Do speaker cables need a burn in period?

Prof,There have been a lot of measurements been made.  It's called our "ears" and the data has been recorded by countless of listeners all over the world. Unless you call them all liars or you say our ears are not valid instruments.

taras22,

Prof: " Do we just accept that any hypothesis can be floated, and then decided by appeal to subjective impressions? "

taras22: Uhhhh, no.

Then, your solution to the problems I posed is...?

But throwing around claims gleaned from the application of half-baked and mis-applied protocols isn’t the answer either.

Sure. Obviously. But I don’t know that you’ve identified such misapplications (at least in what I wrote). And even when you do identify an error, isn’t that a way of suggesting how protocol CAN be tightened?

At least attempting to base claims on measurable phenomenon, and produce measurable support for a claim, as well as take the problem of bias seriously in listening tests, would be showing effort in the right direction of taking the problems seriously. (That is after all why science has been successful).

Rather than throwing out dubiously supported technical claims and just vetting them by methods known to suffer bias effects.

andy2,

Prof,There have been a lot of measurements been made. It’s called our "ears" and the data has been recorded by countless of listeners all over the world. Unless you call them all liars or you say our ears are not valid instruments.

That is a repetition of the same assertion you made before, including repeating the strawman false dichotomy of the "liar" or that "therefore all our inferences based on our hearing is unreliable."

I already dealt with those assertions in detail. Since I don’t see how your reply interacts with the arguments I’ve raised against it, I’m not sure how to respond.

How about this:

Millions of people around the world attribute their health to homeopathy.
Does that mean that homeopathic claims are correct?

Millions and millions of people, and practitioners, believe that the explanations for all sorts of naturopathic therapies are vindicated based on their subjective experience of the therapy.

Not to mention the millions in thrall of any number of treatments based on bogus ideas, but which "subjectively tested" are claimed to work. Ready for your coffee enema yet?

Not to mention the countless contradictory supernatural belief systems vetted on similar grounds.

Don’t you think that millions of people actually be wrong about something? And can that explanation not be put down to a problem in the method they have used to reach their conclusion?

Can I presume you do at least agree that people can be wrong - large numbers of people! - in the conclusions they reach based on their subjective experience?  If so, pointing to "countless" people believing they have experienced audible cable burn in isn't really getting us anywhere.  (And, how many people do you actually think have advocated for cable burn in?  Also, what are you doing with the negative results?  I don't hear any difference in "burn in" whether it's cables or other devices I've bought, and I'm far from the only one.  Get outside the confines of the typical audiophile forum to other audio/video enthusiast forums, and you'll see plenty who guffaw at the audiophile claims of "burn in" and who have not experienced any such thing.  Does your method entail ignoring negative results and only counting the positive claims?

Can I presume you do not reject all the data we have on human biases and how they sway perception?

Can I presume you do not reject that this applies to all our senses, including that people can be wrong even about what they think they hear?

If so, how are you accounting for the facts of human bias in this method where you are appealing strictly to subjective reports?

I have already, in detail, dealt with the "problem" you felt you raised, suggesting that my argument denies the utility of all subjective reports, or of our hearing in general. I showed why that is a strawman, and made a case for why it makes sense to provisionally accept reports based on hearing (e.g. in the realm well-known to be audible) and when it makes sense to be more cautious and ask for better evidence (those claims in the realm of the subtle, or in the realm where the technical/audible claims are controversial).

One can’t help wondering why in the world anyone would pursue this issue so strenuously, so verbosely, so relentlessly. What can be the motivation for being so long winded, so argumentative? To show off philosophy skills? To show off writing skills? To prove that he’s a real skeptic? To prove he too smart to be fooled by audiophile tricks? Or too smart to be fooled by unscupulous and lying high end cable manufacturers? Or to be taken in by a conspiracy of true believers, money hungry manufacturers and deluded audiophiles who drank the Jim Jones Kool Aide. I’m serious. What drives these people? What a waste of time.