Testing, Testing . . .

It turns out this isn’t as easy to do as it sounds. Try walking into your favorite MI or audio emporium on a Saturday afternoon and saying, “Hey, Dude! I’d like to listen to all the mics you have in stock, plus some others I’ve read about. Could you set ‘em up for me please.” Aside from the questions of planetary origin that such behavior is bound to raise, the setup is probably going to be less than satisfactory, what with all the interruptions, snide comments, and rude barnyard noises. You’ll find you have trouble telling the mics apart. You plug one in, talk ‘n croon into it while listening on headphones, unplug it and plug in another one and talk into it and so on. Fairly soon, the remains of your fevered brain are going to get dazed ‘n confused and will simply transmit to your conscious mind the thought that “They All Sound The Same, Dumbhead! Let’s Get Out Of Here Now And Do Something Fun! Just Frown, Look Pensive And Choose The Big Expensive One Over There That O’Flake Used On Her Latest Album” (Yes, this is really how brains talk to their owners, and this is really how the brains’ owners make their buying decisions.)

So, to make this listening test effective, you have to be in a situation where the differences between mics are as thoroughly revealed as possible and where the playing field is really level. This is usually done by using the so-called “blind preference test.” It is a surprisingly effective test, as well as fast and economical once you get it set up. Best of all, it yields really interesting insights into how the test listeners really feel about the various devices being tested.

Such tests mainly come in two flavors, the ABX differentiation test and the ABCD preference test. For this project we used ABCD preference test. Concealing their identities, you listen to four devices, using a switcher to route the test signal, usually music recordings, through one device at a time. You compare them and rate them on a subjective scale ranging from Awful (usually 0) to Awesome (usually 10), making comments (“rich,” “bright,” “thin and edgy,” “it sucks,” etc.) about each one of the four. You usually repeat this a bunch of times, using different test music. Sometimes, you rescramble the devices, changing the identities of A, B, C, and D.

There are other listening tests, of course. The long-term listening trial, where you live with a device for days, weeks or months, and then swap it with another that you also listen to for days, weeks or months, is time-honored. Interestingly, it sometimes yields different results than the quickie tests I’ve described above, which I’ll talk about later. In any case, such long-term tests are so difficult and expensive to do (imagine saying to your audio or MI dealer that you’d like to borrow all of his mics for evaluation over the next 18 months!) that it is not reasonable to make buying decisions based directly on them. So, by default, the simple economy of the ABX and ABCD tests makes them the test of choice.