James Randi vs. Anjou Pear - once and for all

hi doug schroeder:

i will make you a wager. allow me to select a stereo system and two pair of interconnect cables.

i will bet you that i can detect the differences between the cables between digital source and preamp. of course i would be blindfolded.

how much do you want to bet ?

Mrtennis, Betting, like other forms of gambling, is a fool's game. I don't gamble. You'll have to find someone else to pad your ego. Save your money. Have your wife conduct the test, then she can report the results here! :) And if you did well, I'm sure she'd say, "You're wonderful!"

The only way $1M can be won is if the cables are tested scientifically, using a tone generator and oscilloscope, to feed a signal in one end and measure how perfectly that signal arrives at the other end.
A listening test will never work due to the subjective way we listen to music, and the simple fact that a component that sounds better to one person will sound worse to the next. No two listeners can ever hear exactly the same thing due to our ears and brain differences.

Few audio enthusiasts would doubt that good quality copper/silver cable with properly machined terminations will "improve" a system's accuracy. The true question is: at what price point does that improvement level off, rendering any more cash a simple waste? That's what Randi is getting at, the fact that a $7000 cable is not going to give a 100 fold improvement over a $70 cable, and may not even display any improvement at all.

Carl109, if you were to take say 10 of the cables that audiophiles revere plus one bought from Radio Shack and test them as you propose and find no differences even with the most accurate measurement instruments we have, what would you conclude? I would think there are but two alternatives. Either there are no differences or the measurement lack necessary precision or focus on the wrong things.

While I do think I have to rely on what I hear, I agree with you that tests such as Randi proposes are invalid measures of what we want in realistic music reproduction.