Tim, Jim, and others. Jim does of course make a good point about the difficulty in testing. Tho I am unsure about the usefulness of his proposed test procedure itself in the sense that I dont think anyone is going to actually proceed in that fashion. Nor, do I think is that necessary. One can go about this from a more statistics oriented angle. If it can be shown that the same kinds of characteristics show up time and time again the point of being statistically significant and beyond... given a large enough sampling... then one pretty much has to go along with the suggestion that the alteration has an affect. It is correct that nearly anything you do can corrupt a single experiments validity. I'm sure one could actually pick apart the alternating string idea for that matter. That does not necessarily eliminate the value of any such testing as Mark is offering. The experience will no doubt be enlightening despite the fact that whatever results must be seen with skepticism from a purely scientific point of view. We deal in sound and subjective qualification of sound as much as we deal in anything else. We can no more go forward from a purely scientific stance then we can ignore scientific perspective. A healthy mix lies in between somewhere and acceptance of a certain degree of uncertainty is an absolute. I'm reminded of the "tests" used to "prove" that ETD tunings were just as good as the best ear tunings. Funny how no one ever tried to ascertain if there were actually people who were capable of telling the difference. The tests were designed to only find out how many could not. And indeed... very very many could not. So many one could not ignore those numbers. On the other hand... if you did find (by looking) a group of individuals out there that nearly 100 % of the time could identify an ETD tuning by ear... I wonder how this would affect our opinions of them.... just a thought on.... er... scientific method :) Cheers RicB
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