Cable Controversy

Here comes another old, classic debate...to double-blind or not double-blind?  No sarcasm randy-11.  

To quote Stereophile magazine founder, Gordon Holt, from an interview in 2007:

“Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me..”

I've always been a firm believer in blind testing. We, as audiofools, listen first with our eyes, then with our wallets. After taking both factors into consideration, it is then that we use our ears just to "verify" what our eyes and wallets have told us about a product. Let's say an amplifier has a fancy faceplate, or a speaker cable looks like it came off a suspension bridge, and both of them cost 5 times as much as another amp or speaker cable. We go into the listening session with a preconceived opinion of what we will about to hear. Before we begin to listen we'll think the fancy, expensive stuff MUST sound better than the cheaper ones. This happens subconsciously and very quickly, but it's in the back of our minds. We may or may not realise it, but it's there.

I believe that if you compared audio products blindfolded, many times, you would pick out the "uglier" and cheaper products over the more pretty, expensive ones. The audio industry would obviously NEVER back blind testing. (At least the companies who make the expensive, pretty ones).

devilboy, your statement is well articulated and very likely completely true; not only where cables and equipment are concerned, but in source material as well. The same lack of double blind testing has been indicated in cases where different digital formats and/or sample rates within the same format are used (i.e. dsd vs pcm, 16 bit vs 24 bit, etc.). I highly doubt anyone can tell the difference - blindly - between between PCM 16bit and something "better than that". 

devilboy

The audio industry would obviously NEVER back blind testing. (At least the companies who make the expensive, pretty ones).

You're mistaken, because the industry is already using blind testing. In particular, Harmon uses it extensively and has a pretty elaborate setup for it.

@cleeds, maybe I didn't explain myself well enough. I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturers used blind testing within their own company to test out their products amongst other companies. I meant that they wouldn't want US to do it.