Some thoughts on ASR and the reviews

What the 2nd statement suggests is that you do in fact listen, however the scope of your listening relative to reviews is limited in focus which is comes into play with what folks have been critical about in this thread

That's because they don't understand the power of measurements and science of psychoacoustics showing how many are transparent to the source, obviating the need for listening tests.

When there are gray areas, or I suspect people will use this as an excuse to dismiss the review, I listen.  Here is an example of the latter, the Belden ICONOCLAST XLR Cable Review 

Iconoclast CLR Cable Listening Tests
I used two setups for listening tests: headphone and main 2-channel system:

Headphone Listening: source was a computer as the streamer using Roon player to RME ADI-2 Pro ($2K) acting as a DAC & headphone amplifier, driving my Dan Clark Stealth headphone ($4K). I started listening with Iconoclast cable. Everything sounded the same as I was used to. I then switched to WBC cable. Immediately I "heard" more air, more detail and better fidelity. This faded in a few seconds though and the sound was just as it was with the Iconoclast.

For my main system, I used a Topping D90SE driving the Topping LA90 which in turn drove my Revel Salon 2 speakers. I picked tracks with superb spatial qualities to judge the usual "soundstage." I again started with Iconoclast XLR TPC cable. I was once again blown away how good my system sounds.  I don't get to enjoy it often enough given how much time I spend working at my desk. Anyway, after a while I switched to WBC cable. Once again, immediate reaction was that the sound was more open, bass was a bit more tight, etc. This too passed after a few seconds and everything sounded the same again.

I even performed a null test with music and linked to the files in the review.

Another example is the  Review of CHORD GROUNDARRAY "Noise" Filter/Grounding

This is a dongle you attach to unused ports on your system.  It has no circuit in it, passive or active.  It just takes the ground connection and terminates it in some material. It would violate the rules of the universe if it did what they claim!  Of course measurements showed that it did nothing.  Here are my listening tests:

Chord GroundArray Listening Tests
My standard workstation where I perform my testing is naturally connected to our home network where a lot of the data files come and go during the testing over a TP Link switch. It has 8 ports with a few unused ones so I plugged the GroundArray into one of them. Inserting the device is easy. Getting it out is not because the tab is then hidden enough that you can't push to unlock it. I had to use a screw driver to push the lock in to remove it.

I played my reference tracks using RME ADI-2 Pro as I inserted and then removed the GroundARAY. There was no difference whatsoever to my ears. To avoid the accusation that I don't want to hear a difference, I then performed a null test using member @pkane's DeltaWave program. Here, RME ADI-Pro is capturing its own output for analysis. I made two captures: one with and one without GroundARAY. Here is the spectrum of null (difference) result:
 

The little dongle costs a cool $795!  Imagine how many real things you could buy for that much money to improve your enjoyment of everyday life.

Should I waste my time constantly doing these listening tests when the results are so conclusive over and over again? 

Where is the responsibility of the company in all of this?  Why don't they assemble a group of audiophiles and test them properly to show these things make a difference?  Where is the real engineering and physics explanation of any of these things making a difference?

As I said, you all need to be more skeptical here.  There a ton of people taking advantage of your improper listening tests that results in every device making a difference no matter what they do.  All this energy put toward me producing more data on these devices yet you don't apply a fraction of that to companies that make these products to prove their claim.  To prove they know something, anything, about engineering.

Listening less than 50% of the time has nothing to do with ABX blind testing. 

He was noting that you all never test with your ears alone.  So best not keep asking me about me listening.

Entirely different issues and each warrants its own discussion.

There is nothing to discuss.  You all need to start to listen properly without your eyes, matching levels, and producing statistically significant results.  Otherwise the listening tests just serve the companies that want to reach in your wallet and lighten your load.

After all, if the rest of their system is complete sh!t, it probably would sound about the same, and how could they know any better? 

Is that why MikeL and the two people with him couldn't tell his MIT Oracle cable from Monster in blind testing?  Granted, half a million dollars is not a lot of money to spend on an audio system.  How much should he have spent to hear that difference with ears alone???

