I see the issue with ABX blind testing


I’ve followed many of the cable discussions over the years with interest. I’ve never tested cables & compared the sound other than when I bought an LFD amp & the vendor said that it was best paired with the LFD power cord. That was $450 US and he offered to ship it to me to try & if I didn’t notice a difference I could send it back. I got it, tried it & sent it back. To me there was no difference at all.

Fast forward to today & I have a new system & the issue of cables arises again. I have Mogami cables made by Take Five Audio in Canada. The speaker wire are Mogami 3104, XLRs are Mogami 2549 & the power cords are Powerline 10 with Furutech connectors. All cables are quite well made and I’ve been using them for about 5 years. The vendor that sold me the new equipment insisted that I needed "better" cables and sent along some Transparent Super speaker & XLR cables to try. If I like them I can pay for them.

In every discussion about cables the question is always asked, why don’t you do an ABX blind test? So I was figuring out how I’d do that. I know the reason few do it. It’s not easy to accomplish. I have no problem having a friend come over & swap cables without telling me what he’s done, whether he swapped any at all etc. But from what I can see the benefit, if there is one, will be most noticeable system wide. In other words, just switching one power cable the way I did before won’t be sufficient for you to tell a difference... again, assuming there is one. So I need my friend to swap power cables for my amp/preamp & streamer, XLR cables from my streamer to my preamp, preamp to amp & speakers cables. That takes a good 5-10 minutes. There is no way my brain is retaining what I previously heard and then comparing it to what I currently hear.

The alternative is to connect all of the new cables, listen for a week or so & then switch back & see if you feel you’re missing anything. But then your brain takes over & your biases will have as much impact as any potential change in sound quality.

So I’m stumped as to how to proceed.

A photo of my new setup. McIntosh MC462, C2700, Pure Fidelity Harmony TT, Lumin T3 & Sonus Faber Amati G5 & Gravis V speakers.

dwcda

@benanders I respect that you remain respectfully doubtful.
that’s totally fine. I shared the video as I found it interesting and thought it would be enjoyed by some of the folks here. I had no intention to use it to prove anything to you or others in the cable denying camp. That is a fool’s errand.

 

 

audphile1

4,147 posts


…I had no intention to use it to prove anything to you or others in the cable denying camp. That is a fool’s errand.

I think there lies the rub, @audphile1 - I’m not denying anything (I haven’t formally tested for it short of some blind swapping of some on-hand types). I’m reiterating the need for demonstration (of it being more than a placebo).
I know it seems like petty semantics, but it’s an important discrepancy between what can be known (fact with supportive evidence for / against), vs. what is assumed but stated as fact (present state of things).

As soon as one robust, properly controlled study is undertaken and shows a significant number of participants perceived difference between two or more types of cable, the stance of “no difference possible” will be disproven, or at least shaken.

Nothing gets proven in science. Disproof is how the process is works.

 

What proof do you have that other people are really reading and responding to your posts?

@benanders

I’m not denying anything (I haven’t formally tested for it

this further solidifies what I said above. So here’s the rub…I do not need my entire zip code to hear the changes in my system and nod their heads in approval before I finalize any purchase be it cables, streamers, dacs, etc. The only element that matters to me is what I hear and how much of an improvement there is. There were multiple instances where I had sent cables back. Cables that I had actually high hopes for they just didn’t work out. The change was so negative that I couldn’t endure listening to my system for more than few minutes before getting severe fatigue. These were high priced cables and no, they were not defective.
Do you think I would keep these cables if I had 50 people telling me they like the sound? Absolutely not.

And this, my friend, is where the discussion ends. Please let me know when you get around to trying some cables as an experiment in a comfort of your home and system, and what you had heard.

 

@benanders  Your cryptic posts are serving no purpose here.  Your main point is that people’s opinions are basically invalid because they are not confirmed by a controlled scientific study and thus have not been proven and could be wrong or misleading.  Well duh, and welcome to the real world.  That’s why they’re opinions and not fact, which pretty much everyone here understands except you.  Continually pointing out that people’s opinions are potentially fallible is as tiresome as it is pointless.  If you have such low opinions of people’s subjective opinions and their reliability why are you even here?  Why continue to torture yourself (and us)?  Go play with your peeps at ASR and spare us, or better yet go start your own website where people are free to express their opinions as long as they’re confirmed by a rigorous study that conforms to strict scientific methods.  If that doesn’t sound like a fruitful endeavor then you should understand why your posts are both ineffective and useless here.  And no, this was not Chat GPT generated.