The irony is that after the first drink the taste no longer matters.
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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@nonoise …
They really picked the cream of the crop here. This comparison is equivalent of comparing Mogami, BlueJeans, Benchmark StarQuad, bottom of the line Audioquest and some other garbage on that level. Like all these blind test aficionados, they only select and include all similarly bad quality garbage that no one can pick apart. Balantine’s 17. Johnnie Walker Black. Once again this is why all these blind tests are 🐂 💩. |
In the early 1990s I was working with automaker teams to reduce fuel system noise inside the cabin. They would do DBX testing of fuel systems with 4 jurors sitting in the car inside a hemianechoic chamber. The procedure was to run the system with engine off first and then with engine on. Back in the day automakers had warranty costs related to noise so they were taking it pretty seriously. Then the Lexus brand showed up. Their new car reset the paradigm for interior comfort. The body used doubled panels with tar sandwiched inbetween and double laminated glass. The Ford team evaluated the new Lexus. Suddenly, the 0-10 subjective rating system that they used dropped a couple of points on average. Everything is relative. First rule of audio: Your system sounds great, until you hear a better system. |
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