Quote Originally Posted by emaidel
If I buy something - a Hi-Fi Tuning Fuse , or the Achromat turntable mat, or Vibrapods and Vibracones for example - install them and hear a difference, I post my findings here for others to read. First, I hope they enjoy reading what I have to say, and second, I hope they try these items out for themselves. This is precisely the case here with myself and EStat. Each of us bought several of these fuses, installed them in various pieces of equipment in our respective audio systems, and genuinely liked the differences we heard, all of which were directly attributed to the use of the Hi-Fi Tuning Fuses. Having Stereophile on our sides praising the fuses as a "Recommended Component" adds credibility to our observations. Neither of us partook of a DBT, but had one been available to us, I'm sure each of us would gladly have participated. And, I seriously believe, the DBT would only have further substantiated our personal findings. But, such a DBT isn't now, or likely ever will be, available to us. So, we trust our ears - you know, those things we all use to evaluated the audio equipment we've all been purchasing for most of our lifetimes.

I can give a very good example of how a DBT - and a carefully controlled and designed one at that - provided genuinely false results. During the late 70's, ESS was conducting a series of DBT's in college campuses across the country as part of their advertising campaign, "ESS Wins on Campus." The test was incredibly well put together and monitored.

Two inexpensive ESS speakers (the Performance Series One and Five) were compared to about 7 or 8 other speakers from other known manufacturers, all of which were a good deal more expensive than the ESS models. An acoustically inert screen was placed in front of these speakers to obscure them so that listeners couldn't see what they were listening to. Levels were all carefully set via a noise generator so that the "louder is better" syndrome couldn't affect the results. Bose 901's were provided with the appropriate reflecting surfaces so as not to mar their performance in the test. And, for the "double" part of the test, the numbers assigned to the speakers during the comparisons were routinely scrambled so that no particular bias could be formed. Specifically, if speaker "5" were preferred to speaker "3" in a given comparison, the next time the listeners were told that speaker "5" was playing, it was a different speaker.

The tests ran most of the day with many different sessions, each including about 20 or so students. The tests were conducted over a period of about a week, and at the end, the results were tabulated. Based on these DBT's, a stunning "conclusion" was made: the ESS PS-1 (at a list of $149.95) was repeatedly preferred by a majority of the listeners by a factor of greater than 3 to 1 to the far more expensive Bose 901. The PS-1 was also chosen far more often than a JBL L-40, as well as anythng used from AR, Infinity and Cerwin Vega. While the ESS PS-1 was chosen over all of these speakers, the margin was the greatest in comparing it to the Bose 901.

Lawsuit-happy Amar Bose desperately threatened to sue ESS, claiming fraud, but after carefully examining the testing procedure, he had to back down as there was nothing fraudulent about how it was designed and administered. So, did this actually "prove" that the ESS PS-1 was a better speaker than all the others? Of course it didn't, but it surely proved the fallacy of a DBT, no matter how carefully designed and administered it was.
BTW, thankyou for keeping the discussion clean. I do appreciate this.