Yep. To say personal sighted experience preferences with speakers can vary quite a bit (vs "trust ears/just listening") might be understating things.
Audio Musings by Sean Olive: The Dishonesty of Sighted Listening Tests
AES E-Library >> The Influence of Hearing and Sight on the Perceptual Evaluation of Home Speaker Systems
Ironically, Amir does no blind testing. In fact, he maximizes pre-bias by measuring first.
Btw, it's my understanding one can drag their own speakers (within reason) to Harman and compare vs theirs or X. For a fee of course.
Find what ones "ears/just listening" really prefers. YMMV.
cheers,
AJ
That article quotes J. Gordon Holt from an interview where he said:
“Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.”
Also from same article on the question if the high-end audio has lost its way, he says:
“Since the only measure of sound quality is that the listener likes it, that has pretty well put an end to audio advancement, because different people rarely agree about sound quality. Abandoning the acoustical-instrument standard, and the mindless acceptance of voodoo science, were not parts of my original vision.”
This can be surmised as: DBT do matter, measurements do matter, but at the end of the day “good" sound is whatever one likes. For many folks in this forum that means just trusting their ears (measurements and tests be darned); yet for others (including a growing number of younger audiophiles) it means using tests, measurements, and their ears.
