I‘d hang out at the drive through ATM‘s to find and recruit some blind people for the testing. Drive through ATM‘s all have Braille on their keypads.
Why is that?
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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Well, that’s what I was getting at re: perceiving what one “wants,” @audphile1 - you plucked one sentence, chopped off the second half to change its meaning, then added a false narrative to make my statement contradictory. Odd if not uncommon behavior. Doesn’t warrant my effort to reconstruct what I hoped to convey. Sigh. I keep curious why folks who perceive sighted differences in their audio kit don’t aim to be more interested in uncovering whether it’s the kit or their brains as the source of perceived differences. To me, it’s just seems a weird thing to avoid. Obsessive minds can definitely be objective, and those folks tend to be very interesting (IMO); to be obsessive but only within the lanes of one’s own selective constraints for inquiry is fine, but it might not teach anyone much other than a suite of untransferable personal opinions (and if/when those are worded in factual tone, I’d say that can be an info QC issue). However, your mistaking my (lack of) formal testing for my (routinely performed) blind ABX’ing suggests an important knowledge gap, and as you don’t seem to wanna close it, I agree a good signal to end convo. All good, no hard feelings. 😊
ATM’s are likely designed / manufactured to a keypad standard shared by both drive-through and walk-up units. | ||
@benanders that whole sentence sums up your stance on this matter. I literally took nothing out of context. I don’t know what you mean by “behavior”. | ||
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