Question for cable/wire naysayers.....
Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion and sometimes when I hear people talking about measurements with test equipment, I wonder if the ear may actually be superior to that test equipment. The ear is more sensitive than some people realize. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/earsens.html |
@tls49 That's the science part that never enters into the naysayers argument. An article I read stated that human hearing is 10X more sensitive than previously thought and that was discovered about 8 years ago. It had something to do with fourier transform and how we mere humans can tell if something is off to a degree that is basically unmeasurable. Thank you evolution, Nonoise |
Then there is the issue of not all ears being equal. Just as in all other human endeavors, training and experience matter. As Michael Fremer has reported, when the results of blind tests come in, the very top and bottom performers in a group are "thrown out", the former being cited as an aberration. In a group of 10 listeners, 8 of them may score in the middle----half correct answers (or guesses ;-), half incorrect---one below that, and one above. If one listener identifies 10 out of 10 correctly, it’s a pretty good bet he really does hear a difference, yet his result is dismissed. Even if it weren’t, in the field of scientific study, 10 out of 10 is not considered statistically significant. Who cares?! |
+1 on not all ears being equal. Consider something from a different domain: smell. There have been scientific studies of people coming into a test room and either smelling something unpleasant or not smelling anything at all. It runs at about a 50/50 split. The human nose is capable of detecting a certain bacteria in "corked" wine at a level of about 3 parts per billion. I don't think this is instrument measurable yet. That's a pretty sensitive instrument. A good sense of smell can detect up to about 10,000 unique smells. Most people are in the 4000 to 6000 range. In my view, these differences in one sense raise lots of questions about other senses, including hearing. I've gone back and forth on this topic with cables, sometimes convinced there's clear difference in cables, sometimes not. Recently I compared some DH Labs Q10 to some Monoprice Nimbus 14 AWG cable, and after a number of close listening tests, decided that they sounded the same to me. But there's no way that I can conclude what any other cable does or doesn't sound like based on these results, nor what anyone else would think after doing the same comparison. Most definitely, YMMV. |
