John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

I had great difficulty in blending bass and midrange in my admittedly complex system. I got most of it right by experimenting with speaker placement and room treatment but the final touches on bass rendering were only achieved by finding the right interconnect and speaker cables. I don't care if its against the law of physics or if I am hallucinating as long as my ears keep on telling me, that it sounds right now. As Greg so aptly put it: Cables are both personal and system dependent!

Pbb, in my opinion, you are missing a slight point, which I find surprising, since you seem to play the guitar:
Many audiophiles are avid concertgoers and if a piece of wire brings them closer to the experience of the real thing, who would bother then about measurements and double blind testing. For me, the only thing close to some objectivity here, is the live event and how I remember it and if science helps me along this goal, fine, je ne crache pas dans la soupe !

And p l e a s e , lets not start up this argument again. Its futile and leads to nowhere.

Pbb, I do not have the least difficulty with your argument. Besides I think it is very well written and thought out. My experience is, that people who have trained their ears to judge the performance of live or reproduced music,.i.e. in judging the performance of a given system, generally "hear" pretty much alike, although their emphasis on the parameters given for their judgements may differ. Of course, you could use tone controls instead of selected wires to fine tune a system. Only tone controls mostly degrade the sound over a broad spectrum, whereas a well chosen IC or speaker wire may in fact enhance it.
In reading your lines again, I am wondering what your basic hypothesis or assumption is, which you are building your arguments on. Would you assume, that a well designed music system, built and devised to the state of the art of accepted scientific knowledge, would, apart of the vagaries and uncertainties of room influences, be able to reproduce the original musical event in your home, provided the software is of the very best quality? And.... again, say in a truly SOTA system, how much is there "science" in its design and how much "intuition" and "art"? Or in other words, is there sufficient measurement savvy, to design a truly first class system through measurements alone?
Regards,

Pbb, very interesting post. By the way, Bob Carver of Sunfire fame, maintained quite a few years ago, that he could voice his electronics in any way he pleased, to emulate the sound of say earlier tube gear and, so I am told, he proved it successfully more than once.