Jakob1863
Addicted to Fun and Learning
I'm sorry, but you need to read more carefully. Instant, clickless switching is required. ABC/hr is the paradigm, not something else. These issues rest on the basic length of loudness and auditory feature memory. Unless you're a computer or some other species, this isn't in any debate.
I think fas42´s argument was more along the line that there is no proof that the ABC/HR method is the most sensitive test protocol among the many others.
Which is sort of universially true as there exist no "one size fits" approach, it always depends on the hypothesises tested and the usual constraints, as resources aren´t endless.
Reading the recommendation is important as it - although in short form - covers a lot of important factors in the design of experiments and even emphasized the fact that it is well worth to read additional material and to look for competent external consultants, as testing is a complex task.
Most of the material incorporated is well founded on earlier scientific research, but despite that, the recommendations wrt to the audio material sample length is a bit vague, as the recommended length is 10s - 20s .
I have written a bit in an earlier thread about the different models of memory and i think that this recommended time span is inconsistent with the usual models (including the working memory approach) especially considering the assumed FIFO characteristic.
Precoda/Meng proposed in an AES convention paper to use only sample length of <5s based on the assumption that the impact of categorical memory could be minimised.
As the emotional response to music is an important factor it is imo unclear if short sample length could/will lead to the same response as longer excerpts.
Of course that must not be important for certain types of artifacts but for a quality/difference assessment aside those it surely will be.
Up to now i was not able to find publications about experiments where multidimensional evaluation was done with varying degrees of difference and varied sample length to find out which memory time spans could be achieved.
We know that categorization is the important factor while transferring from "short term memory" to "long term storage" but it seems that there exists a somewhat shorter/other path for auditory input.
Have i missed some relevant publications and could you help with some citations?