The level of cynicism directed at those who believe they can hear differences in cables that others can't, or won't, is a fascinating phenomenon to me. It must be rooted in some kind of personal insecurity on the part of those who can' or won't; and in the case of the most common targets, audio reviewers, my long-held belief in "reviewer envy". Here, again, we have one more example of the cynics (Rok) jumping on an opportunity to put down a believer or reviewer. The question that I find most interesting is: Why does it matter so much to the non-believers, that others believe?
The details of the Randi challenge, as described above, are totally incorrect. I think that Acman is correct in that the motivation for withdrawal of the challenge was probably "fear of failure", but for reasons that are not so obvious. The facts are (were) these:
It was NOT Fremer (reviewer) who backed out of the challenge. The first obstacle was put up by (surprise!) Randi, who refused to let Fremer use his own reference cables (the logical choice) for comparison. Randi expressed a concern that Fremer's cables might be "tweaked" to provide Fremer with "cues" for their identity. Then, after some other nonsense put up by Randi, it was Pear (?) Cable's chief who then refused to supply the cables for comparison to some cheap Monster cable in a double blind test. You see, Randi's challenge was not about wether someone could distinguish between two sets of cables. It was supposed to be about wether someone could tell cheap Monster cable from a specific multi-thousand $ cable of Randi's choosing; I think it was Pear Cable.
