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In Reply to: RE: You're talking about the act of listening, and experiences posted by Sordidman on January 22, 2015 at 19:51:32
But who said I was telling people that they're imagining things? I didn't say anything to that effect.
I do believe that we are all subject to confirmation bias in our listening and so I always try to back up my own subjective observations with independent confirmation, on the principle that if a disinterested party hears the same thing I do it's probably real.
Also, you seem to assume that I'm someone without experience, or someone who doesn't hear subtle differences in gear. Neither is true. Not by a long shot.
Nor did I say or suggest that all cables sound the same.
So what do I believe?
- That some people can hear subtle differences in audio gear and others merely believe they can. See forex when John Atkinson and another Stereophile reviewer were able to hear differences in a cable AB test while most others who tried couldn't reliably distinguish between the two cables. Experience and training mean a lot.
- That we're all subject to confirmation bias and that the first step to overcoming it is recognizing and admitting that we have it, that our perceptions can be and are altered by our expectations. If one isn't aware of this in one's own listening it isn't reliable. When I think I hear a subtle effect, I always seek an unprompted second opinion from someone who doesn't know audio but does know the sound of live music. Usually it verifies my own, but sometimes I'm caught in wishful thinking.
- That cables can make a difference to the sound or not, depending on the cable and the rig. This has been known since Pupin invented the transmission line!
Years ago, I was given the job of developing protocols for lead dress in the equipment racks at a atudio facility, and spent some time experimenting and measuring signals with s a spectrum analyzer. Watching EMI come and go as you move a cable a few inches or alter its angle is an eye opener. Far from making me a skeptic about the importance of proper cable design, it made me more of a believer. It was immediately obvious, for example, that the power cords on audio and video gear should be shielded! Yet we didn't see shielded power cords until many years later.
It also demonstrated, dramatically, the importance of lead dress. We all know the rules -- keep cables separate, cross at right angles, etc. But do we always follow them?
- That cables are very simple electrical devices and that only a handful of mechanisms influence the sound, and that these are well known.
- That there is a lot of snake oil in the cable business, engineering overkill that doesn't affect the sound but is used to convince people to pay exorbitant prices.
- That cable markups are very high and that you shouldn't waste money on esoteric ones because once you get the basics -- shielding, grounding, LRC, suppression of microphonics, and good connectors -- they don't make a difference.
- That some audiophiles and reviewers have used cables for tone controls to make up for flaws in equipment and recordings. It is of course possible to alter tonal balance with cables -- there's no black magic involved, the effects of changing cable impedance can and have been measured. But I think swapping out cables is a clumsy, expensive and time-consuming way to address these problems.
- That at the prices that are typically charged, putting the same money into another piece of gear -- speakers, amp, DAC, what have you -- will yield more significant results.
Just my opinion, of course, based on what I've seen and experienced over the years. As such it's always subject to revision if and when new information comes in. I think frequently this becomes an emotional debate between objectivists and subjectivists, and people start disagreeing even when they aren't in disagreement! Whereas my personal approach is more one of curiosity -- can you hear this, am I really hearing this, what is causing it from an engineering perspective, is there a cheaper way to do it.
Follow Ups:
...It seems that a lot of the dispute regarding cables is really over matters of degree. This is compounded by the difficulty of verifying human perception in a reliable and independently repeatable manner. While methodologies to deal with the issues of perception have been developed and are used in other fields, they would be awfully difficult and expensive to apply to the study of cable audibility and other high end minutia. It doesn’t help that a lot of the audio community would consider some of the methodologies to be invalid.
Because the high end cable market is tiny with little potential for big profit, I doubt a rigorous study of cable audibility will ever be conducted so we’re left with what we have now, polarization and lack of consensus. OTOH, I don't think a lack of cable consensus prevents anyone from enjoying their music.
I think you're right. And personally, I've pretty much bypassed the issue because there are so many things I can do/spend time and money on that I know will make a big difference! Or rather I try to use what I know because I've measured it or it was obviously audible, or because there are solid engineering reasons to make a decision. I just try to be practical. For example, I think shielded power cords are a no-brainer, but I think it's much more important to run a heavy gauge cable for the circuit that powers a power amplifier than it is to use a fat power cord, because that's where most of the voltage drop occurs. It's a good example of a case in which a small investment, a circuit with 10 gauge wire, is more likely to yield an audible improvement than a larger one, an esoteric power cord.
excuse me if I've misunderstood in your previous post.
That's why it's good to cite specifics.
If you compare something like AvanteGarde horns to Vandersteens, depending on other amplification factors, - cabling "CAN" or "MAY" be very important. As sensitive & highly detailed and resolving horns also reveal noise. The speaker cables, (different type of shielding)?, could possibly mitigate or amplify this noise, RFI or whatever.
