opaqueice;581950 Wrote: > Would you mind giving some specific examples?
Unfortunately this was 20 years ago, so a bit hard to recall exactly what we were testing. But certainly much of our time was directed at cables, and all three of us decided cables could sound different. We did both blind testing (e.g., with another person changing cables) as well as independent listening where multiple people would write down their impressions of the differences (if any) two cables made in their systems, for later comparison. Did a lot of reading of the psychoacoustic literature, plus all three of us were trained scientists, naturally skeptical and also very methodical. The typical description I hear of an audiophile "testing" a cable always goes something like this: I rushed home with the Wondersound 6000 that just got the rave review from TAS, popped it in my system, and wow, yeah, a thousand veils were instantly lifted, so I bought it. Hah! Nothing could be further from the methods we used in our subjective listening tests. It is easy to change something and think the system sounds "different" the first time you listen. Now try going back and forth 30 times (or more). Hear the exact same difference every time? Often you will realize that what you first thought you heard you actually do not reliably hear. The only way I would consider deciding two cables sound different is if I can find a couple of passages in particular recordings where I can repeatedly hear a particular difference (e.g., more room echo, longer cymbal decay, sense of depth to some instrument). And by repeatedly, I mean over and over and over again, for a number of days. Of course you also need to be careful to avoid well known issues with human hearing. For example, if you are listening to something loud, stop for a minute to change a cable, then start the loud music right back up, the new source will inherently sound "fuller" because your hearing has adjusted back to the silence (I think this is called a threshold effect in psychoacoustics--it has been along time). Of course switching back and forth repeatedly equalizes this factor. Recently I resurrected my "high end" system that had been sitting unused for a good long while. One of the things I have been playing with is cables, which I have not done for a very long time. Do some sound different to me? Absolutely. Do all? No. Of course I have not done blind tests, but I have been able to repeatedly correctly identify which of two particular cables was in the system after not doing any listening for a day or two (I been changing them back and forth, so often do not remember which was left in--at least consciously :) ). Now of course you guys will chant your usual bias, bias, bias mantra, but what is my bias here? I own all of the cables already, and have owned most of them for 15 years. None of them were particularly different in price, nor have I ever seen any reviews of any of them. So exactly which one am I biased to pick? And of course just because I think they sound different, does not mean I think one sounds better. In fact, I like some sonic aspects of one and some of the other. One is clearly just slightly brighter, making the system sound incredibly detailed (you can hear every little pluck of a string, etc.), while the other has more beautiful sounding midrange (so female vocals are gorgeous). It may be all in my mind, but I keep hearing the same specific sonic differences over and over for the last two weeks. Unfortunately for me, on certain tracks one sounds better since it enhances that track, while on others track the other sounds better. So I ask again, how does bias explain this? My bias should be to have one sound definitely better than the other, since I am stuck with these two as my only choices (rural location now makes it impossible to borrow cables for listening). No, the bias argument is highly exaggerated IMNSHO. -- ncarver ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
