Now hold on a minute. Are you saying I couldn't hear that the files are different? Or just that I can't identify which one was the original and which was the EQ'd version?
That you couldn't tell which one was which. Additionally - sorry, a whole new angle here - that you'd not necessarily like the same one tomorrow that you like today.
If I play you a random mix of the files - not just A B A B but maybe A A B B B A A - you won't even be able to group the A and B files together.
That could very well be true. But is that testimony to some kind of psychological effect on my part or to the subtlety of the effect? The result in and of itself does not yield a definitive answer. And conversely, if you say you can't hear a difference, how do you or I know that means there is no differece, that you're ears can't perceive a differece (this time), or that your own negative bias is affecting you the same way you say a positive bais is affecting me?
All of this is why
the only time a blind test is needed is to "prove a negative" so to speak.
is IMHO an incorrect perspective to take. There are REASONS that tests need to be conducted with rigor; they need to account for all variable and eliminate any ambiguity of result. One of the main reasons whey we keep hearing contradictory news on TV about all these different heath studies where one says "eating chocolate is bad for your health" and another says "eating chocolate is good for you" is because the methodology of the studies is glossed over and, in many cases, is quite faulty. It doesn't matter what the objective of any given test is; if not desigend right, it will give false results.
So if dither really matters, and is audible, then it should be audible to all every time.
Why? That reasoning does not follow. Here's an analogy:
Weather is known to affect people's health (humidity affecting atrthitis, barometric pressure affecting sinuses, etc.) Many are so in tune that the can predict a storm coming by the "feeling in their bones". Though this is not 100% accurate, necessarily, there can be other causes than an incoming storm for that feeling. Many people go years or their entire lifetime without making the correlation between weather and their body, others suspect something is going on there but just can't pick out a pattern. Some are affected by the same weather changes in entrirely different ways. Others are not affected by weather changes at all.
Does this lack of ubiquity make the effect irrelevant or non-existant? No, it just makes it more subtle and complex than many of us are comfortable in accepting. But it reamins real nonetheless, and not just old folk tales.
Dither is, at best, a very subtle effect. Not everybody will always hear it. Not every that can hear it will always ID it, or necessarily even hear it every time. It's effect - or perhaps lack thereof, to take in your position as well - is not as easily qualifiable as it is quantifiable. Many real effects in life are like that. That does not make them unreal, it only makes them esoteric.
Personally, I think that if dither were to disappear from the universe tomorrow, that very few would even notice, let alone care. My Coleman Hawkins recordings will still send me there whether they have been dithered one way or another or not. I also do not buy into Monster Cable or 96k recording, just for the record; any positive benefits of either are usually attributable to some other factor than the claims actually in question.
But I do see dithering as something more than a waste of time; while the effects may not slap anyone in the face, nor even be universal in their subtlty, I do think, based upon my own experiences that there is *something* subtle and too complexly patterened there to disregard in the same psycho-mythical basket as most other audiophilia.
I just don't bother losing any sleep over it when that ditering is at the end of the crapola signal chain I have
.
G.