After all, if the rest of their system is complete sh!t, 

Hey!  Not all sh!t smells bad.  Here is the scent of my speakers:

Stereophile Review. 

"The Salon2 demonstrated jaw-dropping dynamics in my listening room. I heard no grain or compression until the amplifier ran out of steam. The Salon2 played synthesizer and bass-drum crescendos so well that I kept cranking up the volume.....The Ultima Salon2 remained in complete control, falling silent after each percussion note. Cymbals sounded startlingly clear, utterly transparent, and sweet....The Salon2s had a spatial precision that I normally associate only with my Quad ESL-989 electrostatic speakers. Nor was the Revel's ability to deliver large, even amounts of sonic power into my listening room done at the expense of the most subtle musical details. 

the Revel Ultima Salon2 is the best-performing, most natural-sounding full-range loudspeaker I have auditioned in my listening room since I started writing for Stereophile in 1984. ..... The Revel design team has smoothed the Salon1's upper midrange while retaining that award-winning speaker's powerful bass extension, timbral accuracy, and superb dynamics. The result is an open and transparent top end, an utterly neutral and grain-free midrange, and bass that is extended and pitch-perfect. The Ultima Salon2 does all this while sounding completely neutral, with top-to-bottom smoothness, coherence, and remarkable resolution of detail."

Soundstage.

"Conclusion

No loudspeaker is perfect, but Revel’s Ultima Salon2 is the closest I’ve found. Its bass and high-frequency performance are beyond reproach, and its midrange deserves high praise for its neutrality, transparency, and speed. Some might wish for a little more of the midrange richness of, say, the Magico V2, but this would be more about desiring a certain type of sound rather than indicating any deficiency in the Salon2. From top to bottom, The Salon2 is an ultraprecise, remarkably refined, full-range transducer that delivers nothing short of state-of-the-art sound while making fewer compromises than any other speaker I’ve heard."

I am quoting sources that are in your camp.  Do tell: what is "sh!t" about my speakers?

@amir_asr - Which Monster cable and were the cable gauges similar?  Bruce Brisson was Monster's cable designer prior to starting MIT, so that's not surprising.  I have Monster's M2.4 cable and the M2 series is a fantastic used bargain and still a solid cable.

Oops.  I misspoke.  It was the Transparent OPUS cable ($46000), not MIT.  Here is the link.

"And to cut to the chase, Mike could not identify the Monster from the Opus MM with any accuracy (nor the reverse, which also would have been a positive result if he had been consistently wrong) using our testing methodology. We stopped the test a little less than halfway through, I think we got through 8 A/Bs before we gave up."

And there were four total listeners, not three.

It’s all about the hits and Benjamins.

Might be where you come from but ASR has no advertising, sponsorships, or any commercial relationships with any company. My youtube channel likewise has no ads despite having nearly 50K subscribers and fully qualifying for such. So I don’t make a penny whether you go there or not.

This forum has advertising so we are all helping defray the cost of running it by our posts here.

Although I have never had a speaker cable in any of my systems over $ 10K.

Sounds like you haven't elevated from mid-fi systems.  From my show report of Pacific Audio Fest, the Børresen room had the Ansuz D-TC Gold signature which costs $108K.

The whole system sounded poor because as you see, no cable lifters were used.  Electrons were looping needlessly and escaping onto the floor, the rack, etc.  This muddied all the detail as there were no micro-dynamics to speak of.  Soundstage was poor as well due to crosstalk between those cables.

From his link to his review on the sound of 2 different tracks

"Boomy and tuby. But large presentation."

"Central vocal image nice; bass still sounded wrong."

The following don’t specify tracks just provide overall impressions

That should have been a warning to you.  You always want to know what track was being listened to so that you can see if there are issues in the music itself.  

This system costs almost $2,000,000.  Folks who have only heard $10K speaker cords in their systems are liable to be impressed just by the cost and scale of the system.  Those of us used to listening to such expensive systems can easily put that aside and provide 1000% reliable listening test results.  To wit, let's bring in Jason Serinus of stereophile into the ring. 

