Audioari1 -- First, the good news: Let me pay you a backhanded compliment and commend you for no longer *seeming* to post in the manner of a troller as of late, so that I can respond. The bad news: We seem to be talking right past each other, so either you might need to re-read my posts more carefully before responding, or I might need to do a better job of communicating.
About your critique of my proposed three-clock test, I think you miss the point. You must think that it involves comparing any one of the three clocks to no clock at all. That option exists, but isn't relevent to the design of the test. This test is intended only for *advocates* of the Clock, to be a method which allows for personalized, long-term auditioning, thus avoiding the criticisms some have leveled against conventional blind A/B testing. (This test is still blind, but can be self-administered during the auditioning phases.) The observed effects of three clocks would be reported as compared against *each other*, not against the absence of a clock. That they look outwardly identical is fundamental to the test. It is *only* a test to see if anything Machina Dynamica claims for their CLC can be audibly differentiated from a regular clock. (If you want to posit, as Tgun5 does in the other thread, that a regular clock has just as much supposed benefit as a CLC, then this test cannot help in refuting that.)
In case I'm still being hard to follow, let me put it another way, expanding on what you've suggested: Instead of giving me one Boulder with the guts of an NAD inside and asking me what I think of it (thus in all likelihood deomstating the existence of the placebo effect, but nothing about the supposed superiority of Boulders), my test is proposing that you give me three Boulders, two with NAD guts on the inside (plus a little ballast! ;^), and leaving me alone for as long as I want to determine whether I can hear any differences between the three. This is not a test intended to demonstrate the placebo effect -- the existence of which you are of course perfectly correct about, but which is where you got confused here -- it's a test intended to discern whether real audible differences actually exist. By making appearances identical, the placebo effect cancels out, leaving only real effects. We've eliminated the potentially onerous need to make the test "blind" on the outside by making it blind only where it matters, on the inside. So again I say, if you're one of those who think Machina Dynamica is actually selling something of unique value here, something justifying not only its cost but its allegedly proprietary nature, then the test I described in the above post should be able to confirm or refute that notion. (BTW, the choosing of three clocks for the test, as opposed to two or four or whatever number greater than one you care to name, was based solely on test manageability vs. expedience and is irrelevent; what matters is that only one of them be a "real" Clock.)
About the "test" story with my girlfriend and the preamps: A) It wasn't a formal test, just an anecdote that I thought appropriate in light of your preamp shootout story; B) She actually did not know which of the two preamps I was running at any given time, and furthermore did not know which was more expensive, who made what, or even who the makers were. She doesn't even carry any preconceived notions regarding makers anyway, since she's not an audiophile. In fact, I'm not sure she even knew that it was preamps I was testing, or if she could even tell you exactly what a preamp is. I just asked her to come listen to two things while I switched back and forth and for her impressions of what she heard, that's all. But as I said, she could see and hear me, and I can't rule out that I communicated something about my feelings without intending to, so it wasn't a controlled test in that regard. That she preferred the opposite one from me could be taken as an indicator that in fact I didn't influence her, but in any case her personal preferences were of secondary importance to me -- I was more interested in her knowing her subjective characterizations, which while I thought they turned out to closely match my own, she didn't know any of in advance (of course she didn't communicate them in audiophile-speak however!).
