I see the issue with ABX blind testing


I’ve followed many of the cable discussions over the years with interest. I’ve never tested cables & compared the sound other than when I bought an LFD amp & the vendor said that it was best paired with the LFD power cord. That was $450 US and he offered to ship it to me to try & if I didn’t notice a difference I could send it back. I got it, tried it & sent it back. To me there was no difference at all.

Fast forward to today & I have a new system & the issue of cables arises again. I have Mogami cables made by Take Five Audio in Canada. The speaker wire are Mogami 3104, XLRs are Mogami 2549 & the power cords are Powerline 10 with Furutech connectors. All cables are quite well made and I’ve been using them for about 5 years. The vendor that sold me the new equipment insisted that I needed "better" cables and sent along some Transparent Super speaker & XLR cables to try. If I like them I can pay for them.

In every discussion about cables the question is always asked, why don’t you do an ABX blind test? So I was figuring out how I’d do that. I know the reason few do it. It’s not easy to accomplish. I have no problem having a friend come over & swap cables without telling me what he’s done, whether he swapped any at all etc. But from what I can see the benefit, if there is one, will be most noticeable system wide. In other words, just switching one power cable the way I did before won’t be sufficient for you to tell a difference... again, assuming there is one. So I need my friend to swap power cables for my amp/preamp & streamer, XLR cables from my streamer to my preamp, preamp to amp & speakers cables. That takes a good 5-10 minutes. There is no way my brain is retaining what I previously heard and then comparing it to what I currently hear.

The alternative is to connect all of the new cables, listen for a week or so & then switch back & see if you feel you’re missing anything. But then your brain takes over & your biases will have as much impact as any potential change in sound quality.

So I’m stumped as to how to proceed.

A photo of my new setup. McIntosh MC462, C2700, Pure Fidelity Harmony TT, Lumin T3 & Sonus Faber Amati G5 & Gravis V speakers.

dwcda

@benanders

I’m not denying anything (I haven’t formally tested for it

this further solidifies what I said above. So here’s the rub…I do not need my entire zip code to hear the changes in my system and nod their heads in approval before I finalize any purchase be it cables, streamers, dacs, etc. The only element that matters to me is what I hear and how much of an improvement there is. There were multiple instances where I had sent cables back. Cables that I had actually high hopes for they just didn’t work out. The change was so negative that I couldn’t endure listening to my system for more than few minutes before getting severe fatigue. These were high priced cables and no, they were not defective.
Do you think I would keep these cables if I had 50 people telling me they like the sound? Absolutely not.

And this, my friend, is where the discussion ends. Please let me know when you get around to trying some cables as an experiment in a comfort of your home and system, and what you had heard.

 

@benanders  Your cryptic posts are serving no purpose here.  Your main point is that people’s opinions are basically invalid because they are not confirmed by a controlled scientific study and thus have not been proven and could be wrong or misleading.  Well duh, and welcome to the real world.  That’s why they’re opinions and not fact, which pretty much everyone here understands except you.  Continually pointing out that people’s opinions are potentially fallible is as tiresome as it is pointless.  If you have such low opinions of people’s subjective opinions and their reliability why are you even here?  Why continue to torture yourself (and us)?  Go play with your peeps at ASR and spare us, or better yet go start your own website where people are free to express their opinions as long as they’re confirmed by a rigorous study that conforms to strict scientific methods.  If that doesn’t sound like a fruitful endeavor then you should understand why your posts are both ineffective and useless here.  And no, this was not Chat GPT generated.

I am not interested by cable threads ...

There are annoying for me because the cables changes are often evident and minors change  anyway compared to most others in the acoustic , mechanical, and electrical dimension...

I was able to tune by ears my 100 resonators ( it was an acoustic experioments as with piano tuning) the results were not thin, but so amazing it changes the way i understood acoustics because my ears catch it not my brain placebo prone...Who will accuse a piano tuner of placebos effects in his job ?

Then i learned to trust my ears and they are biased yes and prone to some illusions as anybody but they also work for a specific job, then how could i need a ABX double blind test for verifying my cables choices if i dont need it for my room after thousands of changes in a 2 years 7 days on 7 of experiments ?😊

The room is tuned for my ears system not for a circus ?

Then why coming in cables thread arguing with people ?

To show your engineering credentials ?

It is useless because no one here will travel to a James Randi show to debunk his cables buyings which can be for sure debatable as any buyings ..

Cables may differ and differ in my experience with the rightfull system in the right room minimally well installed but nothing compare to the modification of a single straw size located at some point in the room...😁

Do i need a test to verify this claim about a single straw ?

No it is an acoustic principle : It is the basis of Helmholtz resonators ...

Try it ...

But the straw must be put in the right volume, at the right place, and of the right size... Train your ears ... It is funnier than arguing about cables and more useful to demonstrate how your hearing work and can be trusted to some limits... And you will learn your room pressure distribution zones with your body...Not by a computer measuring tools... That was my goal train my hearing "by hands" so to speak for the fun and for learning ... 😊

Acoustics is something we feel with our body not only something we write and compute on a paper ...

The greeks were acousticians designing without electronics acoustic marvels and the Egyptian too ...Do they passed ABX double blind test ?

I will be frank i dislike techno-cultism who plague the world right now and that some call science... The last years demonstrated to us the results of coupling techno-cultism as science and in place of science and big corporations together ..

i will stop here ...

 

«I am an acoustician Amish»-- Groucho Marx🤓

I pasted some placards throughout my neighborhood stating I am looking for blind testers. No one called yet. 

i want to be ABX doubly blindtested by you and i am a bit angry that you did not invited me...😁

Anyway i dont travel ... 😊