"It's rare that I encourage people to take my show reports with a grain of salt, but in this case, a dip in the Great Salt Lake, imperiled as it may be, seems in order. The reason is simple. Because the pair of M6s on display had just arrived from Denmark via the Chicago area—this huge speaker requires up to 500 hours of break-in before it sounds its best—they only had 100–150 hours on them. Having already discovered how some of the hotel's huge rooms tended to overemphasize the lower midrange and upper bass, I have no idea if the over-emphasis and extra resonance I heard in that region reflected the speaker's true character, the speaker's character in the early stages of break-in, room interactions, or a combination of all three. (I expect the latter.) But beyond that, the soundstage was huge, depth was impressive, and low bass lines were as fleshed out as can be."

Pretty good match for my assessment and he did it without noticing lack of cable lifters!!!

In the comments, he says this:

"As Robert says, it's a damn show report. If you only want to read censored news, news that's in accord with your preferences, or reviews that are bought by audio companies, your choices are plentiful."

For example, AVSforum hits close to 8 million some months and threw the feral ASR minion manager out on the road (banned his hiney into oblivion).

Ah, you made me look:

Looks like you didn’t realize that the 8M visitors for AVSForum is for three months, not one. Using the same 3 month period, ASR Forum is doing 6.4M biting at their heels. Never had such aspiration for growth but it is rewarding to see how much audiophiles are tired of nonsense they read about hi-fi and want sources of reliable data and true explanation of how their systems work and can be improved.

I’m thinking if someone can’t post a picture that is oriented correctly I probably don't need them sharing their insights into high fidelity music reproduction.

Could we apply the same to someone who doesn't know how to click on the image and see it in full size and proper orientation?  And with it learn that this forum software is ignoring the metadata that tells it the orientation of the image?

It would have seemed that you would have discounted his assessment since they don't follow your science

I do.  That's why I highlighted the part that said "it is a damn show report."  Anyone who takes these seriously doesn't know which end is up.  And that applies to my show reports as well.  But at least with mine, you learn what music was played and discover new music to enjoy.  This is one of the reasons I go to audio shows.  And the other is to meet key people in these companies and have in-depth discussions with them.

The other take away is that subjectivism leads to you many answers to the same question.  They can't all possibly be true.  Jason thought there were issues with the fidelity as did I.  You quoted three others that said there was nothing wrong.  What possible value is there in such "listening?"  And why do you keep asking me to "listen" when at first chance,  you dismiss my listening tests as not valid?

I didn’t say that your listening wasn’t valid, I provided others overall assessments . 

Why would you do that?

Amir only wants to answer what he wants to answer. 

Naturally.  There is one of me and many posting audiophile nonsense.

He will defer and ignore anything else and post a bunch of graphs and babble. 

Nope.  I answered you with text.  That there is no such thing as fast or slow bass, microdynamics, etc.  I said that these are made up terms so naturally there is no measurement that matches them.  It is like saying some speaker sounds like a Donkey and asking me for a measurement for that!

 perused his site a bit and in one blurb about listening to a Dac on his headphones he marveled at the amazing dynamics!

Yes and I explained to you that this term is short hand for dynamic range and how deep the bass goes.  You disagreed and demanded to know if "Cornwall has better Macro dynamics than a Harbeth ."  I post if anyone agrees with you and no one did.  So you need to argue with the folks here, not me.  I have addressed your question and there is nothing else I can tell you.

I didn’t say that your listening wasn’t valid, I provided others overall assessments .

Sure looked like you were posting the three other reports to do exactly that.

Just because you don’t agree with how they provided their reports doesn’t make their comments invalid. 

Then you must also agree with this from Jason:

"Having already discovered how some of the hotel's huge rooms tended to overemphasize the lower midrange and upper bass, I have no idea if the over-emphasis and extra resonance I heard in that region reflected the speaker's true character, the speaker's character in the early stages of break-in, room interactions, or a combination of all three. (I expect the latter.) "

So he heard extra resonances, and overemphasis of lower midrange and upper bass.  Right?  The three other show reports posted made zero mention of any faults let alone these.

