PSB’s Paul Barton Treats Playback/Hi-Fi+ to Blind Listening Sessions at Canada’s NRC Acoustics Lab—Part 2

Posted by: Chris Martens at 2:02 pm, June 5th, 2012

The Envelope, Please

In the earlier session, the four speaker systems under test were (as I later learned):

• The PSB Imagine Mini stand mount monitor used with a PSB HD8 subwoofer,
• The PSB Imagine T2 floorstander,
• The B&W CM7 floorstander, and
• An old (very old) Tannoy stand mount monitor from a bygone era.

I ranked the speakers in the order I’ve shown above (from top to bottom), with the Tannoy lagging far behind its more contemporary competitors. Of the four, and not too surprisingly, I found that the Imagine Mini/HD8 combo sounded very similar, though not identical, to the Imagine T2 floorstander (both speakers are from the same product family and were designed not too long after one another).

In the later session, the four speakers under test were (as I later learned):

• The PSB Imagine Mini stand mount monitor used with a PSB HD8 subwoofer,
• The PSB Imagine T2 floorstander,
• The B&W CM7 floorstander, and
• A prototype PSB product about which all journalists present were sworn to secrecy.

I ranked the speakers in the order shown (from top to bottom), and found it gratifying that my rank-orderings and overall fidelity ratings tracked closely with one another from session 1 to session 2 (Phew! I guess my observational/analytical skills are OK after all).

Several general observations I would make are these:

• PSB makes some darned nice speakers and their consistency of sound within a given product family is quite impressive.
• B&W makes a darned fine speaker, too, though one that caters to a different set of listener tastes (or perhaps a slightly different definition of “Fidelity”) than my own.
• Behind the scrim, and listening in mono, it is very hard to tell exactly how big a speaker system is or is not—the scrim eliminates any possibility of being biased by what our eyes tell us that our ears should hear.
• You can learn a lot from blind tests, but not everything that an audiophile would want to know.

After my visit, and at Paul Barton’s suggestion, I’ve been going back and reading (or in some cases re-reading) some of Dr. Floyd Toole’s NRC research papers—papers that provide the conceptual underpinning behind the procedures and experimental methodologies used for blind listening tests as conducted at the NRC. Honestly, those papers have raised more conceptual “red flags” for me than they have answered, although I find Toole’s work (and his obviously keen mind) simply fascinating. But, perhaps, those conceptual stumbling blocks will have to wait for a different day and a different blog.

For now, I’d just like to express my thanks for Paul Barton having given me and the other journalists on hand a wonderful window of insight into his world and work at the NRC Acoustics Labs.

Happy Listening.