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It's just the primate social conditioning, sitting in a tree flinging whatever you can get in your hand, at whomever hooted last.
Bud
Bud
Sure but using poor quality cable on good speakers may make them sound quite.... average. 😉
Here's a quick (non double blind) test to show that speakers are vastly more important than cables.
Take a $2 per metre cable, and a $100 per metre cable (btw, nowhere near how expensive cables can get). That's a ratio of 50 to 1 in price difference. Use both cables, sighted, and switch between them to your heart's content. Even those who profess to hear differences in cables would acknowledge that the differences are subtle, not dramatic.
Now, take the estimated retail cost of your speakers. Divide the price by 50 (the price ratio of the cables). Now get hold of a pair of speakers that would cost the reduced price. For example, say your existing speakers cost say $10,000 per pair (retail), so you need to find a pair of speakers that cost $200 per pair (retail).
Listen to the cheaper speakers. They would very likely sound absolutely lower quality than the higher cost speakers. The differences will not be subtle, but dramatic.
In upgrade dollars, cables will never do for your system what better designed and built speakers can do for your system.
Correct.But if a $10000 speaker can sound better with a $500 cable,then you have to look very hard to find a $10500 speaker to better it 🙂
😉
And $10000 speakers may sound like $5000 speakers when using them with 2$ cables, quite a waste, I would say.
I can´t cite Einstein word by word on that one, but in general he expressed that it must be an exercise in folly to do something every time in exactly the same way but to expect nevertheless different results.
What means that wrt to audio dbts?
Well, it has been shown numerous times that participants in dbts do have severe difficulties to detect "sameness", which shouldn´t be _that_ surprising as it is just expression of the well known expectation bias. (Means participants usually tend to detect something that they have expected to detect, may it be real or not).
So, we are talking about a paired preference test instead. Why should we use it? Simply because it is very similar to the normal evaluation process listeners normally use. Pick two cables (amplifiers, loudspeakers whatever) and try to find out which one they prefer.
The paired preference test does that too, but would be a (double) blind test.
Of course the test protocol should make use of controls too.
Wishes
You´re welcome. 🙂
But the study doesn´t poke hole in preference testing, but enlightens the fact that double blind tests are notoriously prone to flaws (btw as every other test too), if the experimentators don´t try hard enough and in the end don´t use controls as a safe guard against all kinds of faults.
If the wine tasting double blind had used negative controls it would have been noticed quite early what was happening.
It has to be shown for a test, that it is objective, valid and reliable; you simply can´t do that without controls.
Wishes
P.S. Assumed that the test results should be generalized in some way.
I don't follow the analogy. If I measure the gravitational constant again and again, I'd expect the same results. When test after test fails to show any audible differences beyond the mundane, then yes, it's reasonable to expect that when the N+1st person does the testing, they'll have a null result, too. So the thing to do, for someone who has better things to do with their time than chase invisible horses, is to eliminate any effects of the mundane on the audible.
And though it's not something the faith-based want to hear, that's a pretty easy job for a hunk of wire.
If anyone believes otherwise they should give themselves a good ***** slapping.
The important part was this:
I suppose it depends if somebody is really interested to find out whether a difference is audible or not.
If that is not of interest, but instead the production of test results where the nil hypothesis couldn´t be rejected but nobody knows why, than there is indeed no need to change the routine.
Wishes
I suppose it depends if somebody is really interested to find out whether a difference is audible or not.
If that is not of interest, but instead the production of test results where the nil hypothesis couldn´t be rejected but nobody knows why, than there is indeed no need to change the routine.
Wishes
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For the last four days I am suffering from a really bad cold.I tried to listen to some music but my ears are so blocked that I had no success.I've tried to "listen" using my brain,but again no luck.Could it be that a bad cold can cause brain damage? 😕
Dunno about the cold but some of that cold medicine will make your brain feel like a potato. Anecdotally I have had to mix music with a head cold and thought it was really strange I instinctively offset for the change in FR and my mix really wasn't off when I checked it with a clear head.
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