Quote:
Originally Posted by Artisan Fan 
It's safe to say that most recording engineers are trained listeners and that is the group I roll with.
I think there is still variation in that group, but perhaps not as wide as the general population. By trained, I'm thinking of people who are trained to find certain artifacts like the AAC and MPEG listening groups or people who have calibrated qualitative listening skills a la David Moulton's system.
Trained listeners need to be calibrated as accurately as any piece of test equipment. Wine tasters do this all the time as part of their training.
Quote:
Our tests were not sighted. We did not know what device was cued up.Blind is important, but you also need to get rid of other biases, such as level differences. They can vary quite a bit if you're comparing different recording media.
--Andre
