John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

I agree with Dunlavy that the snake oil peddled in cable claims only serves to detract from actual technological development and advances in audio quality, and tarnishes the audio industry in general.

Or to rephase Doc's statement, for some reason tests based on SOUND ONLY are suspect amongst a large proportion of "cable believers". Let everybody know which component is being tested and it becomes a meaningful test????

Not in my book.
JHunter

Jadem6 -

If you don't understand what JD was talking about, maybe there's a reason?? ;-)

JHunter

Good point, Jhunter.

Dr. Floyd Toole and Sean Olive published a report in the AES journal some years ago where they had a group of 40 listeners evaluate various speakers in various listening positions, both "blind" and "sighted" tests. Some listeners were inexperienced, while about 9 or 10 claimed to be audiophiles. Interestingly, the inexperienced listeners were more consistant in their scoring of the speakers between the "blind" and the "sighted" tests, which suggests that they were to some extent more reliant on the speakers' audible characteristics, while the "audiophile" listeners' score jumped more wildly going from "blind" to "sighted" tests, which seems to indicate that they were more heavily influenced by what they saw and less by what they heard.

Sqjudge -

My EE class showed the same thing - and it's correct. JD knows this also; he designed the Z6 primarily as a technical exercise and to give people the theoretically best possible solution. Reflections are not significant at audio frequencies (unless you've a much bigger living room than I!!), but the impedance matching buys a trivially small - and audibly undetectable by anyone - margin.

WHY do you think he acknowledges that there's no difference between his cable and zipcord? Hint: because the job of a cable is to have the same signal at the output as at the input - nothing more, nothing else. Barring some grossly overpriced tone controls masquarading as cables (or grossly undersized wires), the overwhelming majority of cables do an equally good job to the human ear.

Anyone disagreeing with this is welcome to demonstrate it in a double blind test.

Cheers,
JHunter