I see the issue with ABX blind testing


I’ve followed many of the cable discussions over the years with interest. I’ve never tested cables & compared the sound other than when I bought an LFD amp & the vendor said that it was best paired with the LFD power cord. That was $450 US and he offered to ship it to me to try & if I didn’t notice a difference I could send it back. I got it, tried it & sent it back. To me there was no difference at all.

Fast forward to today & I have a new system & the issue of cables arises again. I have Mogami cables made by Take Five Audio in Canada. The speaker wire are Mogami 3104, XLRs are Mogami 2549 & the power cords are Powerline 10 with Furutech connectors. All cables are quite well made and I’ve been using them for about 5 years. The vendor that sold me the new equipment insisted that I needed "better" cables and sent along some Transparent Super speaker & XLR cables to try. If I like them I can pay for them.

In every discussion about cables the question is always asked, why don’t you do an ABX blind test? So I was figuring out how I’d do that. I know the reason few do it. It’s not easy to accomplish. I have no problem having a friend come over & swap cables without telling me what he’s done, whether he swapped any at all etc. But from what I can see the benefit, if there is one, will be most noticeable system wide. In other words, just switching one power cable the way I did before won’t be sufficient for you to tell a difference... again, assuming there is one. So I need my friend to swap power cables for my amp/preamp & streamer, XLR cables from my streamer to my preamp, preamp to amp & speakers cables. That takes a good 5-10 minutes. There is no way my brain is retaining what I previously heard and then comparing it to what I currently hear.

The alternative is to connect all of the new cables, listen for a week or so & then switch back & see if you feel you’re missing anything. But then your brain takes over & your biases will have as much impact as any potential change in sound quality.

So I’m stumped as to how to proceed.

A photo of my new setup. McIntosh MC462, C2700, Pure Fidelity Harmony TT, Lumin T3 & Sonus Faber Amati G5 & Gravis V speakers.

dwcda

My issue with having people over for blind testing is all the stumbling around and knocking things over. Otherwise it's great.

soix

8,549 posts

04-11-2024 at 08:24pm

 

And this has been demonstrated to take less time than many audio gurus assume. If comparisons are not a literal flip-switch, subjects can be quick to lose, alter or invent, context. A “trust your ears” stance is necessarily deaf to this ubiquitous limitation, and I think that’s fine so long as the choice is not professed to be useful for everyone’s case.”

 

@benanders Lots of things have been “demonstrated” one way or another but doesn’t make something “ubiquitous.” I’ve heard consistent differences manually switching between many cables and did not need instantaneous switching to hear it, and these difference were consistent, clear, and repeatable. Some people, apparently like yourself, don’t possess the ability to do this so can’t trust their own ears, but it’s a very useful method for those of us who can.


Heyya @soix certain biological “limitations” in human hearing x associated cognitive functions certainly have demonstrated ubiquity. Despite that, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with you or anyone else trusting your respective perceptions in music kit. Professing those perceptions to be “consistent, clear, and repeatable” for others is, however, either in honest error or purposefully misleading. You need a proper assessment to claim broad applicability of perception(s), and typing disparaging speculation about someone’s hearing and/or audio kit doesn’t supplant that need, no matter how many times you do the latter. 😉

 

audphile1

4,068 posts

04-11-2024 at 09:19pm

 

@soix your arguments are falling on deaf ears.

 

@audphile1 WHAT??

Professing those perceptions to be “consistent, clear, and repeatable” for others is, however, either in honest error or purposefully misleading.

@benanders So, you’re saying I’m not hearing what I’m hearing despite hearing it consistently after multiple back-and-forth comparisons?  It’s really sad some people need studies to tell them what they can and can’t hear.  I’d submit it’s misleading (and arrogant) for you to maintain that using your ears is an error and misleading based on some study somewhere.  Pretty sure most people here have been able to discern differences between two products, but I guess you need to be told what you can hear rather than being able to objectively judge something for yourself.  Sad.  Deaf ears indeed.

A fundamental property of human perception is that it is variable. The same person experiencing the same thing on different occasions will have a slightly different experience of that thing. Different people experiencing the same thing at the same time will also have slightly different experiences of that thing. That is why measurement of psychological phenomena typically makes use of samples of data. If each person's experience is measured using a psychologically valid scale you will get a distribution of measurements with an average value and a degree of variability (e.g., standard deviation or statistical error). This enables you to say whether two distributions of data are different from one another (or not). 

So, invite a dozen buddies over to listen to each cable (not telling them which is which) and have each of them rate each cable using a psychologically valid metric (a 7-point scale anchored with the labels Like Extremely, Like Somewhat, Like Slightly, No Opinion, Dislike Slightly, Dislike Somewhat, Dislike Extremely would suffice) and you will get an average and a standard deviation for each cable. Calculate the Mean and 95% Confidence Interval for each distribution and if the two don't overlap, well, then, pick the cable with the highest mean Liking.

You can see that this takes a bit of work, but that is what is required for a  psychologically valid answer. I have actually done such research for several corporations at which I have worked. Same thing applies for visual and tactile experiences.