I see the issue with ABX blind testing
I’ve followed many of the cable discussions over the years with interest. I’ve never tested cables & compared the sound other than when I bought an LFD amp & the vendor said that it was best paired with the LFD power cord. That was $450 US and he offered to ship it to me to try & if I didn’t notice a difference I could send it back. I got it, tried it & sent it back. To me there was no difference at all.
Fast forward to today & I have a new system & the issue of cables arises again. I have Mogami cables made by Take Five Audio in Canada. The speaker wire are Mogami 3104, XLRs are Mogami 2549 & the power cords are Powerline 10 with Furutech connectors. All cables are quite well made and I’ve been using them for about 5 years. The vendor that sold me the new equipment insisted that I needed "better" cables and sent along some Transparent Super speaker & XLR cables to try. If I like them I can pay for them.
In every discussion about cables the question is always asked, why don’t you do an ABX blind test? So I was figuring out how I’d do that. I know the reason few do it. It’s not easy to accomplish. I have no problem having a friend come over & swap cables without telling me what he’s done, whether he swapped any at all etc. But from what I can see the benefit, if there is one, will be most noticeable system wide. In other words, just switching one power cable the way I did before won’t be sufficient for you to tell a difference... again, assuming there is one. So I need my friend to swap power cables for my amp/preamp & streamer, XLR cables from my streamer to my preamp, preamp to amp & speakers cables. That takes a good 5-10 minutes. There is no way my brain is retaining what I previously heard and then comparing it to what I currently hear.
The alternative is to connect all of the new cables, listen for a week or so & then switch back & see if you feel you’re missing anything. But then your brain takes over & your biases will have as much impact as any potential change in sound quality.
So I’m stumped as to how to proceed.
A photo of my new setup. McIntosh MC462, C2700, Pure Fidelity Harmony TT, Lumin T3 & Sonus Faber Amati G5 & Gravis V speakers.
You are perfectly right in my book... The feeling emotional (unconscious) memory is very powerful too... Those who think otherwise that auditory memory is very poor and short lived confuse exact sound memory conscious retrieval with feeling/body memory which is long and guide musicians and maestro gestures.
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First :i could not pass this test at all because i never listen and will never listen seriously this pop song studio mixing soup to begin with...😁 Second : we must use a music we know perfectly well to do any test and do it in our own room system...😊 Third :the brain conscious memory of a couples of bit of sound is short in milliseconds yes... But the unconscious emotional body who had memory engrams of the music we love and know is very powerful and i use it all along my tuning of my room ...it is not a conscious act but a feeling of the body...A reaction about what is good for me or what is bad... this memory endure and is related to long pieces of music we learned deeply in our known acoustic environment ... A change in sound here will be detected. Reality is more complex than any techno-cultist ideology ...😊
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First rule of acoustics applied for audiophiles : Your system sound great, the price does not matter here, if all acoustics parameters in the system/room are balanced then no one lacking or in excess relatively to the others parameters ... Learning what are these parameters in acoustics matter...Learning how To act on them and with them matter... For sure the best design in the world will cost more than any relatively low cost system... But if you are in a race to create the best system in the world by only upgrading the gear pieces the probability are high that you will stay ignorant with the essential in audio : acoustics... People who are ignorant use a common place evident fact as " the costlier the better the design" to describe my recommendation as self delusion...😁 They ignore the power of acoustics... How did they now my lost cost modified speakers using Helmholtz principle are trash ? And not a super deal way better than many relatively costlier one with no apparent defect taking into account his design limitations, ( i cannot go under 50 hertz with these speakers marked 85 hertz in the non modified specs) how did they know that ? They are the deluded one ... 😊
