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Too good a post to waste

On a thread that is a running example of the textual equivalent of nonstop cat videos. So here it is again.


I could understand the cables are snake-oil doubters and take them seriously- in 1980. Back then there was no internet, Stereo Review was pretty much it, and Julian Hirsch was the Oracle of all things audio. Stereo Review and Julian Hirsch said if it measures the same it sounds the same. Wire is wire, and that was that. 

Even then though J. Gordon Holt had already started the movement that was to become Stereophile. JGH took the opposing view that our listening experience is what counts. Its nice if you can measure it but if you can’t that’s your problem not ours. 

Stereo Review and the measurers owned the market back then. The market gave us amplifier wars, as manufacturers competed for ever more power with ever lower distortion. For years this went on, until one day "measures great sounds bad" became a thing.

Could be some here besides me lived through and remember this. If you did, and if you were reading JGH back then, I tip my hat to you, sir! I fell prey to Hirsch and his siren song that you can have it all for cheap and don’t really have to learn to listen. Talk about snake-oil! A lot of us bought into it. Sorry to say.

But anyway like I was saying it was easy to believe the lie back then because it was so prevalent and also because what wire there was that sounded better didn’t really sound a whole lot better.

Now though even budget wire sounds so much better than what comes off a reel you’d have to be deaf not to notice. Really good wires sound so good you’d notice even if you ARE deaf! No kidding. My aunt Bessie was deaf as a stone but she could FEEL the sound at a high enough volume, knew it was music. The dynamic punch of my CTS cables is so much greater than ordinary 14 ga wire I would bet my deaf from birth aunt Bessie could "hear" the difference. Certain so-called audiophiles here, I'm not so sure.

Oh and not done beating the dead horse quite yet, according to my calendar its 2020, a solid 40 years past 1980. Stereo Review is dead and buried. Stereophile lives on. A whole multi-billion dollar industry built on wire not being wire thrives. Maybe the measurement people can chalk up and quantify from that just how many years, and billions, they are out of date and in denial. 
128x128millercarbon
isochronism
2,893 posts
 
A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
boxer12
8,656 posts
 
^^^^ On double blind testing 
asvjerry's avatar
asvjerry
4,773 posts
 
I'll just comment on pre-disposition....and move on....

Say what? *L*

...just a tease....;)

Having a spouse that majored in the 'science of the mind' back @ CSCSF, how the mind 'works' (and doesn't) has been something I had more exposure to than most.  That, and a contiuing fascination of what and how that coiled mass in ones' skull taints and paints one's entire existence....

Don't misunderstand me....everyone thinks.  One could surmise that some 'do' it better than others, which does have a particle of truth.

What you think, how you perceive, how you react....has been, and continues to, be so subject to the experiences of ones' entire life that one  can say with all honesty that nobody 'thinks' alike.

I can 'walk a mile in your shoes'...and still not experience it in the same way.  I'm not You.  You are certainly not me.

To say "You can't remember what you heard a minute ago?!"

Of course you can.  How you experienced that is already been immersed into the rest of your synapse structures.

You didn't hear what I did....or the inverse of that.

We can agree that we listened to the same thing, through the same mechanism, at the same time.

It doesn't surprise me that there's so much discussion about it in these pages.

What floors me is the amount of time, energy, and space spent trying to make the 'pointless point'.

'Tribal squabbles' comes to mind....well, mine, anyway.

And I'm well aware that I don't think like most....nor does that bother me one iota.

Cheers despite all that, J
asvjerry's avatar
asvjerry
4,773 posts
 
Your mind is the Best Toy you have, and will ever have.

Take it out to play....;)
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
On a serious note, there is a nugget of truth here. Some people simply do not really know what they hear. Its not that they haven’t heard it, but they lack the vocabulary to express what they have heard. Almost always the people talking this evanescent memory line are incapable of saying exactly what they are talking about. I’ve never once heard one of them say they heard two things so close it came down to the micro-dynamics or timbral harmonics or image focus or anything like that. No. Instead its always apparent they have no words whatsoever for what they are talking about. They are plain and simple too lazy to try and learn the vocabulary.

Now it turns out there’s a whole line of psychology devoted to trying to discern which comes first, the thought or the word. How do you even know the thing you’re talking about without knowing the word for it? Not only can you not talk about it, it turns out you cannot even think about it.

This comes up in x-ray school. An x-ray is nothing more than a 2 dimensional gray scale representation of a 3 dimensional object. When you first look at one its hard to make any sense of it at all. Then you learn a whole lot of anatomy, pathology, mega medical terminology, physics, electronics, chemistry (no kidding) and then with all of this knowledge together with a lot of years studying these things, one day you look at the flat image and are surprised to be able to see what’s going on in 3D.

And guess what? No radiologist or MD ever once asked for a double-blind. That would be nuts. That would show only that they really don’t know what they’re doing. Same here.
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