a great take on big$ cables
My claim is very simple. Since the method proposed (i.e. DBT) is worthless (and there is lots of scientific data that says that is true) for determining audible differences There is not a shred of "scientific" evidence that says any such thing. If you have to make up science to prove your point, you've lost the argument. |
Serus: Go talk to your friend again. You didn't understand what he was telling you. When things sound the same, subjects are indeed just guessing. When they don't, they aren't, and they get statistically significant positive results. I posted a whole list of resources on DBTs on another thread (Reviews with all double blind testing). Go take a look. Then you'll understand why people really can hear differences between boomboxes and better systems--but not necessarily between cables. |
Serus: Boomboxes have their own speakers. That's why they'll always sound different from everything else (including each other). Now, if you imagine hooking the box's electronics to a pair of good loudspeakers, that's a different question. Will it sound different from a component audio system? That depends. A lot of boomboxes have wretchedly weak, high-distortion amplifiers that will be noticeable in a careful DBT. But if you use a speaker that's a really easy load, some of them just might pass. That doesn't mean they're as good as components. It just means that, for this particular task (i.e., driving this particular speaker, in this particular room) they are good enough to be indistinguishable from the specific components you compared them to. |
So, Serus, IF the boombox amp isn't clipping, and IF you equalize frequency response, THEN it will sound the same as a component system (assuming reasonable levels of IM and THD). So what? If you eliminate all the factors that make things sound different, then they sound the same. What a discovery. Alert the Nobel Committee. |
Serus: How do you know they don't sound the same? How do you know you're not imagining a difference where none exists? The answer is, you don't know, and you can't know unless you compare them blind. So if you want to claim they sound different, you have to invent and carry out some sort of blind test (since you insist the ones we have are bad) in which you demonstrate that you really can tell the difference. We're waiting. |
Where to begin, Serus? Just because you don't know the science doesn't mean the science doesn't exist. The study of human hearing is over 150 years old. Audio is not some brand new, revolutionary theory that requires confirmatory tests no one's imagined yet. Audio is old hat, much of it borrowed from other fields. And the way human hearing works doesn't change based on the faceplate of the gear you're listening to. One thing that science definitely does know is that "what your ears tell you" can be wrong. If you can't accept that, then there is no reasoning with you. Believe what you want to believe. |
Stever: You're absolutely right. And no one's ever claimed otherwise. All that's been claimed is that one brand of 12-gauge copper cable sounds exactly like another. If you want to make cables sound different, you have to make them *very* different--greatly increase resistance, or monkey around with capacitance and/or inductance. The former will attenuate the overall level of the signal, while the latter can cause frequency response roll-offs. Why you'd want a cable that wasn't flat is beyond me, but there's no accounting for taste. BTW, weren't you the guy who was planning to audition Transparent cables? You might want to take a look at what they're really made of: http://cable.tcnerd.com/whymit.asp |
