laoman
335 posts
@lordrootman
"OP can you pass a honest A and B test?" Did you read the op? Is this not exactly
what he did?
No, @laoman , OP did not do a controlled A/B test (based on OP’s wording). He and his better half were probably role playing, and someone might have played the horse: read up on Clever Hans - it’ll be a shortcut to understanding how pervasive and subtle bias can be via the simplest of cues, and has been widely acknowledged for roughly a century. Doesn’t mean the differences assumed (between cables) were necessarily absent, it just means they’re being assumed without verifying something besides bias.
Bias as a word is similar to “theory” - many folks don’t understand what it actually is or how it applies in science, so as a word it often “lands” on ears/eyes differently than it probably should.
@soix funny aside - “flat earther” denotes someone who disregards all scientific evidence for the earth in fact being spherical, while demanding no scientific evidence to support the belief earth is flat. In the absence of empirical evidence for cables differing audibly (be it either measurements or rigorous preference studies), I think you might not be using that phrasal poke as deftly as you seem to assume? 😅
Studies are easy to do; they’re quite complicated to do correctly without proper understanding of the discipline(s) involved. Conversely, it seems surprisingly natural for folks to state anecdotal perception as broadly applicable fact. It’s a conundrum that extends well beyond unverified perceptions in home audio. Sigh.
The baseline purpose of making comparisons (the cable swapping exercise) that gave rise to this thread was: get good sound for recording audio books. It seems like that end was achieved, so it’s not of consequence that the road travelled was not an experimentally valid one. I’m glad the recordings worked out well and don’t see that as grounds for fussing over anything. 😁