
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^^^ truth
I taught a course in Aural Recognition (Critical listening) to over 2500 students. The whole brain thing is pretty amazing, could suggest that people heard all kinds of things.
 
The whole long-term listening thing started years ago when those who swore they could easily tell the difference between and could identify various amplifiers, consistently "flunked" blind ABX listening tests. They HAD to insist instant ABX blind listening tests were invalid and set about with silly reasons why they were.

There are still those who will insist what I wrote above is not true but that IS what happened.

Doug
 
I was a little intrepid at first to start a thread of this ilk because of the ensuing battle that usually appears on something as controversial as this. I'm an EE by schooling and am in the middle of Dr Floyd Toole's book Sound Reproduction, The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms. I find his book very informative.

@GChief, did your course ever specify the length of time on average that hearing memory remained accurate before becomming undependable?
 
The brain getting used to a stimulus is called "habituation".

I find these discussions that claim limited auditory memory interesting. From my point of view, A/B listening tests have some value - it can quickly help identify some types of difference. Longer listening evaluations are also valuable. It can determine if some short-term positive impressions are misleading, eg. the "excitement" of base can be perceived to be boomy and fatiguing, or upper clarity can be perceived to be harsh in longer listens.

And I can tell the difference between systems, even though I have habituated to them. I can and do listen to my main hifi, the car stereo, and the room radio and can enjoy music on them all. I am aware that my car stereo never has the clarity or resolution of my main hifi. I'm always aware that the table radio doesn't have the clarity, dynamics or frequency response as the car or hifi. I can tell that when I visit friends that their hifi's are not the same quality as my hifi. I'm also aware that in general, the mega-expensive systems I hear at a hifi show are vastly different to my home system. That's because I have an audio memory.
 
I am not claiming all systems sound the same. They don't. However, there will be assignable causes for that. Either components operating outside their linear range or frequency response differences or slew factor differences, etc.

But, if these differences are not identifiable via ABX blind tests, by way of statistics, the components/systems are not different sounding. Otherwise, humans could statistically tell them apart. There would be no reliance on auditory memory.

Doug
 
I remember a Paul Messenger article in HiFi New and Record Review back in the mid 70s, I think a bit before ABX testing was around, when the split between subjectivists and objectivists was not as pronounced as it became soon after, reporting on a test that had found that lighter colored grill lead listeners to think they heard a brighter speaker compared to the same speaker with a dark grill. He also noted that some tests had found that housewives (this was an acceptable category to use back then, and it is, in fact, material to the issue) in test situations couldn't tell the difference between cream of pea soup and cream of mushroom. Obviously, in non test situations, women who cooked would easily be able to differentiate, even if it were soup mixes, so the implication was that there is something about testing - stress, second guessing, or whatever - that itself undermines its usefulness or reliability.

I don't think it is luddite to question whether instantaneous testing is actually a reliable guide to long term satisfaction, but I also think people who reject testing completely are hiding from the possibility that their senses and their memory are much more fallible than they want to think.
 
3db said:
I was a little intrepid at first to start a thread of this ilk because of the ensuing battle that usually appears on something as controversial as this. I'm an EE by schooling and am in the middle of Dr Floyd Toole's book Sound Reproduction, The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms. I find his book very informative.

@GChief, did your course ever specify the length of time on average that hearing memory remained accurate before becomming undependable?
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We didn’t really go into any of that. It’s was picking man made sounds over ocean background noise then doing in depth analysis. I was involved at the lab rat level in many of the tests at JHU Applied Physics Lab that where used to develop the course, while those did not address “memory” I can say that years later my aural memory is good enough that I can still aurally classify different engines and aircraft being played back after not hearing them for yrs. Take that however you want.
 
