Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

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Re: This is to Phil Tower and whoever else cares....

Posted by Phil Tower on November 13, 2002 at 15:07:24

In Reply to: This is to Phil Tower and whoever else cares.... posted by Monstrous Mike on November 13, 2002 at 14:29:53:

Mike:

I recognize that the NRC, CRC and Dr. Toole are highly respected, and they may very well have developed extremely reliable protocols and are probably using defensible statistical analysis in interpreting their raw data. However, I don't ever recall seeing a detailed description of their protocols or the statistical analysis used, nor am I aware of any of their work having been peer reviewed. I very well could have missed all this and it may very well be readily available.

I would assume that the CRC facilities would be available to whomever was willing to pay to have them conduct DBTs on cables and components. However, as your posts suggest, there has not been much commitment to providing those funds from any source.

If a cable manufacturer could come up with a DBT that showed their cables were better than even zip cord or Radio Shack, I'm willing to bet a thousand dollars, they would. So why don't they?

You and I have been over this one several times at AR. My position is as follows.

First, the cable industry is mainly a cottage industry. Very few cable companies can afford to even advertise, let alone afford the cost of outside, independent testing. It would certainly cost less to run their own tests, but if they achieved positive results many people I am sure would attack such results as unreliable because they had not been independently verified.

Moreover, I can see absolutely nothing to be gained by a cable company being able to prove that their cable can be distinguished from others in blind testing. The vast majority of their potential customers (sometimes broadly referred to as “subjectivists” or “yeasayers”) really don’t care about DBTs. These people, rightly or wrongly, already believe that different cables can often be easily distinguished sonically, and believe that just about any after-market cable is better than zip cord.

Before a cable company could show under control testing that their cable is an improvement on zip cord, they would first have to demonstrate under control conditions that their cable can even be distinguished sonically from zip cable. For those of us who follow this issue, this would certainly be an extremely interesting demonstration. However, for the vast majority of the high-end cable consumers, it would be considered almost a non-event. Then, the company would have to demonstrate that a significant number of listeners who could distinguish, actually preferred the company’s cable over zip. Again, for most potential consumers this is going to be nothing other than a big yawner.

So, I suspect that virtually every cable company that is concerned with paying its bills and keeping the lights on would decide that their money would not be wisely spent hiring the CRC, or any other independent lab, to conduct tests on their cables (even if they could afford the cost of such testing), but would instead come to the conclusion that the money would be far better spent either on advertising or doing more of whatever it is that they believe makes their cables superior.

DBTs on codecs are cost effective, because the profit potential is enormous. That is simply not the case with most, if not all, cable companies. Which also happens to mean that there will most likely never be any public funds available to support sophisticated blind testing of audio cables.

If one were to accept the above argument (from past experience I'm pretty sure you don't), that then leaves the question of why even talk about DBT protocol and statistical analysis. Well, perhaps I'm overly Polyanna on this, but it seems to me that if this subject receives thoughtful consideration on this forum, perhaps some one person or group of people will be interested enough to use the results of these discussions to settle upon a defensible protocol and undertake to conduct their own independent DBTs on a certain cross section of commercially available cables, with the idea of bringing a little more sophisticate research to the Great Cable Debate than may have been the case in the past.

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Sonic Craft

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