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.
So, invite a dozen buddies over to listen to each cable
another invalid use case. And another reason why blind testing doesn’t work in audio. Aside from sound preferences being highly personal so I wouldn’t care what my buddies think is the best sound if it isn’t the best sound to me, you’re polling people who aren’t familiar with one’s system and who aren’t even audiophiles.
Experience shows when we’re having discussions like this and clearly a lot of people out there lack it.
If you need blind testing or your buddies to tell you which cables sound best, don’t waste your time and money. Just get a system that plays music and enjoy it. Don’t burden yourself.
All acoustician are fraudster because they trust their trained ears and do not only takes measures...
There is a big difference between hearing an unknown piece of gear from an unknownm system in unknown room condition and hearing the same piece AFTER you embed it right mechanically, electrically and acoustically in your room ..
After doing that i trust my ears without the need of double blind test ABX device , those who think otherwise had never embed their system properly or they are deaf and so untrained they dont trust their own feelings and perception...
They need to know for sure if what they feel can be approved by others and verified as perfect even if it means negate what they hear and prefer what the measuring tool say...Why not? they are fee to do so but by depreciating the way others do it for ideological reason then ? 😊
People are contaminated by corporations safe guideline or sometimes propagandap ....Double blind test are one like randomised trials over clinician observations... Useful in industry useless in my room and i prefer a free doctor to big pharma...
“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?
That’s definitely not what I “said,” @soix . Demonstrable difference and perceived difference are not necessarily the same thing. If cables aren’t being demonstrated to have difference (whether through properly arranged listener pref studies or measurements or some option I’m unaware of), then there’s no evidence to support a perception of difference. That doesn’t mean something perceived as being different is not real. It simply means there’s insufficient reason to assume it would apply in any other situation, since so many other variables will change at the same time.
It’s really sad some people need studies to tell them what they can and can’t hear.
Well, I tend to think it keeps some things more predictable and interesting. Emotions like sorrow tend to get in the way of objectivity. 😉
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.
Again, no one here has suggested that. What works for you works for you. But professing what you perceive should apply to others’ perceptions and/or use cases? Better off having some evidence.
Pretty sure most people here have been able to discern differences between two products,
Absolutely. As aforementioned, can be demonstrable or can be perceived (or can be both), so can be real or can be imagined (cannot be both); this gets muddled when some folks who don’t consider the discrepancies discuss everything they perceive as though it were demonstrable (= evidentially supported).
So like I said, whether or not it’s intentional, that style of presentation can be misleading.
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.
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