Iâll start with a brief bit of background â simply to highlight the different worlds Iâve lived in â before moving on to my plea. In addition to an engineering Ph.D. and a decadeâs worth of a career as a scientist at NASA and separately one in biotechnology R&D, Iâve spent many years as a management consultant, and an entrepreneur growing a marketing consulting and digital marketing agency. Iâve led engineers and scientists, also account managers and creatives, and been involved in double blind clinical trials and understanding/prediction of human behavior.
With that as backdrop I hope youâll permit me to step into what I see as this endless and by now getting tedious debate about âsighted listeningâ versus âA/B/X testsâ. While thereâs absolutely room and even need for both in our lives, hereâs the rub â no one way is definitively better than the other all the time!
Greg, I respect your opinions and enjoy your well written posts virtually all the time. You have helped me enhance my system and I look forward to hopefully meeting you one day when Iâm in San Francisco. But this insistence on A/B/X testing being the one superior way to demonstrate truth and anything else as subservient is grinding and incorrect.
Just as one counter example for instance, I know youâve heard of the placebo effect. That is as real as the clinical effect in drug development especially, especially so in areas that involve therapeutics for the brain/central nervous system, where the placebo effect is the bane of clinical trials. Prozac for example failed at least 3 (many say 7) trials before any clinical effect could be demonstrated to an acceptable p-value by the FDA. Because the placebo effect is so high and yes people do get better, even cured, from severe conditions with sugar pills!
And in all of this â âcopper is better than opticalâ, âmy cable needs to be brand Xâ, âmy DAC is unlistenable without an attendant clockâ â is it so difficult to simply accept that if thatâs what the listener hears/believes, so be it, for him/her. None of us need to hammer home that what someone believes they hear necessarily needs to be analytically demonstrated. As has been said, even by you Greg, itâs their money and their ears. If you fully accepted that, then why the (often) consistent addition of some version of âprove itâ or provide a hypothesis as to why? A part of me loves the request for the hypothesis (I too think that way), but if they donât or donât want to, thatâs equally fine, right? If one accepts, for example, Miguelâs assertion that the memory of his Rossini is so seared in his brain that he hears the amazing difference Apex makes, then apply the same leeway to ethernet switches? I mean some level of incredulous questioning is fine, maybe even enjoyable, but we sure seem to be entering the realm of, ahem, religion?
Anup, you claim professional creds of various sorts and have landed in what I believe is a measurement is all mantra. I wonder how youâd deal with the placebo effect of an unperformed arthroscopic surgery enabling an individual to walk fine afterwards. Argue with the person who is somehow now walking fine that she really isnât better?
I have thoroughly enjoyed this forum and think itâs the best one Iâm part of. Ergo this plea to at least not rehash/tone down the same argument. I ask this even as I enjoy some of the back and forth between Nigel et al and Greg/Anup but if we could keep it just in good fun, without casting aspersions âŚ?
The key purposes of the forum, at least as I see it and would like it to be, is for us dCS aficionados to answer queries to help others (PAR is el supremo at this and his refusal to wade into the âmy view is better than yoursâ waters is rather telling), to share great music recommendations, to celebrate what dCS has achieved, to engage with dCS in an ongoing quest for upgrades or whatever else, to share our love of our hobby, post pictures of our systems and upgrades, and to wax poetic about anything audio. And perhaps also to needle each other some but hopefully without the need to claim superiority. As I used to say when teaching both data science and marketing, it sure helps to keep candor and curiosity in balance âŚ!