What you quoted from me was this:

"Boomy and tuby. But large presentation."

"Central vocal image nice; bass still sounded wrong.""

Jason said similar thing with "upper bass" having problems.  He praised the large presentation which I also mentioned as a positive.

By the way, it is a given, per fundamental physics and laws of the Universe that the bass in that room is wrong.  It has to do due to wave superposition.  All rooms have bass modes ("resonances" as Jason may be saying) that must be corrected.  This requires parametric equalization.  Without it, it is only a matter of what music you play (that hits on room modes), where you are listening, and your hearing acuity to detect this problem.

Above applies to any system regardless of cost.  You could have a $10M speaker system and it will still produce the wrong bass because that is a property of the room, not the speaker.

Those of you who are spending thousands on speaker wire but don't use DSP, have completely missed the boat on what it takes to have a high-fidelity system.  For $100 you could measure your room and apply the correction to get good sound.  Instead, you are admiring the cost of your system, not its true fidelity.

Another thing I found interesting is the ASR recommended PCM filter is Linear Fast.  If you go on ASR or elsewhere, people will blindly recommend this setting, simply because of Amir's reviews.  I found two things through my own testing...  First, I was getting a speaker pop from the DAC cutting off highs when leaving the DAC on 0.0 dB, so I had to turn down the volume before turning off the volume setting.  Second, Filter Off actually sounds best to me in my system, despite this being the setting that's not recommend.

This is trivially explained through measurements.  See this measurement form my VMV D1se2 Stereo DAC Review:

When you set the filter to "off," the output level jumps up by some 4 dB.  This easily results in better perceived detail, air, etc.  This is why it is critical to match levels in such listening test comparisons. 

Failing that, you want to pay attention to measurements as it not only tells you about higher volume, it also shows that "off" starts to cut off the output starting from just 5 kHz.  There is a whopping 4.5 dB droop by the time you get to 20 kHz! If you had matched levels, you would have hopefully heard the much attenuated high frequency response.  Granted, some confuse this with "less digital" which it is not.

You'll fix modal nulls with parametric EQ dude? Wow.

Automatic EQ systems do that by using a trick that relies on how much headroom  your speakers/amp have.  You pull the overall level down to the minimum of nulls (within reason).  You then use PEQ with negative gain to fix the peaks.  Result is flat response (or close to it).

Keep in mind that no true null exists in a room due to lossy nature of it.  So we are not dealing with an impossible problem.

Fortunately you don't need to fix them fully or much.  Nulls do not cause ringing in time domain so their sonic impact is much lower than peaks.  Fixing 2 to 3 peaks will make a massive difference.

This my be the most logical explanation of why all DACs don't sound the same and why chasing the best measurements doesn't produce the best sound quality.

The most "logical" explanation is one that takes science into account and tells you that sighted evaluations by the designer and reviewer have no value especially at these low levels of detail.

Fortunately Cameron is starting to learn this as you can tell from this video of his produced 5 months later than above video.  The title is clickbait as he does not at all test two different DACs but do listen to the introduction where he fully acknowledges that such testing must be blind and repeated:

I haven’t heard the D70, but heard their D90 III and it was terrible. 

Had a member send me $30,000 worth of CHORD DACs/Resmpler/Cables for testing. I asked him how fast I needed to test them and to my surprise, he said to take my time.  And that he had bought a Topping DAC and couldn't tell the difference between them so he was going to use that until I returned his gear.  Who is right?  You or him?  Measurements demonstrated by the way that the two DACs would sound the same but of course, Topping was more than 30 times cheaper.

Then there are views like this:

Again, are you right or him?  

Topping sells thousands and thousands of these models.  Why is it that they don't all return them if they sound "terrible?"  

I tell you why: until you learn to only assess fidelity with your ears alone, you will continue to live in the fog of subjectivity and not know what is what.  Once you do these tests properly, then you will that there is no conflict between objective performance of these products and what you truly hear.

You’re pretty-much buying a disposable device you anticipate may never get a firmware update and may die at any moment.

