I am an audioenthusiast and also in the field of medicine. There is a lot bad science out there and as far as I know there are NO Double Blinded, Placebo-Controlled studies comparing different cables. I am certainly not aware of any studies ( I do not mean scientific lab measurements; I mean studies involving a good sample size of listeners/audio enthusiasts). Ultimately what matters in the REAL world is how clables sound to the human ear and not what it's inductance or gauge size is. So If there are any Placebo-Controlled, Double-Blind Studies out there, I would love to know. Having said that, I use Cardas Golden Cross Interconnects. But I once had my wife help me decide on whether the Tara Labs Air 3 sounds different than the Radio Shack Gold Series ICs. She would switch the cables without me seeing or hearing what she was doing (I would go to another room)and then she would play me the same music....We did this over and over for about 1.5 hours, listening to Recent 20-bit CD recordings from Dave Brubeck and the Magnolia Soundtrack(not 20 bit if it matters to you). I would take notes each time I listened. But you know what at the end my notes proved that i liked the Radio Shack brand about 55% of the time and the Tara Labs 45% of the time. I had initially done the A/B comparison between these two cables myself (the worst possible study design: Study size=1 with Investigator Bias=Enormous). During my own A/Bing I had decided that the Tara Labs was FAR superior to the Radio Shack brand until me and my wife decided to make the design better if not ideal. So why did I choose the Cardas?.....It sounded better (whether I wanted it to sound better is another story, I probably did) I was never able to do a comparison between the Taras and the Cardas GC in this Single Blinded fashion....In order to really find out one needs at least a few hundred subjects of different ages from both sexes with different hearing abilities using the same revealing audio set up and then make the study at least a single blind study run by examiners who have no financial stake in the audio or cable industry. No one will fund it!
Speaker wire is it science or psychology
I have had the pleasure of working with several audio design engineers. Audio has been both a hobby and occupation for them. I know the engineer that taught Bob Carver how a transistor works. He keeps a file on silly HiFi fads. He like my other friends considers exotic speaker wire to be non-sense. What do you think? Does anyone have any nummeric or even theoretical information that defends the position that speaker wires sound different? I'm talking real science not just saying buzz words like dialectric, skin effect capacitance or inductance.