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Nat said:
I remember a Paul Messenger article in HiFi New and Record Review back in the mid 70s, I think a bit before ABX testing was around, when the split between subjectivists and objectivists was not as pronounced as it became soon after, reporting on a test that had found that lighter colored grill lead listeners to think they heard a brighter speaker compared to the same speaker with a dark grill. He also noted that some tests had found that housewives (this was an acceptable category to use back then, and it is, in fact, material to the issue) in test situations couldn't tell the difference between cream of pea soup and cream of mushroom. Obviously, in non test situations, women who cooked would easily be able to differentiate, even if it were soup mixes, so the implication was that there is something about testing - stress, second guessing, or whatever - that itself undermines its usefulness or reliability.

I don't think it is luddite to question whether instantaneous testing is actually a reliable guide to long term satisfaction, but I also think people who reject testing completely are hiding from the possibility that their senses and their memory are much more fallible than they want to think.
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In my listening experiences at walking into stereoshops and listening to different makes of equipment, I noticed differences in sound in the first couple of minutes before I grew acustomed to the sound as time went on. This is coincides with my childhood observation as well. I brought up the childhood experience because I had no preconcieved notions or biases to cloud what I was hearing. Short term testing only indicates differences, long term testing reveals if you can live with the differences.

When different amps were switched in on the same pair of speakers, my short term equalled my long term observations. When speakers were switched through on the same amp, my short term observations did not equal my long term observations.
 
GChief said:
We didn’t really go into any of that. It’s was picking man made sounds over ocean background noise then doing in depth analysis. I was involved at the lab rat level is many of the tests at JHU Applied Physics Lab that where used to develop the course, while those did not address “memory” I can say that years later my aural memory is good enough that I can still aurally classify different engines and aircraft being played back after not hearing them for yrs. Take that however you want.
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I have a similar analogy growing up on a farm. I could make out which tractor my dad was using at the time before seeing the tractor as I learned the sonic signature of the tractors. Same ad birders learning the call of different birds I suppose. Whats weird is that with yours and mine experiences, the sources would never sound the same. Maybe the mechanical tolerances and differences are too great to blend into one homogenous sound unlike the far tighter tolerances found in electronics.
 
If we couldn't tell the differences between the sounds made by different things, hearing wouldn't be much use. But when the sound sources are similar, it is harder to differentiate. I would assume that telling the difference between different tractors or engines (significant differences in a limited pool of sounds) would be easier than telling the difference between two of the same model.
It might also matter if it is the actual sound or the sound reproduced - now and again we mistake one person's voice for that of another, even, rarely, that of a sibling. But this is relatively common on the phone. (And, weirdly, we (or at least I) frequently mistake my own voice in a recording for that of a sibling - it isn't surprising that I don't recognize my own voice since what I hear when I speak is largely the noises generated internally, but it is surprising how easy it is to believe you are hearing your brother (or before puberty, your sister) when you hear yourself on tape.)
 
Nat said:
If we couldn't tell the differences between the sounds made by different things, hearing wouldn't be much use. But when the sound sources are similar, it is harder to differentiate. I would assume that telling the difference between different tractors or engines (significant differences in a limited pool of sounds) would be easier than telling the difference between two of the same model.
It might also matter if it is the actual sound or the sound reproduced - now and again we mistake one person's voice for that of another, even, rarely, that of a sibling. But this is relatively common on the phone. (And, weirdly, we (or at least I) frequently mistake my own voice in a recording for that of a sibling - it isn't surprising that I don't recognize my own voice since what I hear when I speak is largely the noises generated internally, but it is surprising how easy it is to believe you are hearing your brother (or before puberty, your sister) when you hear yourself on tape.)
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From my experience, 23yrs doing acoustic analyst and maintaining the gear the source does not matter, hearing is hearing, the brain processing the info. And I am talking about man made noises being picked up and recorded with an extremely high background noise environment. Out in the field or the side of the road is completely different. One of the reasons I don’t do a deep dive anymore in these threads, lots of push back from people assuming. @Nat that second part is a general comment not directed at you.
:beerchug:
 
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