Clever Little Clock - high-end audio insanity?

And BTW, about that preamp shootout, I once lassoed my girlfriend into doing the same kind of blind test. She's not an audiophile and couldn't care less, but she was easily able to immediately and consistently discern at least some of the sonic differences between the $3K and $6.5K solid-state preamps I was A/B-ing (volume-matched, of course). To my slight chagrin she preferred the former even though I preferred the latter (not that I told her so until we were done, although it's possible she could've picked it up from my body language since the test wasn't double-blind). But I did agree 100% with her descriptive assessment of what she heard, and could see why she might've preferred it with those particular test recordings. In fact, she blew me away by stating the overall situation much more congently and concisely than I had been able to form it in my own mind. When I told her why I liked the more expensive one, she blithely dropped something like, oh sure, she could tell that you could hear much more through that one, but that was why she'd found it less pleasant to listen to (I had played CD's). Just amazing, aren't they fellas?

This is evidence of how flawed double blind testing is. Despite the attempts people put into giving so much value to blind testing, it is inherently flawed. The advise above to listen for a period of time is a good one. Often times the differences are very clear, other times it has more to do with musicality than sonics. Musicality is tapping your foot, and only time can identify this important aspect of our hobby. Too often we rely on quick comparisons, when this is never how we actually listen to music. Those looking to acquire equipment might put great value in blind testing. Those who just want to enjoy music must take the time to discern the attributes of a system

audioaril,

"For some reason, rapid A/B switching doesn't allow the brain to make adjustments quickly enough."

Perhaps, there is an analogous phenomenon for aural experience that exists for our visual experience. Namely, if you look at a colorful object for a while and then close your eyes, you see an "after-image" of the complimentary color that lingers for a while. While it lingers, the after-image color interacts and mixes with your subsequent visual experience (with eyes open). The brain is not able to instantaneously wipe itself clean between two sucessive visual experiences. I have two paintings that demonstrate this phenonon dramatically. Anyone who has looked at them for a few seconds reports the same thing: colors blend, new colors and forms emerge and there is movement of the nebulous forms. If our brain reacts in a similar dynamic way to aural experience, that may explain in part why rapid A/B switching is not an appropriate methodology to testing audio components. If the "after-image" of A lingers in the brain and mixes with the experience of B, we may get a more homogeneous result that clouds differences.

Puremusic: That might seem a reasonable hypothsis, but I doubt it's actually true -- listening to a piece of music once and then again is not analogous to staring at a static image until it's 'burned' on your retina. Otherwise, if it were, we not only couldn't hear changing sounds such as music very well, we'd have trouble seeing changing images within a constant environment, which as far as I know is exactly the opposite of how we actually respond. Maybe a better analogy would be listening to a static sinewave tone for minutes, although I don't know this. Anyway, I believe the ways the ear and the eye operate as sensors, and how the brain processes each, are too substantially different for such analogies to hold much water. The other problem with that conjecture, for me, is that I personally find A/B testing to more often highlight than to obscure subtle differences. Of course, I'm doing this by myself in my own system, which means it's not blind, so you could always object that I'm fooling myself.

To All - Let's go back in time to 1991 when Stereophile published Thomas J. Norton's review of the Tice Clock, a product that bears more than a slight resemblance to the CLC (or the CLS for that matter) - i.e., a digital clock. As one might expect, the Tice Clock was heavily drubbed by audiophiles and some reviewers of the time (and currently).

Unlike the CLC, the Tice Clock plugs into the wall outlet and supposedly operates by influencing how the electrons flow in conductors. Now, whether or not that theory is true I can't say, and have no experience w/ the Tice Clock myself. More importantly, I'm not suggesting the Tice Clock operates at all like the CLC. However, the hoopla that surrounded the Tice Clock way back when certainly bears a strong similarity to that of the CLC in many ways -- if I do say so myself :-). Here is the link to Norton's review of the Tice Clock:

http://stereophile.com/miscellaneous/784/index4.html

GK, Machina Dynamica