Caviar on hamburger
Caviar instead of beef ... How uneducated are you? 😊
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.
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I have a large variety of cables I purchased over the years. Not very expensive ones , no lamp cord, many very nice Chinese cables that would cost a fortune if they were made in Europe where I live. Anyways. I have been extensively listening to them all, for long periods of time, to the point that their performance has become very predictable. I can tune my system to a different flavor, I know exactly which cables to use. Predictable, repeatable results, both good and bad, that's no placebo. Why would I ever need a blind ABX text? Why can't people understand that, if our brains are indeed tricked by "situations" or "context", the stressful blind ABX teste with short bursts of music is certain to influence those brains - in a bad way- just as much as the (widely inflated) expectation bias? |
@audphile1 You say I wasn't there at the original recording, well I was I spend many many many many decades recording sound all over the world at the highest level in studios, churches, opera houses, castles trains and city streets I do know how the actors voice sound when your having lunch with them and understanding the differences when you're recording them with a different microphone than you usually use or listening to them on different monitors. The differences are not about cables or even the level of noise in the preamp the differences are acoustic. |
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