"01-29-15: Psag
I agree that only a limited number of switches are needed, if the test conditions are good. What are good test conditions?: A treated room with good acoustics, high quality electronics, well-recorded music, the ability to do rapid switching (having a second person to manipulate the hardware helps), and familiarity with the musical selections. That's all you need to eliminate subjectivity and get to the truth."
What I was referring to was a very simple test. You have 2 cables in the system, 1 is copper, the other silver. The goal was to see if you could pick out the silver or copper, and that's it. Nothing subjective like what cable sounds better. That's just personal preference. So after you hear a 10 second clip of music, you say copper or silver. With such a small sample, you can't really weed out things that may produce bad results. For example, lets say that there really was no difference that a test subject could hear between the 2 cables. That would mean, both cables would sound identical. But we won't know that until after the test. That would also mean, every answer given would only be right by pure chance. So for this test, since there are only 2 answers, and going by the assumption that there is no difference, over time, the answers would have to conform to a 50/50 split. If we only got 10 samples under this scenario, there's a really good chance you wouldn't get a 50/50 split with just 10 tries. With 100 tries, you get much closer. An easy way to visualize, or even try this concept to see for your self, would be to filp a coin. Flip it 10x, and even though you should get 5 heads and 5 tails, with so few tries, you can easily get different results. The only way to reduce this type of error is to take a larger sample. Flip a coin 100 times, and you'll get much closer to the 50/50 split that you would expect to get from just pure chance.
I agree that only a limited number of switches are needed, if the test conditions are good. What are good test conditions?: A treated room with good acoustics, high quality electronics, well-recorded music, the ability to do rapid switching (having a second person to manipulate the hardware helps), and familiarity with the musical selections. That's all you need to eliminate subjectivity and get to the truth."
What I was referring to was a very simple test. You have 2 cables in the system, 1 is copper, the other silver. The goal was to see if you could pick out the silver or copper, and that's it. Nothing subjective like what cable sounds better. That's just personal preference. So after you hear a 10 second clip of music, you say copper or silver. With such a small sample, you can't really weed out things that may produce bad results. For example, lets say that there really was no difference that a test subject could hear between the 2 cables. That would mean, both cables would sound identical. But we won't know that until after the test. That would also mean, every answer given would only be right by pure chance. So for this test, since there are only 2 answers, and going by the assumption that there is no difference, over time, the answers would have to conform to a 50/50 split. If we only got 10 samples under this scenario, there's a really good chance you wouldn't get a 50/50 split with just 10 tries. With 100 tries, you get much closer. An easy way to visualize, or even try this concept to see for your self, would be to filp a coin. Flip it 10x, and even though you should get 5 heads and 5 tails, with so few tries, you can easily get different results. The only way to reduce this type of error is to take a larger sample. Flip a coin 100 times, and you'll get much closer to the 50/50 split that you would expect to get from just pure chance.