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RE: Is Ralph Lauren making fuses now?

Cute, Brian, cute.
If you liked that one, here's another.

I posted a modified version of this on another thread (The future of hi/end audio & a rant on honesty in reviewing) but got no reaction.
It revives the old objective/subjective dispute about things that shouldn’t be observable (maybe like fuses)but seem to be anyway. Here’s at least one of the problems as I see it:

I personally--along with my audiophile buddies--hear differences in cables (and other things) and we develop preferences based upon those differences. We had a phono cable shootout a few days ago, repeating the same test we had performed a month or so ago. It was a single blind test: the swap-pees did not know which cable we were listening to; only the swapper did. The results were entirely consistent with those of the first test. All were high-quality cables in the $3,000 range.
I doubt that the differences would have been measurable by standard audio scientific methods. On the other hand, we cannot deny what our ears are telling us. One problem is a failure to communicate.

Listener group: “We hear differences when swapping cables”

Scientist/engineer: “What differences?”

Listener group: “Cable #1 sounds sweet and musical; Cable #2 sounds trashy and discontinuous; Cable #3 has no bottom end compared to #1 and #2.”

Scientist/engineer: “What the heck is anyone supposed to do with those observations?”
“I can’t measure musicality or sweetness”
“My instruments show only minute differences in bass response, noise, and phase.”
"Those minute differences could not possibly account for the perceived differences.”

And that’s when the fight starts.
Question: How do we get beyond this?


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