John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

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

This is utter nonsense 702. Dr Floyd Toole, credentials and all, does'nt even beleive that differences in Amps exist that measure the same. He has always been a hardliner Julian Hirsh type and I would hate to think of our sonic past and presant, had Floyd's philosophy been the only one.
Finnish Scientist Dr Matti Otala, probably the world's most accomplished amplifier expert and author of many great AES journal papers years ago, built and marketed the worlds most textbook perfect amplifier long ago called the Citation XX. There was not a single reason on earth for this amp Not to be perfect in all areas. The whole thing sounded only so-so. There is more to it than textbook perfect design. I'll say it again, rapid ABX switching means nothing. You must live with the product and listen extensively to music you are familiar with. Then a correct "Lock" can be identified.