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.
I wrote a trap (bit offensive) in my defense. This thread has been a joy to me. I learned few lessons and I like this topic very much with many knowledgeable participants. Cheers. Alex/WTA |
The problem with the X part is that we distinguish sound qualities differences by our unconscious body feeling not by conscious remembering .We felt a change we do not always perceive it clearly. we will perceive it more clearly by changing some acoustics parameters in the room or the gear. .. The double blind ABX test cannot be successful nor useful out of our usual sound environment including our system/room anyway ... What is indistinguishable in some environment is distinguishable in our own . You cannot do that by double blind testing with ABX method at all ... The x part will introduce a conscious interference ( a suspicion and a self doubt the stress of being tricked ) that will impede your relaxed spontaneous body feeling continous reaction in each acoustics continuous parameters change when you adjust and tune an Helmholtz resonator mechanically for example as i did. ...
The goal is not a circus test , or an industrial statistical test on a hearing population but the goal is for you improving in an incremental but continuous way your own acoustic environment ...You cannot do it and felt compelled to prove it at each minor improvement... It is preposterous... Only people with no psychoacoustics understanding can propose that or people in the business of debunking gear marketing... Like objectivist techno cultist... 😊 Simple blind test is useful and enough for any individual audiophile.
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@mahgister I do not - I have been involved in blind ABX testing in audio and in science. How the Brain Fills in the Blanks | Psychology Today There is more information out there, just like this. Our brain doesn’t change what it does because we say it is audio. |
This is just common place facts almost pop psychology used as pretext to the debunk circus in audio using ABX ...😊 Child play sorry ...
Hearing is way more deep and way more trustful friend who helped us to survive in Nature than way more just a trickster or a child filling blank at random ... ...Hearing was refine ability was key to survival in Nature and society through speech immediate perception of nuances . «"In seminars, I like demonstrating how much information is conveyed in sound by playing the sound from the scene in Casablanca where Ilsa pleads, "Play it once, Sam," Sam feigns ignorance, Ilsa insists," Magnasco said. "You can recognize the text being spoken, but you can also recognize the volume of the utterance, the emotional stance of both speakers, the identity of the speakers including the speaker’s accent (Ingrid’s faint Swedish, though her character is Norwegian, which I am told Norwegians can distinguish; Sam’s AAVE [African American Vernacular English]), the distance to the speaker (Ilsa whispers but she’s closer, Sam loudly feigns ignorance but he’s in the back), the position of the speaker (in your house you know when someone’s calling you from another room, in which room they are!), the orientation of the speaker (looking at you or away from you), an impression of the room (large, small, carpeted).» https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html
About the phenomenology of perception read real books not psychology today ... 😊 The physicist Henri Bortoft analysing the phenomenology of perception with Goethe : "taking the appearence seriously " And for acoustic this unknown writer is just confirmed by the last acoustic research Which is here: https://www.sciencealert.com/pythagoras-was-a-genius-but-he-was-wrong-about-one-thing Now the real studies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45812-z Akpan J. Essien in his book "sound Sources" way before the studies who demonstrate how Pythagoras was wrong describe it perfectly : Here an article because the book is 50 bucks 😁 :
As you can see i dont read pop psychology magazine describing how our hearing can be fooled ... It is one side of the coin the other side is how our hearing create his own world of meaning and how our hearing beat the Fourier uncertainty limit thirteen times and nobody understand how this is possible... Perhaps you learned to play with ABX protocol to debunk cables believers but i designed my own acoustic room and learned basic enough to know that if the Ears/brain can be fooled it is not the rule because we would had not survive our hallucinations or unrealistic and unnatural biases ... |
The stereo image is an audible illusion. Our ears/brains are being tricked into hearing sounds distributed throughout a spatial field. High Fidelity does an amazing job of making the room feel like it is full of musicians. And this can all be done with just two speakers. Changing cables or changing gear can disrupt the timing cues and the timbre of the music and since our senses are comparative we tend to decide we like one version over the other. Hence we will sometimes flip back and forth between two versions in our stereos unable to decide which we like better. That is not the basis for calling something, “snake oil“. It‘s much easier when we find a clear difference that we definitely like but don‘t be surprised if others disagree. A/B blind testing works best with a group or panel of jurors because differences of opinions always arise in all but the most blatant of changes. In the end its your system and you can set it up like you want. I‘ll be the first to criticize it if I don‘t like it. But it is just an opinion. Maybe someone will measure their system‘s response in their room and argue it sounds great because it measures great. Sheesh! To me, a great sounding system has clarity. That is high contrast from zero sound at rest to clear, powerful crescendos at the peaks. Bass is full, robust and clear. I can hear the fingers plucking the bass guitar strings. I can hear the timber of the drum heads. Voices are captivating with a reach out and touch them realism. Horns and brass sound like real horns and brass. Cymbals are crisp and delicate with a feel like they are right there. A piano sounds like a piano in the room and I can almost smell the wood of a stringed instrument. Rhythm and Pace that makes the music flow out of the speakers and captivates. No harshness, no fatigue and no sibilance- no cotton ear after listening a while at moderate or high volume. A bad room can muddy the bass and mid bass. It can also accentuate sibilance. A/B comparisons will be clouded/confused if room interactions are interfering with the music. Some people will be more sensitive to that than others. |
