DO CABLES REALLY MATTER?

That’s an excellent point that most people who aren’t intimately familiar with all the details of specific types of cables or any audio product, it’s all too esoteric for the average person, would be influenced one way or the other even if the test was SIGHTED. Even hardened audiophiles oft don’t keep up with very much of the newer developments in cables, especially HDMI, Ethernet cables, power cords, etc., as we have seen, no pun intended.

@ ron1319: I'd bet that if you repeated your tests again the next day or next week you'd get different results! Human memory of sonic "differences" is very fallible and prone to error! Making comparative testing difficult and frustrating!

So how is it that we can recognize voices that we haven’t heard for a while, say even decades....and even on lowest common denominator transducers like telephones, and in noisy environments where voice articulation is several notches below ideal.

And the reality is we do this all the time without thinking of how great our hearing is and how well our auditory memory works. Yet this phenomenon, supported by an n of literally billions, is oft very conveniently forgotten when one takes a particular side discussing double bind tests.

So here is a thought, consider for moment that The Most Esteemed Mr Kait is absolutely correct, and that there is something fundamentally wrong about testing in the double bind manner. 'Cause, reality, you know, that thingee that science is trying to map, is voicing, nay shouting, a much different tune. 

taras22,

So how is it that we can recognize voices that we haven’t heard for a while, say even decades....and even on lowest common denominator transducers like telephones, and in noisy environments where voice articulation is several notches below ideal.

How is the answer not obvious?

The differences between voices are very large in terms of timbre, harmonic content, pitch, vocal characteristics, etc.  We certainly can, obviously, remember gross audible differences as between voices.And those differences are large enough to recognize through lower fidelity transmission.


But the more subtle a sonic difference, the harder it is to remember, which is why fast switching becomes ever more important. 


If we talked for a while, you would likely recognize my voice if I called you a week later.

But if you listened to a song on my system at 70dB sound level, left for a week then returned to listen again, you would not be able to tell if I'd raised the volume by a couple db.   That difference is far too small to keep distinct in your memory.  You could have spent an entire week listening to the song at my place, but if you went a week between each "trial" to discern a couple dB level difference, we can expect you still wouldn't reliably identify the difference.

But you likely WOULD reliably identify that subtle difference if you could quickly switch back and forth between one sound file at 70 dB and the same one tweaked to 72 dB.

So if the differences are LARGE (especially multivariate), we can remember differences for longer.  The more subtle the difference, the harder time retaining them in our memory.    But...isn't that obvious?

So here is a thought, consider for moment that The Most Esteemed Mr Kait is absolutely correct, and that there is something fundamentally wrong about testing in the double bind manner. 'Cause, reality, you know, that thingee that science is trying to map, is voicing, nay shouting, a much different tune. 

And everyone at your local Psychic Fair, or alternative healing convention, or anyone peddling pseudo-science, says the same thing. 
Congratulations on the company you are keeping ;-)

roberjerman
@ ron1319: I’d bet that if you repeated your tests again the next day or next week you’d get different results! Human memory of sonic "differences" is very fallible and prone to error! Making comparative testing difficult and frustrating!

>>>>I trust you’re speaking for yourself as my audio memory is perfectly fine. Sorry to hear of your difficulty and frustration. Maybe you need to eat more fish. 🐟 besides, as I’ve oft commented things change from hour to hour, day to day, week to week for a lot of reasons so of course it would make sense that things might sound quite different from time to time. The difficulty is correlating sound with the variables, as always. Nobody promised you a rose garden. 🌹 🌹 🌹 🌹 If it was easy everyone would have a great sounding system.

- Your friend and humble narrator