Ethernet Cables, do they make a difference?

@geoffkait
>>>>>I have serious problems with long term listening as a definitive method of testing. And I’m going to tell you why. First, things change over time for any number of reasons, even day to day and hour to hour the sound can change on a whim, for no apparent reason. But sometimes the listener does make actual physical changes to his system during the long term listening. And those changes, conscious or not, can affect the sound. So, which is it, the sound on Sunday morning at 7 am or the sound on Thursday afternoon at 3 pm? Second, audiophiles frequently complain of audio memory being an issue, so what’s to prevent audio memory from being an issue in long term listening?

Once again it looks like we’re faced with the likelihood that there is no such thing as a scientifically valid listening test. There are too many variables in the case of long term listening to be able to definitively conclude anything about the device under test. If someone can’t hear it in a short term test there’s no guarantee he can hear it in a long term test

Understood. But, for me, I’ve found that in some cases, I need to hear lots of familiar music played mostly in it’s entirety, to get a handle of just what the change I made did to the music. I try my best to not introduce other changes until I’m satisfied but hey, I’m only human.

Unlike visually, where we see everything at once when we enter a room, only to have our mind sort things out, aurally, we need to hear things in their entirety, or close to it, to make a determination. Gestalt in the visual sense doesn’t work the same in the aural sense, or at least in the same time frame.

Short term listening tests can help to see if one can pick out a note’s pitch, scale or tone and not the whole contribution a change can make to the music. Long term listening can at least help get one a handle on what’s happening, in a better sense, but I agree it’s not definitive.

All the best,
Nonoise

You could do that. But why not swap cables in someone's personal system that he/she's intimately familiar with?

You're off to a great start on that 9th post. 👍

I'm speaking of the efficacy of parlor tricks vs. listening.

I found this statement from John Atkinson (the one that measurement obsessed folk fall back on for support) to put a kibosh on most A/B/X tests:  

...2nd order behaviors -eg-distortion signatures and noise modulations that characterize sound quality, and these things take a lot of listening to identify.    

It's what I and others have repeatedly stated: long term listening is the correct way to identify sound signatures and clues. You can get the gist of a cable or fuse or what have you but it takes immersion in the music, over time, to correctly assess anything, unless it's something glaringly apparent.

All the best,
Nonoise

But when conducting such tests, researchers need to be sure that the test itself is truly scientific, that variables have been eliminated and that the protocol follows established practices. That's not as easy as it might seem to the casual observer. And failing to use proper protocol yields results that are completely unreliable - perhaps even more so than sighted listening. 

Totally. The tests put forth are not in any way definitive. Nor are they the test to be conducted. As silly as it sounds, the A/B/X test would have to be tested since so far, it's only been a parlor trick. There would have to be short term tests and long term tests in order to eliminate faulty conceptual constructs in the design of the tests.

Looking at what the testers demand demonstrates a skirting of any actual test and instead, conditions guaranteed to scuttle any findings that would demonstrate that there are discernible differences.

All the best,
Nonoise