Cables that measure the same but (seem?) to sound different

@snilf  Brilliant post!

If neuroscience is one day able to "map" the neural connections that objectively correspond to the experience of tasting a fine Cabernet Sauvignon, that neurological correlate will capture nothing at all of the experience of tasting that fine wine. We do indeed have two different "systems" here; even if there's some one-to-one correspondence that can be mapped, they are not ontologically identical, they belong to different categories of being.

That's exactly right.

although I can't have a pain in your tooth, if we are to discuss our preferences—which are strictly incommunicable, as they are grounded in our private subjective experiences—then we need some kind of common language. That's what science, and "measurements," purport to provide.

Partially agree. Science and engineering measurements have very specific goals, much narrower than the goals of the taster or hearer. That's why we read film critics to understand or assess a movie and we don't particularly ask for a count of the number of frames, e.g. In other words, we communicate about sound using the language of the experience of sound, which is more akin to the language of wine experts and movie critics than to audio engineers. (Ironically, it's the audio engineers who have to figure out the "subjective" stuff so they can design for *it.* Those who put objectivity first get the cart ass-backwards.

In the last analysis, "objectivity" is really only universal subjectivity: what is "true for everyone" is merely that which everyone will experience in relevantly similar ways.

Right -- even what everyone "would" experience if the right conditions obtained. 

while we don't all experience Mozart (or Black Sabbath) in relevantly similar ways, we do all experience sound waves according to the laws of acoustics and auditory perception. This is why many audiophiles insist that all music will sound better on a better system.

Agree again. And we *all* experience this (or mostly all) because we are really so much more similar than we like to admit. As Wittgenstein pointed out, the very idea of a private language is impossible. The same is true of a private audio language.

@sdl4 I liked the way they took a veil off upper mids and highs. Almost the effect of putting a thin cloth over the tweeters/mids and then removing it.

Found them all used. For the speaker, found a 14ft length then had AP cut it in half for me. Wound up with a $2200 cable for a grand total of $750 with shipping after all said and done. 

To start you off.... https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649774539-analysis-plus-solo-crystal-oval-rca-audio-interconnect...

hilde45:

Your contrast between a film critic's qualitative analysis and a scientific, quantitative account (e.g., of the number of frames in a film) is very clever, and telling here. "Qualitative" and "quantitative" roughly correspond to my distinction between "subjective" and "objective," respectively; they're different descriptions of the same phenomenon, and not reducible one to another (whichever way one might want to work the reduction). But only roughly. Again, if Kant is right, even quantitative analysis is ultimately "subjective," even if "universally" so, since arithmetic is nothing more than an analysis of the subjective "form of sensibility" that we experience as time.

Your reference to Wittgenstein picked up on my "I can't have a pain in your tooth" trope, which comes from him. FWIW, I have my problems with the private language argument, but that's certainly not grist for this particular mill.

Still, the relevance of serious philosophy to "audiophilia" and its various debates is pretty surprising. Or maybe not. Depends on your attitude to philosophy, I guess.

As @snilf states above, "Science gets better and better at identifying, describing and quantifying what is universally subjective, and so, in principle the audible differences between interconnects must be 'measurable,' even if not yet, if they exist at all. But those still hypothetical measurements no more guarantee an agreement in preference than would a comparative chemical analysis of Chateau Mouton-Rothchild and Chateau Lafite-Rothchild."

I agree that most of the differences we hear between cables should be measurable at some point in the future, but we are not there yet. At present, we can measure some things about a cable (e.g., frequency response, resistance, capacitance, etc.), but we don't usually have a clear handle on whether anything we measured actually accounts for differences we hear between specific cables. And even when we hear a difference, it's not a given that there will be agreement about which cable is preferred. 

If you haven't actually read the AES publication I mentioned earlier in this thread, you might still want to take a look at it. It's a paper by Milind Kunchur from the U. of South Carolina entitled "Cable pathways between audio components can affect perceived sound quality." It was published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society in June. The study included double-blind listening trials comparing two interconnects: a balanced Straight-Wire Virtuoso and a single-ended Monster-Cable Interlink 400. After identifying significant methodological problems with the traditional "short-segment comparisons" of the ABX paradigm, the author developed and implemented an "extended multiple pass" paradigm that is actually a lot closer to what a person experiences when listening to music. (Please read the paper for more details.)

A group of 18 college students participated in the study, and these students completed a total of 59 double-blind listening trials. 43 of these 59 trials were judged correctly; the probability of this result being due to chance was p<.0005. When frequency response was measured, both cables varied by less than +/- 0.005 dB over the range of 16 Hz to 22 kHz. Resistive losses were too small to be considered important. However, the noise levels measured in the StraightWire cable were significantly lower than in the Monster cable.

The author concludes that two system configurations differing only by the interconnect pathway are audibly discernible, even by average listeners with no special experience in music or audio. The study did not complete an exhaustive exploration of all possible factors that might contribute to sonic differences between interconnects. However, electrical measurements did suggest that noise might be one factor affecting sonic performance. The author also noted, "The measurements also show that characteristics such as resistance and frequency response, that naive consumers may focus on, are irrelevant for distinguishing HEA ("High End Audio") interconnect cables."

@snilf Yes, we'll leave Wittgenstein aside for now (until someone accidentally yells 'slab.') I'm a pragmatist by training, so the Kantian account of subjectivism is helpful for me, but only to a point. (Another topic to run off the road, here.)

@sdl4 Most most most! appreciative of that link, which I've not had time to look at yet.