drewe181;637375 Wrote: > It's also a FACT that I prefer Pink Lady apples to the others though > this does not lead to the assumption that PL apples are the best of all > the apples. Again, opinion and fact are two very different things. In > the scientific community they call these Hypothesis and Theory. Eg. > Einstein's Theory of Relativity would have began as Einstein's > Hypothesis of Relativity until the scientists of the day set out to > prove him wrong yet couldn't.
This is actually a mis-statement of scientific method and scientific convention. A theory is an attempt to organize and explain a set of observations (facts, if you will). It is the identification of the pattern underlying the data, and an attempt to account for the pattern. The data may be generated from millennia of observation, or from experimentation (designed to address hypotheses). Darwin made many detailed observations about the natural world, including about finches in the Galapagos, but also drew on observations made by others; he didn't attempt to perform anything we would call an experiment; Einstein's general and special theories of relativity attempted to reconcile disparate, sometimes conflicting, data. Both made testable predictions, and subsequent testing has largely (but not completely) born out both theories. As to how this applies to audiophilia. . . not totally clear. Perhaps we could say that anyone is free to present a theory about the experience of sound reproduction (use of xyzStupidlyExpensiveCables, for instance, makes the music sound better to sophisticated listeners), but has to be prepared to make the claim in a testable fashion. If the claim is that the music sounds better when people can see the fashionable cables and know when they are in use, then that is testable. If the claim is that the music sounds better even when people don't know what cables are in use, that is testable, too. The former condition, while perfectly acceptable, doesn't actually tell us WHY the music sounds better, even if we control variables like volume. Could be the inrinsic properties of the cables; could be the pretty blue color; etc. The latter condition actually might tell us something important about what makes music sound better (might or might not be accuracy of reproduction; might be human's intrinsic preference for certain sound tones; etc.). That's why it is important to know in some reasonably exact way just how the waveform at the output end of the cable is different from other cables, so we can start thinking about WHY they sound better in a blind test, if indeed they do. R. -- RonM ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RonM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17029 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88345 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
