A Blind Test of Horns at IHS Denver, the Results

A post on the Pope Instrument Repair site/blog points to the results of the blind test of horns done at the 2008 IHS Denver Symposium. The results are here, worth checking out if you are an advanced hornist.

UPDATE-2011: The results are gone now! But, relying on memory, the gist of it was three (four) horns were tested. One was a custom Geyer horn of some sort, one was probably a Conn 8D, one was a Reynolds Pottag Model, and the other was a “mystery horn.” Read more about the Reynolds Pottag Model here; you will want to after reading the results.

The gist of the results was that when listeners knew they were hearing the Reynolds they did not like it but Pope tricked the audience! For the Reynolds was also the “mystery horn,” and when people rated the mystery horn it often came in as the best sounding horn! Says something about our ears versus bias against certain models and types of horn.

The following September the following short article was posted as well, and it seems like one to combine with this one for a bit more complete article.

Inspired by the report of the blind horn tests done at IHS Denver, in our first studio class of the semester I did something similar. The three horns used in the test were three quite different horns, a big Paxman 25AND horn (the one I recorded my solo CDs on), a Holton single B-flat, and a Conn single F. Students were told that these were the three horns but they were not told which horn was which. I played a C major scale on all three horns and they had to guess which one I played first, second, and third.

The majority of the studio did in fact get it right; it was not extremely hard to do as these three horns are quite different. Still, it was pretty interesting as the difference was much smaller than they thought it might be given the vastly different nature and quality of the instruments in the test. Something to ponder.