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These same techno cultists will soon advocate for A.I. system knowledge connection with the brain as the only one having value then, scientists would be connected on the machine without which "purely human science " will have no value anymore. You dont need To ABX DBT a machine and all knowledge is "standardized" and sanitized as the propagandist Popper anticipated it. Rationalism conflated with Reason .( read Michael Polanyi instead he is deeper but less known and was himself a working scientist, which Popper never was) For these techno cultists the concept of meaning is reducible to bits. Goethe is an idiot and their A.I. a God... The next mankind division will be political no more , no more stupid left-right superficial debates arranged by Corporations masters as WWF wrestling matches, which only idiots only takes as serious but division between those who are connected to A.I. and those who are not for the sake of the hive. All anticipated by the Calvinist Mandeville in 1714. Stupendous. |
You had not understood my point at all... You dont even tried so enebriated by your techno-cult instead of science... Acoustics as a science exist...your argument is pure ideology... A small room acoustic cannot be standardized by the way guess why ? Acoustic content of any room differ from another as well as size, geometry and topology... my ears are biased in a way different than your own...Then i tuned my room for them... Better than ABX DBT pseudo circus , we may measure our inner ears canals and HTRF and determine our listening position better in the room etc ... In small room acoustics all must be designed for the owner perception.... Your insults against audiophiles "golden ears" are not grounded in science but in the techno cultist ideology... I dont need ABX DBT circus in my room ... 😊
You speak as an ASR ideologue..."audiophildom" as if all audiophiles were ignorant... You are ignorant you have no idea of what is acoustics sorry... Standardize your own ears i will keep mine as they are, imperfect but trainable and truthfull for my needs ... 😊
By the way the concept of timbre is not a word salad nor the concept of listener envelopment and the source auditory width ratio LV/ASW... Inform yourself how to create it in small room acoustics... No, it is not in the ABX DBT manual ... "audiophildom" "golden ears" , who use these words salad ?😊 You, poor little soul not me ... You are a deluded soul unable to see your own biases...Then you come here and throw insult because people try cables not in your way on a theater with ABX DBT ... Good luck.... But please give arguments not insults... Especially in a site where there is many other people who think differently... They are not all idiots... Cables matter way less than acoustics, even your electrical specs of design in some variable acceptable boundary matter less guess why ? Acoustics parameters variations had huge impact... No need to ABX DBT test to hear them ...
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Are you a scientist? 😊 If yes how can you ignore that the main training of the ears/brain in audio is related to acoustics with an "s", a substantive then not mere room acoustic ( an adjective). When you experiment with acoustics, you can for example modify the room reverberation time and you learn how to feel it by modifying the parameters at play... You can modify the ratio between reflection and absortion... Etc... You can play with the pressure distribution zones of the room with resonators specifically tuned... Do you really think that all i have to train my ears is changing the cables? Perhaps this lack of imagination related to the way to modify the sound characteristic reflect your own impotency more than mine... I dont use just cables to control my own system/room by far... It seems you had never read a book about acoustics nor never experimenting with acoustics and you called ABX DBT "science" ? It is not science it is just a tool useful in the industry... And you call me a "golden ears" as if it was an insult because i trained myself with acoustics basics . What is "timbre" ? How do you think we can learn it ? Just listening real acoustic instrument is not enough, we must modify the acoustics parameters of the environment where these acoustics instrument will be played lived or in playback or recorded ... This is science applied basic concepts... Timbre is defined by at least 5 characteristic parameters we must learn how to control... ABX DBT test yourself...😁 In my room tuning i only needed simple blind tests to reinforce time to time my incremental path of improvement in the tuning process...thats all ... How do you think i tuned the damping load of my damped speakers near + or - 100 grams of load on 80 pound? by listening as a tuner tune a piano WITHOUT the need of an ABX DBT test for each notes...😁 How do you think i tuned my bundle of tubes size and length choices for my rear porthole speakers new design ? By ears...
Let me smile...at your science ABX DBT which reflect ignorance and the use of expression as "golden ears" as insults to top your ignorance as a flag ...
