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Topic: Audio Cable Hate? (Read 68670 times) previous topic - next topic
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Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #300 –
Quote from: SIY on
While you're at it, here's a beautiful and hilarious example of how to be fooled while being perfectly conscious of the method


Weren't Penn and Teller going to do a "BS" episode on audiophiles?

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #301 –
First I've heard of it, and it would be hilarious.

Start with Serinius.

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #302 –
This topic mixes some very general issues with specific issues and questionable analogies, which seems to cause some confusion.

Let's talk about speaker cables: the average Joe has some experience with cables in general outside of the audio-realm: powering his toaster, connecting his external HDD to his laptop, etc. For the most part, they just work. Hi transfers this experience into the audio world, buys regular speaker cables and is happy. Reading lots of audiophile bullshit he becomes skeptical about his choice and decides to try high-end cables. Naturally, they sound great. His skeptic friend challenges him to a blind test in which Joe fails to tell his old cheap cables apart from the expensive new ones. Joe realizes that he's been duped and that speaker cables, like all the other cables he knows, are nothing to be concerned about. He returns the boutique-cables and continues to enjoy his regular cables.

Let's talk about lossy audio compression: most people on this forum are old enough to have witnessed the rise of MP3 and the likes. The amount of compression is short of miraculous when compared to general purpose compression methods (think ZIP) and requires considerable technological effort. From the beginning, marketing has been a little enthusiastic about the bitrates needed to achieve "CD-quality". That and the fact that many early MP3-encoders did not make the most of the technology had many people experience audibly flawed lossy files. Given these circumstances, it is understandable that people remain skeptical. More so because no credible source will give you any guarantees that even the highest-bitrate lossy files will provide transparency under all circumstances even though medium bitrate files sound great on most occasions. Some people will fret about these fringe cases and others just don't care.

To conclude: speaker (and other) cables are a different beast than lossy audio compression and thus result in people handling the issues surrounding them differently. The uniting element is that outrageous claims are made regarding the sonic impact of both. Our understanding of human perception tells us that many factors besides the actual sonic qualities influence what an individual experiences. Many audiophiles deny this fact and trace 100% of their experience back to the raw audio performance. This is ridiculous. Proper experimental design is required to examine the sonic qualities on their own.

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #303 –
Quote from: greynol on
But hey, Arny will likely come back in seven hours.  Maybe he'll tell you why we still need double-blind testing and how it can be useful in liberating placebophilia.

Eight and a half hours, but managed to miss the fallout.  C'mon Arny, buddy, what say you?

I'll refer you back to this reply including a relevant quote from one of David's posts in case you weren't following:
http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php...st&p=879123

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #304 –
Quote from: Heisenberg on
I can't tell you because I don't know other than to ask whether blind tests still being used  in medical studies.


Double blind tests are often required in medical studies of various treatment options. Some are required by law and some are required in order to obtain publication of results in reputable journals.

Quote
I do appreciate your candor in acknowledging that you don't know. I am not all that familiar with the regulars that post here. Is there someone who is most likely to know about the scientific research on how people perceive things post bias controlled tests?


I know of none and if any existed, I'd probably know.

Most people's scientific curiosity and vigor is pretty well exhausted by simply doing the bias controlled test!

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #307 –
What do you mean by "experimental set up"?

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #308 –
Quote from: Rich B on
What do you mean by "experimental set up"?


The associated audio components, test equipment, and cables.

The variations shown are so small that it would be interesting to see the same identical measurements repeated several times to see if any of the small variations are due to the experimental set up.

Good practice would be to check the setup for random variations in the results and present the data so that the lines aren't so close to falling on top of each other.

At this point my take away is that there were no significant differences.

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #309 –
Rich B, just by moving the earcup a few millimeters you can measure up to several dB big differences. In comparison, these headphone cables show virtually no difference. With the method used you'd see the same tiny differences even without changing cables.
"I hear it when I see it."

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #310 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
At this point my take away is that there were no significant differences.
That seems in agreement with the author of the test who comments:
Quote
Do I see anything that might be characterized as an audible feature due to the different cables in the measurement? Nope. Nada. Zilch.

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #311 –
Quote from: Heisenberg on
Why the hostility?
It's because several people have come to HA with quite subtle anti-DBT arguments, couched in the form of genuine enquiries, which eventually turn out to be little more than trolls.

Some forum members sometimes over-react to genuine enquiries, because they've previously wasted time politely discussing similar topics with folks who only joined to deceive and derail.

OTOH some forum members are too kind for their own good.


Most of the placebo we talk about here is expectation bias. This relies on expectations(!) - some you can manage, some you can reprogram, and some you have no control over. Hence the contradictory statements you quoted can all be true, but about different things or different situations.

The only absolute is that if you want to be 100% sure of removing expectation bias, you must double (or even triple*) blind the test. Even then, you should give due consideration to listener training (good) and listener fatigue (bad).

* - it's debatable whether there's a difference when the test is run by a computer. Even so, from a pure perspective I'm uncomfortable with tests where the participants have a list of what is being tested, even when it's double-blinded so that at any moment they don't know what they're listening to. I'm not suggesting we need to do any better, but if I was back in academia trying to be super-rigorous, I'd be uncomfortable with an ABX test of known items, and very uncomfortable of a MUSHRA style test with known items.

Cheers,
David.

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #312 –
Heisenberg are you the heisenberg lately posting at the slimdevices forum?
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Audio Cable Hate?

Reply #313 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
It's because several people have come to HA with quite subtle anti-DBT arguments, couched in the form of genuine enquiries, which eventually turn out to be little more than trolls.

...and some of them are still posting, perhaps in this very topic (you be the judge).

I'll bet most (all?) of them have never bothered to perform a double-blind test of any kind, though some have said they would.

It's pretty silly arguing against something with which you have little-to-no experience and likely barely understand.