soix
8,565 posts
@benanders You took this out of context.
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@soix , understood. Thank you for your clarifications.
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.
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If a recording is played back at a different SPL (Sound Pressure Level) than the original performance, is that not distortion? Yet, recordings do not come with liner notes that specify the playback volume. I tried to convince my wife years ago that I‘m not playing the stereo too loud, I‘m playing it at the original recording level and any less loud would be distortion. She didn‘t buy it but as long as it is a song she likes… The size of the soundstage on my system varies with the recording. Some recordings are small and intimate and some go beyond the walls of my room. How would I know what is right if I have never heard the original performance? Based on my experiences listening to live music I judge what seems right during a listening session at home. There is a Roger Waters recording that puts voices 90 degrees to my left and my right. It is the most extreme that I have heard on my system save for the “laughing voice“ that is right by my head near the end of Dark Side of the Moon. Depending on speaker placement and room treatments the Roger Waters recording that I am referring to will make the imaging move forward towards the front of the room a bit from extreme left and right. So I have used that as a benchmark to ensure I have an optimum setup- assuming the artist intent was to have the sounds to the extreme left and right. |
@ tonywinga, @donavabdear To evaluate the sounds, one needs to check the state of ears. Human ears trick our perception of sounds. A same sound can be heard much different by ears. In below video, the sound at 0:27 seems pretty quiet, but the same sound is actually very noisy with a wide soundstage at 1:28. Generally, above sound can be heard like 0:27 to a’philes and like 1:28 to women/non-a’philes. Alex/WTA |
I think my current Nordost Tyr 2 XLR cables are defective then because they image and stage better than the mogami and several other cables that I used in the past.
In the recording studio, may be. However, audio reproduction at home is an echo system consisting of components, speakers, room, listener and even cables. It is a complex blend of many factors that affect imaging and soundstage. A change of a speaker toe in angle will make it or break it. None of us have a reference of how it was intended. We weren’t there. Your thought process, @donavabdear , is flawed in many ways. Including your belief that canare and mogami if used in the studio are good enough for home audio. If I use gruyere cheese and black truffle butter on my burgers and McDonalds doesn’t, are my burgers defective? |
I concur with audphile1 +1 Save for the hamburger part which is "defective" because i eat only McDonald one sorry ... 😊 |
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