By the way learning acoustics basic with our ears has nothing to do with my "ego" . It was my hobby to create a system/room at low cost and be creative doing so instead of buying costlier gear pieces as false solution for an acoustic problem...
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Testing hearings ability in some conditions is not the same as testing cables in some others conditions... Accusation of "golden ears" are stupid. Each ears /brain perceive differently in his own hearing environment with his own systems...This is a scientifically proven fact in musical and speech acoustics... Denying the validity or the usefulness of blind testing is also stupid. But there is difference between using simple blind test in my home as i did in my acoustics experiments and training and using ABX DBT on statistical chosen population and using it to demonstrate as in a circus run by techno cultists some audiophile claims...😁 All that is conflated as "science" ... This conflation is preposterous... This is why most cables debates are useless, there is too much factors and parameters meaningful in many fields and those who discussed are biased as : cables dont make a difference and cables makes powerful differences. Which neither claim is true because it is related to very different possible factors at play... The less useful discussion are about cables... The more useful one are about acoustics concepts ( not mere room acoustic ) and in second only about gear design ... 😊 |
I concur with this soix opinion. When you learn acoustics with your "ears"/brain you smile at the faith of these two crowds. 😊 The cable worshiphers and the cables denyers...
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You read my post the wrong way as it suit you... I insisted on acoustics experiments learning...NOT ON MY ROOM S.Q. save anecdotally which was my laboratory .... It does not matter how sound my room for you ... What matters is the results even if someone can consider them imperfect, they were stunning and would be stunning for everyone... How do you think i learned how to create the listener envelopment and sound source auditory width ratio correctly for my ears/brain located at some specific spot in my AUDIO ROOM ? In acoustics research papers it is called LV/SRW, here the definition : https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1027235/FULLTEXT01.pdf It is not important that my room please you, it please my specific ears and the change is stunning for anyone as night in hell before and day in heaven after...😊 You can doubt it because you are ignorant in acoustics. Phone one and ask him ...Ask him if i am in delirium describing the potential effect of acoustic control of a room and ask him about this ratio : LV/SWR Only narrow mind and ignorant of what acoustics means as concept in science can think that it means ONLY few panels on a wall because his wife own the living room ...Acoustics science exist with or without wife and in dedicated room ... 😁 Helmholtz resonators works as a deep central concept in acoustics...Try wikipedia...or a handbook of acoustics...I modified not only my room but by headphones and my speakers using these principles... My room was my fun laboratory not a theater for ABX double blind test of cables for "deaf" consumers... Read this above it describe what it is in great hall but the concept are the same but not applied in the same way for sure in a small room i can send you articles ... I used many articles for room acoustics because Hall acoustics is another applied realm but it is the same concepts..
You stop discussion because your ABX double blind test made no sense in architec tural acoustics construction process be it a Hall or a room ...Guess why ?😃 It is because the construction is based on physical acoustics measurements and each in wall resonators can be computed... But you can work in a very small room with various resonators and tune them by ears ...I did it for fun ...It takes 100 because of auto correction of the timbral and dynamics to my taste ... I learned acoustics in the process. I even created by the resonators grid positioning around each speakers and around my ears gaining some ambiophonic results using others mechanical means (fold screen ) with the resonators...
When someone here said "i am out" facing real argument revealing the preposterousness of this ABX circus with no answer, he say "i am out" because he act like a children going to pout in his corner ... Simple blind test are useful as i said i used them many times.it is necessary all along the acoustic tuning process.. ABX double blind is used with good reason in the industry for sure... For audiophiles it is a circus which is amusing to see and the results for a couple of cables not scientific at all because all others usual factors linked to a cable evaluation are eliminated ( our usual environment) Cables are secondary factors of S.Q. anyway not primary fundamental one ... Yes cables may sound different it does not means that it is rational to buy 10,000 bucks cables... It is ignorance of acoustics or deep pocket ...
