Are cable recommendations worth anything?

2020-11-06 20:35:17 UTC

you don’t provide any examples except one from a very suspect website where no such reward is offered....The description of differences is purely s...

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I did none of these things. I did provide a lot of links, and I will assume good intent that somehow you mistook that for spam.  

I think the short answer is they are only worth something if the recommendations are a) to make sure the connectors are well-made b)wider gage for longer runs, and c) the cable you already have is probably fine.  Those are the only things scientific evidence suggests at this point, despite the occasional furious snowstorm of denial.

Well, I listen with my ears not scientific instruments.  Not too hard to hear differences between cables IME.  

I don't find that argument at all compelling, as the scientific evidence covers audibility as well, with thousands of blind tests.  And if you are confident, there are many opportunities to prove that you can hear a difference for money.  No money has been claimed.  There's just zero evidence that such a claim is true, so the reasonable assumption is that the difference you are hearing is a placebo effect.

Please tell us who is conducting these blind tests, especially those offering prize money. Please also tell us the details of the blind tests you have conducted yourself.

You'd have to be hiding under a rock or willfully avoiding them not to have seen them, after decades.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/catalogue-of-blind-tests.8675/

I've blind-tested all my amps and did so with cables until I stopped buying anything fancy (but not DACs, I really should get to that).  I was unsurprised to hear no difference in the old expensive cables I own (Cardas and..Opus, I think it was?) and anything else I could find. That was a long time ago and I never looked back, given that the third party evidence is just..monumental.  There's a great test in that thread where the listeners prefer a coat hanger, and another where they can't distinguish a rube goldberg connector made of very thin transformer wire, a paper clip, and some alligator clips. Cables are pretty easy with level-matching, obviously, but the time between swaps can be pretty hard on audible memory.  If you are willing to live with hi-res digital files using each cable, go on over to Archimago's site and take a trial yourself with rapid A/B.

Amps were really a shock for me. I swore I heard differences sighted but utterly failed to get it right blind (Adcom, VTL, Bryston, March Audio).  Just used a hand-held db meter for level matching, marked off the pre-amp settings and had my son swap the amps.  I was imagining the difference, apparently.

Since then, I've offered $10k to charity to pass blind tests in a properly set up trial.  The initially interested always stomped off in a huff over the terms (I initially got Amir over at ASR and Archimago to agree to help set up the trials, and they and many others offered to chip in, you can see the details over at ASR, but that limits us to two places in the world).  Of course James Randi famously offered a lot more money.

It's worth doing this for yourself.  I still think there could be minor differences that show up in rapid A/B testing, but claims of "night and day" differences in the chain prior to the loudspeakers really don't have an evidentiary leg to stand on. Sad, as an equipment enthusiast, but the truth often is.

Seems that the moderator has taken sides here and spuriously deleted multiple posts that contained no abuse, no profanity, and no personal attacks, unlike some of the responses.  They are facilitating the epistemic closure evident among some on this site. Shame on him/her, whoever they are.

Suffice it to say that the people who are “dug in” are those who a) deny that the mountain of evidence against their subjective opinions even exists and b) don’t have the guts to prove that they have the golden ears they claim.  Dissing other people’s ears (if I had a dime for every time some super-annuated snob pulled that one) while purposely holding his hands over his own.

The null hypothesis has been clobbering the faith in cable differences for decades.  

“Their system sucks, and everyone knows it- except for them! Because they haven’t learned to listen. “

It always comes back to this. “My ears are better than yours/better than thousands of others”. It’s pure nonsense, incredibly juvenile, and contains no useful or compelling idea, let alone scientific logic.

Stereo Review started debunking the cable myth in 1983, Head-if tests hundreds of people and only one can correctly identify cables from the sound, and on and on (within the links in the thread I posted above) but all you’ve got is your claimed exceptional abilities.

Look, you can argue there is a problem with blind tests (i reluctantly disagree, but ok). You can argue that all the tests done so far are flawed (large task, but at least it makes sense), but combatting science with snobbery is kid stuff.

And I enjoy the hell out of my system, especially as I’ve learned where applying money actually makes a lasting difference for me, instead of a temporary placebo hit that inevitably fades and keeps you on the hedonic audio jewelry treadmill.

The Archimago link within the text above is a great place to start on how to actually think about finding truly audible differences, as well as the story of a fellow audio junkie’s search for an audible difference in any kind of cable (power, interconnect, digital, etc.).