Identification was based on multiple casual blind listening tests. Test subjects were asked to describe audible characteristics they could discriminate. Descriptions were found to be consistent between listeners regardless of the sequence in which cables were compared. That's all I have to say about it.
I agree with most of it, but referred to hearing we like which is narrowing the area even further, because hearing we dislike is also perceived.
Hans
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But if you didn't compare it with others in the route to power amps how do you know?
headphone cables? Really? We went from talking about snake oil to discussing people who like hearing voices in their head? Is it the far from flat responses or the artificial soundstage which makes talking about cables in headphones more silly? How about the overriding mechanical issues? Do your ‘iem’s’ double as an fm antenna? Some do…oh you added a connection so you could swap headphone cables, what do you think the odds are that the additional connection will degrade the sound more than any cable could ever ‘improve’ it? Your high-end headphones already had such a connection? Why? Oh yeah they were excited about selling you some additional ‘high-end’ cable to ‘improve’ your sound, I mean couldn’t they have just included the right cable for their headphones, skipped a connection and given you better sound? How much did they consider wire fatigue and stress relief with the connector?
That testing was done by someone else before I came along and did my own tests with an HPA. Had no reason to feel like more was necessary on my part. However, did notice the same audible change when the old line level cables were removed from my power amp and replaced with new cable. Wasn't a blind experiment but it was consistent with the blind results.
@Indigent Audio: Not headphone cable. Go back and read again. It was line level cables feeding an HPA.
Please tell us more about this test. Where, when, how, who... etc.? Thanks in advance.
What about business oriented person?
What about perceiving something?
DAC (line level device) matters for soundstage but line level cable doesn't? 🤔
Details matter so I'll ask, which blind results?
What you say sounds reasonable but I have to ask if you think the construction of the individual ear has no bearing on the signal that gets to the brain. I'm asking this because from the perspective of audio technology, the shape and construction of all transducers (both speakers and microphones) has a very large influence on the mechanics of their interaction with sound.
I guess my thought is that it's natural to want to simplify things so they can be clearly understood in principle but at what point does reducing everything to a minimum of parameters lead to operating from what we think rather than from what is actually going on, which is usually quite varied and complex with subtleties. You say "average hearing profile" which of course sounds authoritative, but given enough samples an average of 100 can be arrived at with a mix containing values of 10,000. and outliers are not de facto insignificant.
The top performers in human aural sensitivity belong to very young demographics. Given the average age of the members on this forum, the bar needs to be lowered a bit.
Heh heh, Yup, I hear ya , but I was really trying to make the point that while it's natural to quote the average, doing so without care gets one to responding to life in an average way. These discussions very often get into the flavour of arguing over right and wrong and I think reality is a little less narrowly certain.
Of course not. However, the entire system performs as a unit. The "range of normal" for hearing accuity isn't all that wide in any aspec.
The shape of the pinna is a key element in localization. However, the specific shape is included in the entire ear-brain system, so just because there are larger/smaller, or somewhat different shapped pinna doesn't mean that the ability to localize is completely skewed. Yes, the pinna affects frequency response vs axis, but that is precisely the point of it.
Lost. Sorry.
I think you know what "average" means. Let's not get pedantic.
The average in humans results in a bell curve. The point of "average" is that most of the samples are within a reasonable range of each other. There are always extremes. The extremes do not represent the average, and as data sets get larger, extremes are less significant.
Real metrics like audio analyzers and other test equipment that is many times more sensitive than a human ear? 🙂
In this picture: What is "average"? The entire sample? Just the middle? If average is the middle (I think it is) then, the average person couldn't tell the difference between seventeen-thousand-pound interconnects and barbed wire as I said near the beginning of this thread...
