John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

Plasma, take a look at my post on the "Are Audiophiles Obsessive Nuts?" thread here on Agon, and I won't bother to repeat it here. Thanks for the link to the essay by Dunlavy; he sure speaks more authoritatively than do I. Thank God there are some, albeit precious few, who are willing to speak the truth about the widely accepted, yet critically unexamined high-end orthodoxy.

I found Dunlavy's comments to be very interesting. One note regarding his "experiment" proposing to show that so-called golden ears are indeed incapable of hearing the differences between cables: by not removing and changing the cables during the test, he did not prove that the subjects could not hear differences. Instead, he showed that these audiophiles believed that they COULD hear differences when none existed. This doesn't prove that the same subjects would not be able to hear differences between different cables. Anyway, interesting post!

k

Measurement proves nothing. Let's have John measure a group of tenors singing a line of music. Human vocal cords are made of the exact same material. If all the tenors sing all the right notes, the sound will "measure" the same on John's equipment. If John is correct, then all tenors must sound the same, and any difference we heard between the sounds created by Pavarotti, Bocelli, Domingo and your local church cantor is just an illusion. I can tell a difference, so I guess I better go get some Prozac.

I don't hear John talking about any of the great cables out there.Has he listened to them? How can you react in a vacuum?