Firmware updates are rarely needed on DACs.  When they are, they are absolutely provided by the likes of Topping and SMSL.  Now, high-end companies, that is another matter.  I bought a $10,000 TacT processor years ago.  Paid another $5K to upgrade it but didn't get a chance to test it right away.  Eventually I powered it on and noticed some channels were no longer working.  Go on their site and find a new firmware.  I upgrade the firmware, reboot and the thing gets stuck in an infinite loop on power up!

I contact the company owner/founder/designer.  Told him what happened and he said I am screwed as he no longer supports that product.  The thing is still sitting here in a closet as I don't have the heart to part with it.

My Mark Levinson DAC that I bought for some $6,000 back in 1999, broke down.  I had to fix it myself, replacing a blow capacitor.  Company had promised upgrades but none were ever provided for newer/higher sample rate.  It too is sitting in storage while a Topping powers my DAC.

My other electronic failure has been a DAC made in Germany.  Its USB interface just stopped working one day.  This product cost over $1,000.

In contrast, I have about 300 to 500 DACs here, mostly from Asia.  None have failed on me.  Majority cost less than what it would take to ship my high-end gear to be repaired!

As to return policies, there are places that give you that such as Audiophonics in France.  You can also buy them from Amazon and if there are early mortality, get a refund or replacement.

The dude you are responding to spent $25,000 on his DAC.  The sales tax alone would buy you not one, but two of the best DACs Topping makes!  And it is not like he can get support from anyone local.  He would have to ship it to EU for repair, deal with customs and who knows what other grief to get it services.  And you better believe a tube product is going to have far more problems than any of the DACs I recommend.

For every stupid post that you come up with that states that all DACs sound the same...

I have not told you all DACs sound the same.  Indeed I have post expensive DACs that are not transparent. 

What I am saying is that you all have no prayer of backing your sighted listening tests when you don't use your eyes and perform a controlled listening test where only the sound differs.  You fail miserably in controlled testing where the outcome is known so we can check your answers.

Who is right? 

Science and engineering.  It predicted that MikeL wouldn't be able to tell speaker cables apart in controlled testing, that he could sighted.

Go on, find another person who agrees with you and link it here....go on...Let’s ave it!!!!!

Countless people agree with me who come to ASR.  I even post people from your camp such as the long standing member here with half a million dollar system that could not tell his uber expensive cable from cheap.  Here you go again: 

---

It was the Transparent OPUS cable ($46000), not MIT.  Here is the link.

"And to cut to the chase, Mike could not identify the Monster from the Opus MM with any accuracy (nor the reverse, which also would have been a positive result if he had been consistently wrong) using our testing methodology. We stopped the test a little less than halfway through, I think we got through 8 A/Bs before we gave up."

And there were four total listeners, not three.

Really on thin ice here. You keep quoting the one A/B where someone did not hear a difference as your proof that your "pretend science" is true. 

He is a great example because he is the uber version of you all.  He is a member here and you can question him if you like.  And his experience in this test is fully documented and not some folklore you are repeating.

Again, I can link thousands and thousands of posts and quotes and videos and online and print magazine articles that say the exact opposite....again....who has truth?

You certainly don't have the truth because you don't follow the simplest protocol to make sure the results are valid and indicate fidelity as perceived only by your ear.  Further, plurality of people confused doesn't make them right.  People lack awareness of how their perception works.  By not reading and learning the science and engineering, they are easily confused.  See this video for example:

Does not equal 

Don't confuse playback equipment with content.  No one is showing you analysis of your music but rather, cold, engineered hardware with zero awareness of what it is playing.  It is an engineered piece of hardware which can trivially be examined using engineering means.

You on the other hand, make a super lousy fidelity meter.  Your mood changes.  You take into account your life experiences to evaluate something.  You don't know your biases.  You let your eyes override your ears, etc.

We can turn you into a decent fidelity meter by using proper protocols.

For music enjoyment, we don't need any of this.  Indeed, non audiophiles are just as good as you in determine what music sound good to them vs not.  Different domains.

Basically Amir is the world's greatest cynic.....He believes that we cannot believe what we hear. 

