Cable auditions - Hard Work?

"Washline: The bottom line is this: Without doing blind A/B testing, your emotions and the fact that you spent big bucks on power cables will influence what you are hearing.
A/B testing is not enough."

Pretty tough to judge people's ears, yuri. Better to stick with your own. It is an organ after all and every bit as fallible as the next.

Guys, don't take this personally, but unless you have done Blind ABX tests with your power cords and interconnects, it is all subjective.. you know what is playing, and you may think you hear a difference instead of really hearing one.

Stereophile magazine even did a blind A/B test with different high end amps, and most of the subjects couldn't tell the difference between them!
yep, entire amplifiers, not ICs, not Power cords..

Just a few days ago i was testing the digital outputs of my Musical Fidelity Tri Vista 21 DAC against the analog outputs of my Yamaha S2500 when playing a CD, using my transformer-based passive preamp as an A/B switch.
I couldn't tell them apart, and i doubt anyone could.
The DAC really makes a difference in units not having a great analog stage, but once you start to get in the high end of things, is hard to tell the difference.
While the Trivista 21 is one of the best DACs made, a Stereophile Class A unit, i was kind of dissapointed the analog stage of the S2500 sounded just as good, with no upsampling..
I am going to do further tests / blind tests with different CDs to see what i can hear..
Cheers

Yun, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah! That's all I hear.

Yuri: Your "I am right and I dare you to prove me wrong" approach leaves little motivation for anyone here to make the effort to help you determine why you are not hearing some differences with these products. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps your system implementation is the cause of you not hearing such changes?

My system is very different than yours and I do indeed hear changes that do not require any silly blind testing. Rather than preach to us that what we are hearing is all in our minds, perhaps a more pro-active approach would be to learn from others on what they have done to achieve the sonic differences.

Have you taken your audio gear to someone else's home and compared it to what they have? Maybe their setup would allow you to hear such immediate differences.

Your pedantic delivery that cables make no difference, DAC's make no difference, Stereophile's report shows that amps make no difference, etc., etc., benefits nobody. Does such a magazine report imply that everyone will have the same results in their home system? We can all determine the outcome of an audition for ourself.

"Just a few days ago i was testing the digital outputs of my Musical Fidelity Tri Vista 21 DAC against the analog outputs of my Yamaha S2500 when playing a CD, ..."

Why are you using the DAC's digital outputs to compare to the analog outputs of a CDP? What are the DAC's digital outputs driving? A more "conventional" test would have been the DAC's analog outputs vs. the Yamaha's analog outputs into the preamp. And what is driving the Tri Vista? The Yamaha as a transport? And through what digital cable interface? Just this interface alone could mask or entirely destroy the opportunity for you to hear the benefits of the Tri Vista.

"I couldn't tell them apart, and i doubt anyone could."

Probably true but more likely due to the system's implementation rather than there not being actual differences between these individual products.

What I find ironic from your Magnepan 2.7 vs. 3.6 thread, you wrote that changing only the inductors in the speaker brought on an improvement. ONLY THE INDUCTORS!!!! And yet you can't hear amp or DAC differences?

What do you listen for.....simply frequency response and tonality changes? What about dynamic contrasts, harmonic overtones, decays, separation of musicians on the stage, etc.? For me, these are the significant changes brought on by the components which you claim sound the same.

I read the report on the power cable test. A quick review of the components that resulted in that system would indicate that such a system poorly conveys many of the attributes I listed above. I own the Talons, and they are wonderful speakers, but they are not strong in the dimensionality areas. And forget about these attributes with the Parasound JC-1s and the Theta DAC/preamp. If you want to test a Ferarri engine, you don't drop it in a Buick Century.

So Yuri, the big question here is, if you can not hear any differences, then why not just go with a Best Buy rack system and be done with it?

I think there is some truth in what you say Yuri. Audio listening is entirely "subjective." Why is that? Because the ear is an organ that is the ultimate transmitter to the brain. As long as all potential listening experiences are mediated by such a subjective piece of material, one can never truly say that sensory experience is universal. But by the same token, no one else can tell someone else what they hear or do not hear. You can't take what is for you a good, reliable means for evaluating and assume it is more true than another. I'm sure that people do want to hear what they want to hear. So you are right on that score. But by the same token I think it's also very possible for people to hear what they don't want to hear. For example, they might wish that their expensive cable is better than another expensive cable in their system but decide otherwise. And also it might be the case that their cable is better than the other in a different system. So much of this already subjective and context-dependent that you can't make the kind of universal claims you are making here. All you can say is that there is some evidence on A/B comparisons where people couldn't make blind distinctions. This fact raises some question about the reliability of certain high end gear being superior to others. That's fine. What doesn't go is the idea that you can draw too many conclusions from this.