Cable auditions - Hard Work?


Does anyone find it to be "hard work" to audition cables? I find that I have to be 'fresh' before I can begin to listen to cables. After I begin, I can only listen, with the intensity needed, for a period of about an hour.

As I do A/B comparisons, it sometimes seems, my impressions change as I listen. Sometimes the differences are so small or subtle, that I question if I'm hearing a difference at all. Have I lost it?

How do you folks do your cable auditions? I'd really like to know.

Thanks
paul
oldpet

Showing 4 responses by washline

Well, I supposedly got suckered into buying a 300 dollar multi-tap with RF nodules some time ago after buying some new components and after having plugged the stock power cords into an el-cheapo multi-tap worth about 5-10 bucks. I was also curious if better quality cords make a difference sonically. What was my discovery? They most certainly do. That one 300 buck multi-tap effectively lifted the music to a far greater presence than it had before. This wasn't wishful thinking. I was very prepared to be disappointed. My ears, however, were not.

Cables make a huge difference. Period.
"Washline: The bottom line is this: Without doing blind A/B testing, your emotions and the fact that you spent big bucks on power cables will influence what you are hearing.
A/B testing is not enough."

Pretty tough to judge people's ears, yuri. Better to stick with your own. It is an organ after all and every bit as fallible as the next.
Jadem6, you've completely sold me on the K-S Emotion cables with this and your other post. I've already told Joe by email that I will be saving up over the next year and will completely upgrade my system to his cables. Thanks for some very enlightening information. You have provided some terrific posts about these cables and information that I can really use. Thanks a million.

Bill
I think there is some truth in what you say Yuri. Audio listening is entirely "subjective." Why is that? Because the ear is an organ that is the ultimate transmitter to the brain. As long as all potential listening experiences are mediated by such a subjective piece of material, one can never truly say that sensory experience is universal. But by the same token, no one else can tell someone else what they hear or do not hear. You can't take what is for you a good, reliable means for evaluating and assume it is more true than another. I'm sure that people do want to hear what they want to hear. So you are right on that score. But by the same token I think it's also very possible for people to hear what they don't want to hear. For example, they might wish that their expensive cable is better than another expensive cable in their system but decide otherwise. And also it might be the case that their cable is better than the other in a different system. So much of this already subjective and context-dependent that you can't make the kind of universal claims you are making here. All you can say is that there is some evidence on A/B comparisons where people couldn't make blind distinctions. This fact raises some question about the reliability of certain high end gear being superior to others. That's fine. What doesn't go is the idea that you can draw too many conclusions from this.