I don't "believe."  I know.  In my last corporate job, we blind tested large community of our audiophile employees to see if they could tell lossy audio from the source.  They performed miserably, missing flaws that were instantly audible to me and our trained listing panel.  I was hoping we could use our audiophile community to expand our testing this way.  But it did not work out and served as an embarrassment to me.

You simply are not critical listeners.  You perceive a difference where none should be and instead of thinking hard why that could be, go around brag that you heard the difference.  Not once do you allow anyone to grade you.  You take the test.  Give yourself A+ and keep going.

Just because you have ears and like music, doesn't make you able to hear better than average person on the street when it comes to non-obvious differences.  You need to learn this. 

@ricevs There is no point trying to discuss A/B, A/B/X, any kind of listening test with Amir.  Any test he conducted or was directly involved in is by his definition, is scientific proof.  Of course, in every one of those cases no difference was noted, or if some slight difference was noted it will be explained away.

Double Blind tests *did* show amplifiers to sound different

"So there you have it. "Proof" that amplifiers do sound different in double blind tests."

Throughout this thread, I have post a number of positive outcomes of double blind tests which hard core objectivists saying "can't happen."  I suggest you adjust your talking points to who you are addressing.

It is really joyful to discover another hidden gem of tweaking that makes your stereo come alive. 

It would be if it is real.  If it is imagined difference, it will disappear like a fart in the wind, leaving you with emptier pocket and thicker fog of audio subjectivity.

I suggest you learn about Equalization.  In most cases it costs nothing.  Results will be transformative.  And you can tweak it for months if you wanted to.

@ricevs I notice that the all-knowing, the magnificent @amir_asr  didn't address your question.  What a surprise.

Flat-earther demands to have testimonials from hundreds of people that earth is not flat to believe.  You are going to amuse him by gathering such data?  Or do you provide proof points that earth is not flat and let him decide to learn or not?

Only three listeners is insufficient to reach the conclusion stated.

Yet we are told to believe sighted, listening of DACs, cable, etc. by single individuals here.

By if you want to be dismissive of a test that favors your cause, be my guest....

 Please show us the hundreds of double blind tests done over a long time with hundreds of subjects that prove this....please...please....please.

Forgot to address the folklore around "long term" testing being better.  Read my digest of AES paper,  Ten Years of ABX Testing, by David Clark

Two groups of audiophiles were selected.  One that subscribes to your beliefs, and one that didn't:

'Two groups of audiophiles were used as subjects. Lawrence Greenhill's Long Island based, The Audiophile Society (TAS) provided the high-end oriented "golden ears." David Clark's Southeastern Michigan Woofer and Tweeter Marching Society (SMWTMS) provided the "engineers."'

They were randomly given one of two boxes, one that did nothing and one that added 2.5% distortion.  Testing was done both with quick switching in ABX versus long term evaluation using "take home" version of the same.

This was the outcome:

"The results were that the Long Island group [Audiophile/Take Home Group] was unable to identify the distortion in either of their tests. SMWTMS's listeners also failed the "take home" test scoring 11 correct out of 18 which fails to be significant at the 5% confidence level. However, using the A/B/X test, the SMWTMS not only proved audibility of the distortion within 45 minutes, but they went on to correctly identify a lower amount. The A/B/X test was proven to be more sensitive than long-term listening for this task."

In other words, "long term" testing substantially reduces your ability to hear impairments, not improve it as subjectivists wrongly claim.  This is backed by how our hearing works.  Short term memory that lasts just a few seconds, captures hugely more data about what you are hearing than long term memory.  

Long term listening also causes adaptation which means you get used to flaws and no longer perceive them as much (or at all).

This is too hilarious.  Amir comes up with a test between '70s or '80s vintage amplifiers so he can claim both sides of the blind test argument when convenient.

The test was run back then.  I had to go and buy the rare old magazine issue which had the report in it.  The quotes you see there are from scans of the magazine.

Were any measurements performed? 

Yes but rudimentary by today's standard:

Gentlemen, you can't have it both ways. 