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Your argument are so lame, do you think i tune my room by ears with 100 resonators with astonishing results but all is wrong because my eyes were open ? Do you think we can ABX double blind a piano tuner tuning the piano to be sure he do the job? Do you think save occasional simple blind test that i needed ABX blind test to convince me that what i perceive in each changing of parameters, on 100 resonators tweaked mechanically , thousand of operations for the fun of experiment, do you think my ears/brain delude me ? Study real acoustics science not ABX double blind test manual useful for statistical studies in science yes but useless and impracticable when creating our system/room/ears paradise... You are in a techno-cult as many engineers... Do you wait the replacement of man by machine too ? 😊 I change the porthole of my speakers using a bundle of straws of different size and lenght by ears, using Helmholtz principle about resonators all this with a complete improvement so great it is no more the same speakers at all . Do you think i need ABX double blind specialist to guide me ? If you think so you are deluded by your ideology which has nothing to do with science... We are not a big pharma company here nor a studies group in acoustics using population statistics with double blind test... 😊 |
I am not interested by cable threads ... There are annoying for me because the cables changes are often evident and minors change anyway compared to most others in the acoustic , mechanical, and electrical dimension... I was able to tune by ears my 100 resonators ( it was an acoustic experioments as with piano tuning) the results were not thin, but so amazing it changes the way i understood acoustics because my ears catch it not my brain placebo prone...Who will accuse a piano tuner of placebos effects in his job ? Then i learned to trust my ears and they are biased yes and prone to some illusions as anybody but they also work for a specific job, then how could i need a ABX double blind test for verifying my cables choices if i dont need it for my room after thousands of changes in a 2 years 7 days on 7 of experiments ?😊 The room is tuned for my ears system not for a circus ? Then why coming in cables thread arguing with people ? To show your engineering credentials ? It is useless because no one here will travel to a James Randi show to debunk his cables buyings which can be for sure debatable as any buyings .. Cables may differ and differ in my experience with the rightfull system in the right room minimally well installed but nothing compare to the modification of a single straw size located at some point in the room...😁 Do i need a test to verify this claim about a single straw ? No it is an acoustic principle : It is the basis of Helmholtz resonators ... Try it ... But the straw must be put in the right volume, at the right place, and of the right size... Train your ears ... It is funnier than arguing about cables and more useful to demonstrate how your hearing work and can be trusted to some limits... And you will learn your room pressure distribution zones with your body...Not by a computer measuring tools... That was my goal train my hearing "by hands" so to speak for the fun and for learning ... 😊 Acoustics is something we feel with our body not only something we write and compute on a paper ... The greeks were acousticians designing without electronics acoustic marvels and the Egyptian too ...Do they passed ABX double blind test ? I will be frank i dislike techno-cultism who plague the world right now and that some call science... The last years demonstrated to us the results of coupling techno-cultism as science and in place of science and big corporations together .. i will stop here ...
«I am an acoustician Amish»-- Groucho Marx🤓 |
Because we can evidently hear differences with many cables we can or we will measure differences ... Thanks for the video audphile1 ...😊 But generally as a factor of S.Q. it is secondary...It is why cables threads are boring for me... 😊 |
It pass my mind why people argue with no understanding of psychoacoustics where any kind of parameters and measurement ( musical, acoustical physiological, mechanical or electrical measures are subordinated to subjective guinea pigs voluntary listeners perceptive evaluation from all background) are correlated to subjective impressions collected by sampling them on a given population and studied statistically . Cables; be it for objective measurement crowd with their obsession with mere electrical measurements or be it for the other crowd for which their own ears only tell the tale and only their ears; cables, must be investigated in psychoacoustics studies. Period. Not on audio thread. If a cable matter for you fine, If the cable do not do the job, dont go objecting with Maxwell or contradicting by using it corrected by quantum theory. It is useless.Preposterous.Ridicule. I dont like cables thread. 😁😊😋 |
very well said ... +1
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I apologize to you because i was perhaps rude saying this...😁 I apologise sincerely ... But hearing is perhaps easy to trick in artificial condition but in natural one it is more reliable if not we would have less survival successes in tracking animals without being a prey ... And social decoding of language content, intonation , direction and conditions ask for a very refine tool not a tool easy to deceive ... i reacted to this common place and cliche about the fact that any senses cannot be trusted... ... Thats was my point among others in my posts ...
