"The Audio Critic" B.S. or what?

I wanted to share a story from last week. Spent the holiday at my brother's place visiting family. Dan has an "average" consumer rig: Dennon budget receiver, plastic Sony CD changer, Infinity bookshelf 2-way's. The living room is really bad: 20' vaulted ceiling & all-open to everywhere in the house (reflections everywhere). Carpet, but no drapes(vinyl blinds) one sofa & stuffed chair are the only absorbtion. Room is so hot you can hear it echo with a single finger-snap. To make matters worse, speakers are on stands in corners, & firing long-ways into the room; one firing right into the sofa (I tried to explain spkr. placement, but they're where he wants them). I brought along an abandoned pair of old oxidized Monster Cable & an equally old $20 pair of IC's to give him. He was open-minded, but hardly enthusiastic. First the IC's were swapped out - warmed up the sound; added punch & body. Then the speaker cable was temp. connected. Dan really didn't want to replace the spkr. wire; it was a real pain working in his cabinet. So we temp'd it in anyway & the improvement was significant, enough so that he ripped out that old 18awg. Radio Shack wire asap. I also brought along a pair of Lapis IC's just for fun; now he *asked* to hear them! Sound became leaner & more detailed (his words) the typical sonic signature of silver. We put back the $20 patch cords (brand name long forgotten) & he's a happy convert to 'upgrading via rewiring'. No blind testing done here, but here's a guy who knows next to nothing about sound & (used to) think that wire is wire. "you can't argue with success"

Good story, Bob. And Leafs, what does fovered mean? Is it liked 'rogered' or more like 'buggered'?

You are so dim witted that you can't read my post properly. Blind testing is not the same as double blind testing. And I suggest you go see a shrink about that anger.

The "boxes" are not filters per-se... The inductors, caps, R's in the networks are, to my understanding, a Group Delay Equalizer. This accomplishes the time-alignment of various frequencies traveling down the cable, such that they arrive at the speaker's terminals simultaneously. MIT explains that this phase-correction may contribute to perceived louder-sounding (and quieter = less noisy) performance than with a non-aligned cable operating at the same power level. I only have their 3rd, or 4th-best cable down from the top. Still kinda pricey, but so worthwhile! GREAT product. Spectral even 'requires' the use of MIT with their gear. Certainly a respected manufacturer, not to mention their design guru Keith Johnson. Think he just might know something?

I think Jostler has made the most sense here so far. How can so many refuse to acknowledge the mountains of evidence in the annals of psychology? One note to "Joe-coherent"--before we have another Carl-Joe fight on our hands--when you made a distinction between "blind" and "double-blind" did you mean the distinction between blind and blind A-B testing? When you mentioned the example of the perfume shop wherein one could be confused by the propinquity of the stimuli I thought you might be referring to blind A-B testing rather than double-blind testing per se, which I believe means that the person administering the blind test to another is also unaware of the nature of the sample contents being tested. As versus the single-blind test where the person administering the test would know the nature of the contents. I would agree with you that listeners can be "dazzled" by types of A-B tests, especially when the differences are subtle. However I don't see why all audiophiles don't regularly test blind, like beer and wine testers do. If people knew ahead of time that it was Chateau d'Yqem they were tasting instead of a Mongolianian Sauterne...(not that I have anything against wines from Tuva). Professional beer tastings even insist on using the same glassware for all the beer to be tested as people's decisions are known to be affected by their aesthetic response to different glassware. Often beer is tested in opaque containers because the dark coloured beers "taste" more bitter when they can be seen to be dark by the taster than when they can't be seen. Surely audiophiles are not immune to analogous effects. Why not do everything we can to reduce these effects? I am disappointed that professional reviewers aren't naturally inclined to do this. I am not denying the validity of the claims of Dekay, Bob_bundus, Gthirteen, Carl_eber and Sugarbrie etc. They could be hearing things I'm not able to perceive. Carl especially, seems to have extensive experience in the pursuit of this hobby. I'm curious--what are the reasons for not doing blind testing?