But you seem to be that way.  You claimed I make excuses to dismiss ABX test results.  I show you one and now you are doing exactly that.

Yet, more recent blind tests of any audio related item noting audible differences conducted with similar rigor and number of listeners are routinely dismissed by Amir and ASR faithful. 

Once again, a blind test alone is insufficient to produce reliable results.  You must match levels, and repeat enough times to get statistical rigor.  If someone doesn't know to do these things, then they don't know what they are doing.  The test I post above followed the right protocols.  As did the tests that I have run that also showed positive outcomes.

The importance of repeating enough times cannot be underemphasized. Here is me attempting to pass an ABX test:

---

foo_abx 1.3.4 report
foobar2000 v1.3.2
2014/07/09 17:39:55

File A: C:\Users\Amir\Music\Arny's 30 Hz Jitter File\Arny's new files\no jitter.wav
File B: C:\Users\Amir\Music\Arny's 30 Hz Jitter File\Arny's new files\30 Hz jitter barely noticable level .015.flac

17:39:55 : Test started.
17:40:40 : 00/01 100.0%
17:41:30 : 01/02 75.0%
17:41:41 : 02/03 50.0%
17:41:52 : 03/04 31.3%
17:42:04 : 04/05 18.8%
17:42:19 : 05/06 10.9%
17:42:32 : 06/07 6.3%
17:42:46 : 07/08 3.5%
17:42:58 : 07/09 9.0%
17:43:12 : 07/10 17.2%
17:43:27 : 07/11 27.4%
17:43:42 : 08/12 19.4%
17:43:53 : 08/13 29.1%
17:44:15 : 08/14 39.5%
17:44:46 : 09/15 30.4%
17:45:00 : 10/16 22.7%
17:45:12 : 11/17 16.6%
17:45:30 : 12/18 11.9%
17:45:52 : 12/19 18.0%
17:46:23 : 13/20 13.2%
17:46:28 : Test finished.

----------
Total: 13/20 (13.2%)

----

Notice how I was doing well to the bolded trial with 7 out of 8 right.  But once I kept going, it was clear that was accidental and I had to terminate with defeat at the end.

Someone passing such a test once or twice is meaningless.

How do you make your stereo better? Listen and experiment. Try things you have not tried.

Did you experiment with AC sockets? If so, did you then experiment with AC socket covers?

How about what you wear? Surely sound waves hit them and the fabric impacts the reflections that your ear then hears. Did you try the effect of cotton t-shirt vs sweater?

How about orientation of the cables on the floor? What if you make zig-zag pattern vs straight?

How about what you ate that day? Surely that impacts the blood vessels in your body and by direct implication, your ear and brain. What foods make your sound better or worse?

How about testing multiple samples of the same audio device model? There are hundreds or even thousands of components in them. Each one has variability. How do you know when I buy DAC X and you buy DAC X, that the two perform the same? Maybe your DAC X performs great and mine, horrible. That is possible, right?

Do you have 100% temperature control of your entire system down to a degree? Electronic devices change their characteristics measurably with temperature. Even the equipment chassis and your speaker enclosure are impacted by it. The latter is impacted by even humidity. Have you tried to figure this out and come up with exact temperature your system sounds best?

How about the type of ground you have outside? All high-end audiophiles know that grounding matters. What if I have sand and you have loamy soil? What if it has rained or not? What if there is snow on the ground? Did you test and tweak all of this?

And where did you buy your gear from? Surely if it is kept in a warehouse, vs a store, vs temperature controlled chamber, it would make a difference.

What if you painted your audio systems a different color? The particles in paint may impact EMI. Lot of audiophiles think EMI is a problem. Have you experimented with paint then?

How about how much weight is on each piece of audio gear? Did you tune that to the nearest pound? Surely that directly impacts resonances induced in the case and its impact on sound.

I have a lot more questions but let’s get the answer to these.

