Some observations from a former skeptic - and a question

@ahuvia

I can appreciate being a skeptic and I’m fine with your position.  If you read my original post - I had done multiple demos previously - with no discernible difference. Conceptually, it didn’t make sense to me either. I did not expect positive results so I came in to this with no confirmation bias.

That said - the differences in an a/b comparison were pretty easy to hear. No, it wasn’t a blind test but I will politely suggest that you would have heard a difference - it wasn’t difficult to perceive.

I would also submit that one problem with a blind test is that you’re required to identify which is which correctly. The test can be failed while still perceiving  differences.  Of course, different is not always better. But let’s start with the exploration of whether or not there are differences. 

As a fellow skeptic, I think you would appreciate how many pieces of gear (some were considered state of the art and in an exalted price category) I have auditioned and passed on because there might have been a difference but I wasn’t sure - or it didn’t merit the spend.

I’m at peace with these purchases.

Best,

Audio’s a bitch when you don’t have enough listening experience or the ability and confidence to trust your own ears.  Sad really.  Yet we here have to endure their painful and utterly ignorant posts.  Ugh.

Everyone except you and I is hearing things, and I’m not sure about us either.

There was another test where all they did was change the color of a light bulb and people thought the speaker "changing" sounded different when the speaker did not change at all.

I think the psychology of some of the "meter reader" cables-don't-make-a-real-difference types is a lot like some other close-knit clans of professional skeptics - self-righteous, arrogant, vituperative, and totally closed-mindedly convinced of their mechanistic imagined view of what a human being is - a fine-tuned biological deterministic machine that can be totally characterized by various types of medical and biological research. In this mindset, if instrumentation can't detect it it doesn't exist. My impression is that there aren't any of these extreme types on this blog, but they may soon make their presence known.

These "guerilla skeptics" of audio are zealously defending the bastions of the wonderful enlightened scientific establishment against the legions of unwashed devotees of "woo" phenomena that don't exist outside their deluded audiophile imaginations, and these closed-minded skeptics are determinedly promulgating their empty philosophy wherever they can trumpet it. They worship the double-blind experimental protocol despite the fact that this protocol has the inherent tendency of (by a self-selection effect) carefully selecting out the faithful flat-Earth meter-reader engineer types who will usually predictably find nothing due to the very self-suggestion psychological phenomenon they think is going on with the true audiophiles. 

These flat-Earth meter-reader engineer audio fanatics remind me a lot of the "guerilla skeptics" that infest Wikipedia especially in the topics of paranormal phenomena and the afterlife, and of the science of Intelligent Design in its battle with Darwinism's impotent and invalid partial random walk process of random mutation plus natural selection. They have taken on the they think noble task of policing the Internet and especially Wikipedia of any false claims of esp, psi, the paranormal in general including NDEs, past life memories, mediumistic communications, any other afterlife research findings, and so on. The same scorn of the ignorant unbelievers, the same arrogance that they (the elite representatives of the True Theory) know the Truth and it has been proven by science (In reality not by a mile!). They of course also totally and deliberately and falsely mischaracterize the scientific researchers and proponents of ID as devotees of Young Earth fundamentalist Christian Creationism).

I tend to take all of this turmoil as indicative of a common thread of a strong intolerant science fanatic tendency in our society, people who have a deathly fear of "woo" of all kinds, they characterize as some sort of evil any deviation from the strict line of establishment consensus mainline reductionist materialist science, namely scientism - the worship of Science as some sort of religion. As a reversion to past ignorance and deluded religious faith that oppressed the development of enlightened Science in the beginning. Leading evangelists of this new religion are people like Richard Dawkins.

The other influence in their ranks is where there are the ones that just mainly have a strong need to belittle others in order to bolster their own egos. In order to accomplish this, they see themselves as heroic guardians of the True Faith of Materialism. Any topic where they can find what they consider "woo" is fair game since it allows them to really feel superior.

Yes measurements are maybe half useful and more useless,  but expectation bias, placebo effect and when the beer happens to kick in are all things.

They are both a thing.  

As for power cords where does it stop?  Certainly outlets should be changed to commercial duty gold plated of course, and then that horrible solid core Romex wire from the circuit breaker to the outlet needs replacing with single crystal copper.  Don't even get me going on the circuit breaker itself and the meter.  Pretty soon we are out the street hanging new power lines.   I have an electrician's license but I don't want to do that.

Honestly, my system's outlet is pretty bad.  Probably the first thing most should change including me to a heavy duty commercial type.  Where it takes effort to plug it in.  

But yeah I can see how the crappy zip cords feeding my amps may be a weak point.  And where they plug into the amps.