Wilson, AvanteGarde, Karma, Von Schweikert, all make very expensive speakers: all of them have very different physical materials, and all of them sound different. And, - they all sound different from sub-$1000 NHT speakers. With each of those aforementioned speakers, different cables may possibly behave in different ways when we speak of transmitting RFI, or raising or lowering resonant frequency, - some more significantly than others.
Lastly, - there are really no significant "objectivists." No equipment design topology, and no resulting final sound can be universalized to sound better. You can make mundane and gross objective statements like the Manley Stingray is an integrated amplifier that uses tubes. But choosing to use tubes, or not, in your design is a subjective choice.
"Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'"
That's precisely why I didn't respond to the request for specifics. It's just too complicated and there are too many of 'em! And often you just don't know beyond broad generalizations about output impedance and the like. So I got lazy and skipped the question. :-)
My take on the "objectivist" philosophy is something like this: If you take two amplifiers AND run them within their power envelope AND put a little jigger on them so you can adjust LRC, you won't be able to hear the difference between them in a blind AB test that would confuse Einstein because it was designed to compare differences of a single variable, not complex and ever-changing audio signals.
And, of course, I could be just as snarky about subjectivists, but I'd better save that post for Hydrogen Audio. :-)
I'm actually a great believer in the utility of blind testing and AB testing and, as an engineer, trying to figure out how measurements correlate with what we hear. But on a practical level, most AB testing has limitations and is better at proving that you *can* hear something, and even the most comprehensive measurements won't tell you everything, or be easy to interpret. In many cases, it's taken decades before I understood how a given measurement influences sonics, or someone did some basic research that explained something I've puzzled over. In many cases, I'm still mystified.
And beyond that, what sometimes gets overlooked is that AB tests typically *do* show that components sound different. Tests on converters, sampling rates, amplifiers and op amps have all confirmed audible differences.
At the same time I'm aware that we all suffer from confirmation bias, and that when we evaluate audio we're trying to soot from a heaving boat because our "references" are actually recordings that differ from one another and we're listening to a long chain of equipment, so that one component can be making up for shortcomings in another.
Another way to look at it -- when I was a kid, I learned about hifi from Julian Hirsh. And then at some point I noticed that my system, chosen as it was on the basis of specifications, didn't sound as good as some systems that didn't measure as well, and discovered Stereophile and later TAS and became an ardent subjectivist.
And then, like all good things, subjective audio started to attract some snake oil salesmen and cargo cult reviewers (hi, Enid) whose perceptions had more to do with a colorful imagination than anything else. And a sort of tail-chasing retro/tweak culture arose around that. Besides which it started getting really embarrassing when people started freezing CD's and invoking quantum mechanics.
So now I try to steer clear of the extremes.
I'm not a "cable naysayer". I think I hear subtle differences between different cables, at least some of the time. I definitely believe in the importance of using clean, tight fitting connectors and cables designed to reject extraneous noise.That said, there is a hierarchy of importance in audio componentry. Speakers, recordings, and source components rank higher than cables and racks and footers do. This much is true, I think.
That said, sometimes there's a tendency to focus overly much on the minor differences produced by the lower ranking components once the highest ranking components have been installed and adjusted to our satisfaction. It's almost as if, once the *big picture* has been established, my mind has little else to do but obsess over the tinier details of the presentation. And as I focus more and more upon the tinier details, those details seem to jump out at me in what is perhaps an inordinate manner. Just as the slightest speck of dirt on a fresh white tablecloth might appear like an abomination to the fastidious and disconsolate homemaker, the slightest bit of grit or grunge in the sonic presentation can seem most annoying to the dedicated audiophile. Unforgiveness reigns in the minds of the obsessed.
YMMV and FWIW, of course...
Edits: 01/23/15 01/23/15
LOL, no, I agree. It's what John Atkinson described once as "Princess and the Pea" syndrome -- as I become intimately familiar with a pierce of gear, I start to hear every little shortcoming. And you can get so into that that you can start to miss the forest for the trees. Then you end up with one of those systems where you invite someone to listen and they aren't impressed. "What, dear, you don't hear the non-resonant outlet plate I installed?"
Well, I do think some of that micro tuning is necessary since you do have to live with your system. Forex, there's a window behind one of my speakers at the first reflection point and I can always hear it there, distorting the image. An occasional listener wouldn't notice the effect unless maybe I pointed it out, but I do, and since I have to live with it I'm trying to do something about it.
But mostly, I try to stay focused on the big things like speakers, elecronics, and acoustics, because I think that's where most of the gain lies.
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