scientific double blinded cable test

  nonoise

Imagine going through life not being allowed to believe something you can hear, let alone see, taste, smell or touch, because someone else hyperbolically claims that it's not so.

Well said. That's part of why I think that blind testing really has very limited value to most audiophiles.

It is immediately apparrant for even a casual reader of the forum to correctly conclude that gdhal attempted to perpetrate a fraud upon the Audiogon community of audiophiles and the many posts of his that have been deleted by the moderators further support this simple observation. I am grateful to the dedicated, alert and well informed staff for taking action to prevent gdhal from defrauding someone of good faith of 10's of thousands of dollars and this is why I insisted with him that all discussion  of his "challenge" would be in public because it would expose him. What is a rather strange aspect of his extortion-fraud effort  is that it was attempted to have been executed under the cloak of "science" and exploration intended to reveal "truth" when really it was an outright fraud the very type of deception so many of these self-proclaimed "scientists" here accuse others of with their frequent accusations of "snake oil" against those who can hear differences in cables!

I did a blind test as follows: I had two identical CD players playing the same disc and started them at the same time so they were exactly in sync.   With two sets of interconnect running into the amp inputs I could use the remote to switch inputs.  If I did this switch rapidly at the start of each test I had no idea which input was playing when the test started. I then tested between the two at a touch of the button. As long as I didn’t peep at the amp display I had no idea which was playing. 

Initially I ran two sets of identical £14 Maplin interconnect cable (UK electrical retailer) to ensure the two CD players sounded the same. They did.  In this test I could not perceive a difference between the two CD players.    Next I simply compared different interconnects. 

I had four interconnects to trial (Maplin at £14, 3 others ranging from £800 to £1500).  I was testing Maplin (cable A) vs another (cable B/C/D) in each case.  With two of the Interconnects (B and C) the differences were subtle: results showed I chose the expensive cable more than 50% of the time,  but the differences were minor and for me not worth the money. With cable D the difference was massive, and it was immediately obvious which one I was listening to, so much so I choose cable D over A 100% of the time (each test was done around 20 times).  I was intending to go on to test B vs C/D etc but as D was so far and away better I didn’t bother. I bought cable D (which incidentally was the cheapest of B,C and D). 

This is is such an easy test to do and so easy to set up I'm surprised Hifi reviewers don’t do it.    The only downside was that the only way to get two identical CD players for me was to use two 1990s cheapish Denon CD players, rather than the high end CD player usually in my system.  I did double check the results by doing non-blind testing between the interconnects with my regular CD player and found the same results. In this instance by the time I had changed the cables I actually could not detect a difference between A and B/C but the difference between A and D was even more apparent. 

Yes of course this is another example of a proper, scientific, verifiable, and repeatable excercise that could be replicated by others' who are genuinely interested in exploring the audibility of differences between cables in a Music Reproduction System and those who question such an outcome are suggested to do as you have done and perform there own research before asserting they're beliefs in this forum as though they had scientific validity. 

I find it hard to comprehend this verbal diarrhea, but what I do understand is that clearthink thinks science is on his side. Well, have a look at the links I mentioned earlier. Their story is quite different, as anyone here can freely find out. There is no need to take clearthink's garbled words for it.