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Saying that :
Does not mean that our hearing is a poor tool waiting to be tricked... It only say that in natural environment we hear the sound from ONE source not from TWO speakers... Then this does not means that the ears/brain are easily tricked, it means that in a stereo ARTIFICIAL environment the ears /brain are tricked because they are designed by evolution to detect amazingly detailed information on many levels with accuracy which is unexplained by Fourier principle..... Using it as an example of a defective quality of our ears/brain is erroneous and misleading... |
This is just common place facts almost pop psychology used as pretext to the debunk circus in audio using ABX ...😊 Child play sorry ...
Hearing is way more deep and way more trustful friend who helped us to survive in Nature than way more just a trickster or a child filling blank at random ... ...Hearing was refine ability was key to survival in Nature and society through speech immediate perception of nuances . «"In seminars, I like demonstrating how much information is conveyed in sound by playing the sound from the scene in Casablanca where Ilsa pleads, "Play it once, Sam," Sam feigns ignorance, Ilsa insists," Magnasco said. "You can recognize the text being spoken, but you can also recognize the volume of the utterance, the emotional stance of both speakers, the identity of the speakers including the speaker’s accent (Ingrid’s faint Swedish, though her character is Norwegian, which I am told Norwegians can distinguish; Sam’s AAVE [African American Vernacular English]), the distance to the speaker (Ilsa whispers but she’s closer, Sam loudly feigns ignorance but he’s in the back), the position of the speaker (in your house you know when someone’s calling you from another room, in which room they are!), the orientation of the speaker (looking at you or away from you), an impression of the room (large, small, carpeted).» https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html
About the phenomenology of perception read real books not psychology today ... 😊 The physicist Henri Bortoft analysing the phenomenology of perception with Goethe : "taking the appearence seriously " And for acoustic this unknown writer is just confirmed by the last acoustic research Which is here: https://www.sciencealert.com/pythagoras-was-a-genius-but-he-was-wrong-about-one-thing Now the real studies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45812-z Akpan J. Essien in his book "sound Sources" way before the studies who demonstrate how Pythagoras was wrong describe it perfectly : Here an article because the book is 50 bucks 😁 :
As you can see i dont read pop psychology magazine describing how our hearing can be fooled ... It is one side of the coin the other side is how our hearing create his own world of meaning and how our hearing beat the Fourier uncertainty limit thirteen times and nobody understand how this is possible... Perhaps you learned to play with ABX protocol to debunk cables believers but i designed my own acoustic room and learned basic enough to know that if the Ears/brain can be fooled it is not the rule because we would had not survive our hallucinations or unrealistic and unnatural biases ... |
The problem with the X part is that we distinguish sound qualities differences by our unconscious body feeling not by conscious remembering .We felt a change we do not always perceive it clearly. we will perceive it more clearly by changing some acoustics parameters in the room or the gear. .. The double blind ABX test cannot be successful nor useful out of our usual sound environment including our system/room anyway ... What is indistinguishable in some environment is distinguishable in our own . You cannot do that by double blind testing with ABX method at all ... The x part will introduce a conscious interference ( a suspicion and a self doubt the stress of being tricked ) that will impede your relaxed spontaneous body feeling continous reaction in each acoustics continuous parameters change when you adjust and tune an Helmholtz resonator mechanically for example as i did. ...
