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RE: Power cord realities and illusions

I find it interesting the level of self confidence / pride that some exhibit, assuming that those who don’t hear what they do, don’t have “enough resolution” on one side of the tympanic membrane or the other.

I have to admit I while I did have a hand in tube power amplifier design in the late 70’s (before the advent of IEC power connectors), I have never been in a comparison test of power cords, this being a more recent phenomena.

In the three speaker wire tests I have been in, I found a rather curious thing.
The attendees who brought their exotic cables and tried them, ALL of them heard the properties they had been hearing at home when compared to the 25 feet of hardware store lamp cord.
They went back and forth finding musical passages that made the difference most easy to detect.

THEN everything changed, well really only one thing changed. What changed was the lights on the switcher which indicated which wire was being used no longer came on.
From then on, no one knew which wire was which and that was the only change.
From then on, no one was able to tell a difference between A or B and when the indicator light was turned back on, what were “obvious big differences” were admittedly very small and the experience invariably humbling to the proud who never actually tried it or were dead sure there was a big difference with X.

Understand, the cop out of “ not enough resolution” wouldn’t apply as the attendees strongly “heard” the properties of the samples they brought listening extensively first. It was only when the light that told which was which being disabled, that prevented them from “hearing” the properties.

This is why when you get your hearing tested, that they don’t have a red light go on with the sound because you would “hear” much better.
Since there is no way to tell which side of the tympanic membrane a given detection arises from, a test where you remove any knowledge of the answer, forces the result to be based on sound arriving at your ears and not what you know or expect.
You can’t fake a hearing test as the only clue is sound and you hear it or not. As with speaker wire tests, if what you heard when you knew which was which went away without prior knowledge, then as real as it seemed, that was an internal artifact unrelated to anything external your eardrum. Of course none of this critical examination / testing helps sell any aftermarket stuff so there is a down side.




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