Blind Test Quiz

thomasross20 · August 2023

I am certain these videos have been posted before but coming at them again, I still got them wrong!!
Please - no posting the answers, but you can discuss which ones you got wrong and what you liked about each.

The first two videos swap between 3 guitars - the only thing being different are the back woods: rosewood, maple & mahogany.

In the first video, I got mahogany and maple wrong and preferred the maple.
In the second, I got those two wrong again but that time preferred the mahogany!

This third video features two back woods you have to make a guess at:

Aside from these videos, this guy's guitars sound fantastic and the videos are an excellent resource to listen to different wood pairings. I think from the videos, I can conclude that while the back does matter, it doesn't matter half as much as the top wood (another topic in itself) and as much as how the builder voices the guitar.

I found it fun to come back to this after some years and still getting it wrong lol....

thomasross20 · August 2023

Btw the answer are on his YouTube channel - just search for the same video title and you can see the guitar being played each time.

D'oh shockingly I got my "answer" to video #1 wrong. I actually liked the mahogany the least in that one! Goes to show it's all BS!

Half the time I preferred the rosewood!

Tannin · August 2023

I've come back to this after listening to it shortly after you posted the thread. Back then, I thought three things:

* It was difficult to distinguish between the three guitars, they were very similar.
* It was confusing trying to guess which timber was which and at the same time work out which one I liked best.
* I'm not sure that I particularly liked any of them. Fine guitars to be sure but none of them jumped out and impressed me with its sound.

Listening again, they are very similar. More similar than mahogany and rosewood guitars usually are. I don't know why this is. Possibility #1 is that other makers tend to do things differently depending on their back timber - i.e., they usually "go for a rosewood sound" with the top construction and this exaggerates the effect of the back timber. Possibility #2 is that Mr Kinnaird builds guitars in a way which de-emphasises the contribution of the back. (I.e., these guitars are more nearly "dead back" than they are "live back" designs. Doubtless there are other possibilities too, but whichever way you slice it, this first video is much harder to pick than various other blindfold videos I have seen. I don't think the tune he is playing is helping. Strumming a few simple cowboy chords would be much more useful, especially with some single note fingerpicking (not too fast!) to follow.

I can practically always pick rosewood from mahogany blindfold, but do find the maple - mahogany distinction harder and don't always get it right. I'm going to listen to video #1 one more time. The first time I had no idea. (But my ears were crook, as I mentioned in another thread.) The second time, just now with my ears a lot better though still not right, I was able to jot down my guesses, but not feel at all confident about them. Last try ....

Hmmm ... nope. No further forward. I might try it on speakers instead of headphones. I always used to use (pretty crappy) speakers but lately I've been listening to everything through headphones and I'm not convinced that is working for me.

As a control, I just listened to a couple of the Acoustic Letter tests on You-tube (one blind, one not) and could easily hear the differences, and mostly guessed the timbers correctly. So yes, I'm not dreaming. This clip is very difficult and probabnly not representative.

I'm going to leave this question unanswered until my right ear unblocks. Next week maybe.

PS: I've still only watched the first video. I'll come back to the others another time.

Kittyfrisk · August 2023

I'm sure that most people here will have come across this test study before, but I reckon it never hurts to be told something twice rather than not at all

http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/hearing/the-guitar-experiment/

malcolmkindness · August 2023

All of these tests show that the wood used for the back and sides of guitars is largely irrelevant, but we don't want to believe this. Manufacturers are constantly telling us that we need a certain combination of tonewoods to produce a certain sound and lots of people believe this because it suits the modern agenda of "buy more stuff".
People often say "I can definitely tell the difference between rosewood and mahogany guitars" but if you think about this rationally, you realise that with only two choices you will be right 50% of the time.

Tannin · August 2023

Malcolm, I do way better than 50%. Rosewood is easy. And no, "all" of these tests do NOT show that. Some of them point in that direction (the first video above - you'll note that I speculated about some possible reasons to explain why that one fails to provide a clear difference where others often do), many other clearly show that some back woods make quite a difference. (And also show that other back woods are quite similar to one another. Mahogany and maple, for example, are much harder to tell apart than either of those two and rosewood, or Blackwood and Queensland Maple.

What the blind tests DO show consistently is that many different woods make good backs and that there is no reason to insist on told-school rosewood or mahogany as opposed to (just to list a few examples) cherry, walnut, Queensland Maple, California Myrtle, Khaya, Sipo, Osage Orange, Liquidamber. This is not at all the same thing as saying that "woods don't matter".

malcolmkindness · September 2023

Well, you may have remarkable hearing, but if you refer to the "Roger Bucknall" experiment mentioned in Kittyfrisks post, a much more scientific approach was taken and the results were quite clear. Six or seven guitars all designed and built to be as alike as possible except for back and side woods and a control guitar included, and there was very little difference between them.

Tannin · September 2023

But construction varies enormously. I don't mean from instrument to instrument (though that is true too) I mean between builders and models.

Essentially there are two ways to build an acoustic guitar: dead back and live back. (For simplicity I will consider those two only, in practice of course these are end points between which other possibilities exist.) A dead back, as the term implies, is designed to contribute nothing to the sound of the instrument other than to close off the resonating chamber. Almost any materiel will do - famously people have made dead backs from papier-mâché with perfectly acceptable results.

Live backs, in contrast, employ the back as a sound-producing part of the instrument, and these are where you hear the characteristic differences between the various tonewoods.

No, I don't have remarkable hearing, but I have generally been successful at distinguishing back timbers in blind tests, and when hearing guitars live in shops and the like. Not, I hasten to add, between reasonably similar timbers, but given, say, Queensland Maple and Rosewood, I'd expect to pick it almost every time. I'd be very surprised to find that you could not - they are quite distinct.

malcolmkindness · September 2023

I know about dead backs and live backs and I know different builders have different approaches to building, but the science clearly demonstrates that there is very little difference in sound between various back and side woods.
I would respectively suggest that you are simply hearing what you want to hear. That's fine, but it's not scientific.

Tannin · September 2023

Blind test = blind test. In one word, no.

guitarjack66 · September 2023

We like what we like,we don't what we don't.

Kilgore · September 2023

guitarjack66 said:

We like what we like,we don't what we don't.

Indeed.

There will be varying levels of interest in the arcane mysteries of if, how, why, to what degree, etc, etc various combinations of back and side woods affect a guitars tone.

Personally, it's not something I have a great deal of interest in. If I like the sound of a particular guitar that's all I need to know.

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