Clearly, there is some combing in all random selections. What I'm not sure is if the amount of combing showing up in my program is the same as on the Empeg. It's hard to tell because ultimately we are perceiving this data in a different way than listening through the playlists. But here you have it anyway.

Not being content to judge things by eye, I have been running some statistics on actual Empeg generated shuffles.

To accomplish this, I took a virgin Mk IIa and loaded 1000 short (200ms) songs into a single playlist. Setting notify=1 in the config file allowed me to capture the player-generated shuffles off the serial port. And a little scripting in minicom allowed me to put it in an unattended loop.

I actually thought I had found some subtle, but statistically significant, anomalies based on a 30 shuffle sample. But when I tested them on a second 150 shuffle sample they disappeared.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think what we have all seen is really just our human instinct to see patterns even if they aren't really there.

--John