So, all the high end reviewers were completely wrong all these years.....Martin Colloms, HP, Gordon Holt, Peter Moncrief, Jean Hiraga, Robert Harley, John Atkinson, etc. to infinity......and all the manufacturers.....to infinity....have been wrong....all this time

They have been indeed.  That part is certain as in all these years, they have not managed to put together a single, controlled listening test that shows their sighted evaluations are true.  None! 

On JA, he often finds measurements that directly contradicts his subjective counterparts.  But that line is buried in a bunch of text, among measurements that high-end audiophiles don't understand or read.

As to plurality of them, for every one of those audio poets of subjectivity, there are thousands of engineers who would laugh at any notion they have about audio fidelity.  Take Dave Jones who is the leading engineering blogger in one of his earliest monologs about Panasonic "audio" capacitors:

I missed that you had Gordon Holt in there.  See this interview with him.

"

Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?

Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio."

Your own witness leaves you out in the cold.

There is no proof otherwise.......For the millionth time.....Show us the proof!!!!!

You are the proof.  If you were right, you would do an ears-only test and show you can tell your tweaks make a difference or not.  

But sure.  What do you think of this youtuber:

1. YOU harp about how nobody can trust their own hearing.

Everybody can trust their hearing.  I trust my hearing when I post double blind tests showing full ability to detect differences.  You too can get there if you only trusted your ear and didn't need the knowledge of what is being tested into the equation.

2. YOU base that claim on ABX tests of Audio components where no audible difference was noted and extrapolate that to a universal truth (see #1).

Nope.  Never said this either.  It is however a universal truth -- or as close as we can get to it -- that you all will absolutely flunk tests that measurements show no audible difference.  We know that because engineering tells us that.  We know that because psychoacoustics science predicts it.  We know that from experiments where you all fail miserably when only your ears are involved. 

Heck, you can't even reliably tell the differences between speakers and you want people to believe you can tell the difference between cables?

3. YOU dig up an ancient test with the staggering number of 3 participants as a valid example of audible differences being heard in an ABX test. (see #1).

The authors made the first ABX comparator.  That makes them very notable in this sort of thing.  Those authors then took the rigid position that no audible differences exists no matter what.  I challenged them for years and eventually got one to agree and disclose this test.  I bought the magazine and provided the first online record of it.  You making excuses to dismiss it makes your position extremely odd and self-defeating.

If that test was brought to YOUR attention as proof audible differences can exist, you would have dismissed it. 

The opposite is true.  I post about that test frequently when objectivists go overboard with claims of everything being the same.

It is clear you don't know what my position is in audio.  Yet you are so sure it is wrong even though it works against you.  I suggest you think again before making lists like this.

Funny thing is that this argument is not new. Had hobbyists listened to the empiricists decades ago, we would not have improved cabling, tube amps and turntables. 

I don't get involved in turntables but for sure there are no "improvements" in cabling.  Your cable company has provided long links to your house carrying hundreds of high frequency channels.  You want to say with straight face that audio needed something extra despite its ridiculously low bandwidth?

You can't use your own faulty assumptions to make another point.  My $28,000 audio analyzer has zero audiophile cables.  Yet it can measure small signals that are orders of magnitude lower than threshold of human hearing.

On tube amps, as I have said they are the steam engines of audio world.  At best they are transparent as solid state amplifiers.  On the average and certainly at worst, they screw up the audio pipeline, adding significant amount of noise and distortion on top of modifying the frequency response of your speaker.  These are all step backwards.  Not forward.

Absolutely correct. I am so happy for those who spend more time listening to music than rationalising it.

We don't spend any time rationalizing music.  You all do though by worrying about spec of dust on the wall screwing up the sound.  That level of anxiety must impact the listening pleasure.  If that doesn't, certainly the amount of time spent buying and messing with the system does.  I have seen member threads on forums go for hundreds of pages as the swing in the wind with this or that cable, tweak, product, etc.  One minute this is the best they have.  Next minute a veil is removed with something entirely different.

Folks in our camp buy performant gear, plug them in and enjoy.

 Sloppy on all counts....but, I'll let you and the minions flounder in darkness on this one, lol.

Sorry, but there is not a thing you know that we don't know and haven't discussed about acoustics at ASR Forum.  Start with this: