[ljguitar]

Originally Posted by Howard Klepper

...no one, so far as I know, has ever claimed to be able to meaningfully distinguish among 30 guitars at a single sitting. 6 or 7 maybe.
...a single blind experiment is not worth much.

Hi Howard...
I agree that blind tests are not useful. Some of the fallacy I see with most proposed blind testing of guitars is the assumption that guitars can be played or listened to blind and any useful or conclusive information would result.

Coffee cuppers and wine tasters have a very methodical - and well defined ways - of tasting and grading coffee &/or wines. I've been roasting coffees as a serious hobby-ist for nearly a decade now, and have dabbled with some serious folks who regularly hold cuppings (for selecting beans and arriving at roasting levels for the beans they use in their own stores).

They train their own tasting teams in-house, and teach them language to communicate their findings. It's very serious business, but none of the cuppers I know think of it as very scientific...merely useful for their own purposes.

They are not interested in publishing results. And they rarely agree among themselves as to which is the best tasting coffee (they each have preferences), but nearly always agree as to which are the best quality of the beans they have sampled that day.

With both wine and coffee tasting, very small quantities of wine or coffee sniffed, inhaled, tasted, swished, and then spit out, and extensive notes taken - nobody is blindfolded, nor is any aspect of the process hidden.

And between each sample, the palate is cleansed with water and a moment is taken.

Is it possible to cleanse the ears/brain between proposed guitar samplings? Do we have language to describe what we feel and hear? Could some be developed? (perhaps)

It seems we players (some of us anyway) have some sort of personal need to empirically establish once-for-all scientific sounding things about guitar tone, and to prove that our personal opinion is the only one - or at least the best one...