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In Reply to: RE: USB Cables posted by mwheelerk on December 18, 2014 at 01:34:36
My experience with cables is that people tend to hear what they expect to hear when performing subjective listening tests.With objective (some type of attempt at blind) testing, the genuine look of surprise on people's faces when they hear something (or fail to hear something) different than what they expected is a lot of fun to observe. :-)
Edits: 12/18/14Follow Ups:
I'm sorry Scrith but exactly how do you know what people expect to hear and what they do hear. That may be true for yourself and it might be true for others but the only way I would know that for certain is if they told me "I expected to here this and I did hear that". Otherwise I am only making an assumption on other people's experiences.
Well, it usually comes from the discussion that inspires the blind test in the first place. Like if I hear someone say "I think WAV sounds a lot better than FLAC" I will invite them to try a blind test. Whether the response is "Gee, they sound about the same" or "A clearly sounds better than B", the results are interesting and helpful, unlike any subjective review I have ever read.
The only thing he knows is what he hears, or more precisely what he doesn't hear, himself.Why he tries to extrapolate from that, jumping to conclusions pertaining to others - that's truly beyond comprehension.
Edits: 12/18/14
Not banned at the moment for your stupid comments? Congrats, enjoy it while it lasts!
Edits: 12/19/14
.... not just stupid, but also betray total lack of experience, and lack of respect for experience of others.
I've no idea what you think you're doing here, but result definitely stinks. Badly.
I am not surprised when I fail to hear consciously what I had intuited to be the case. This is a normal situation, how the mind works. One of the reasons why this happens is that typically there are only a few portions of a track that are "tells" for small differences. If you are not paying conscious attention at these points your conscious mind will miss the clues, although your subconscious has already taken these into account. There are other issues as well having to do with memory effects. The mind builds an acoustic model over time and this ability was not designed to deal with "teleportation" from one electronically created sound field to another.These effects are surprising the first few times they are encountered. With more experience and effort one can go beyond this stage. One will never go beyond this stage without a lot of effort and that requires belief that success is a possibility. Note that an unsuccessful test does not prove that a difference could not be heard. Failure to find evidence of guilt is not proof of innocence.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Edits: 12/18/14
I agree, blind tests are not the final word on anything, but experience has shown me they are much more valuable than someone else's subjective review, which are almost always heavily influenced by expectations (e.g. "The world's most expensive cable was supposed to sound amazing, and boy did it ever!"). I have, on occasion, noticed something long after a change to my system that didn't initially seem to have much impact, such as a cable change, weeks later...usually I am just happily listening to some music I haven't listened to in awhile and I think I suddenly heard something different or new, so I ask my patient wife to try an informal blind test for me with and without the change, and sometimes the difference is clearly discernible (and sometimes it isn't, which I usually just chalk up to not remembering it quite right).
Edits: 12/20/14
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