The goal is not a circus test , or an industrial statistical test on a hearing population but the goal is for you improving in an incremental but continuous way your own acoustic environment ...You cannot do it and felt compelled to prove it at each minor improvement... It is preposterous... Only people with no psychoacoustics understanding can propose that or people in the business of debunking gear marketing... Like objectivist techno cultist... 😊 Simple blind test is useful and enough for any individual audiophile.
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I greatly appreciate your feedback on my own experience . I dont have yours in all the world studios then i am way less credible than you are ... But you certainly can imagine that 2 years full time in a dedicated homemade acoustical room with hundred of experiments along basic acoustics concepts convince me of what you just said in the rest of your posts... Most people cannot do what i have done because it takes a room your wife will never enter into 😁... And so much time that it had been full time reading, thinking , tinkering 2 years being retired... Now i learned enough to be cured of gear upgrade audiophilia... thanks for your kind word ...
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Sound perception is not about "filling what is not there" you conflate flawed stereo listening illusions (crosstalk problems) with spatial objective qualitative information the brain compute from the two ears about a vibrating sound source qualities and state and localisation ... let down the ABX manual and buy a book about acoustics... 😁 You see a side of a coin.. You forgot the other side... Biases are not only negative impediment... Some biases are positive and acquired in specific training environment as our own created incrementally dedicated acoustic room.. Have you ever created one yourself ? I bet no... If you had created one you will understand how hearing can delude us yes but most of the time inform us...You will had used as i have working on my room /system simple blind test...No need to ABX double blind circus...We are not here to prove our gold hearing ability but to create our own room ... Guess what properties here are essential for survival in nature ? No not the delusion part or aspects of hearing the informative trained one the more important one ... We must learn to hear in real environment , for example trackers in jungle...Our own well known room especially our dedicated self created one ... We dont learn to hear to be debunk by Circus James Randi ... And yes hamburger with Mushroom and caviar and truffes help hearing... 😊
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I concur with audphile1 +1 Save for the hamburger part which is "defective" because i eat only McDonald one sorry ... 😊 |
The sound evaluation at distance through youtube or recording mic from a specfic room imply so much variables that we cannot assess cables differences even if we hear them in all case... In the case of milhorn test i heard a very good system in an acoustically acceptable room acoustic and good mic conditions immediately, this is why i spot easily the differences...😊 In the second case with dwcda the room conditions and system conditions are less favorable , i did not hear immediately any differences except that the room/system were less good and perhaps the mic recording then i dont listen more than once ...They appear all the same in THESE CONDITIONS with this system/turntable/room ...
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No way someone can hear differences from a youtube video if his system is in a non optimized room with an unbalanced system... First in these conditions i cannot judge like if i was there , but what is bad will be perceived clearly if your system is very well balance ...Mine is ... I dont need blind test and i dont need to prove anything ... |
All acoustician are fraudster because they trust their trained ears and do not only takes measures... There is a big difference between hearing an unknown piece of gear from an unknownm system in unknown room condition and hearing the same piece AFTER you embed it right mechanically, electrically and acoustically in your room .. After doing that i trust my ears without the need of double blind test ABX device , those who think otherwise had never embed their system properly or they are deaf and so untrained they dont trust their own feelings and perception... They need to know for sure if what they feel can be approved by others and verified as perfect even if it means negate what they hear and prefer what the measuring tool say...Why not? they are fee to do so but by depreciating the way others do it for ideological reason then ? 😊 People are contaminated by corporations safe guideline or sometimes propagandap ....Double blind test are one like randomised trials over clinician observations... Useful in industry useless in my room and i prefer a free doctor to big pharma... |
I just tested three cables put here by a cable maker in few minutes through youtube... It is not perfect but very easy to spot the diffrences if you own a balanced system even with music through system/room i did not know with youtube ...😉
Double blind test is like randomized studies imposed by corporations over clinical observation by doctors often a way to "control" the message in the right direction ... I used simple blind test in my experiments as routine ... abx double blind test can be useful but it is in no way a proof of anything... A tool is not a proof... |
