<font color='#000000'><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>
Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">
I think you people all have a chip on your shoulder! I'm a professional musician and sound engineer, who's also been an audiophile for many years. I've heard the effects of cable break in many, many times. It's not fiction.</td></tr></table>
Certainly our perceptions seem every bit as real to us as anything can be. But the problem is, and which has been proved beyond doubt, is that our perceptions are not always accurate reflections of the physical reality.
For example:
Here we perceive that A and B are the two ends of a straight line. But the physical reality is that A and C are the two ends of a straight line.
Similarly, just because we may perceive some difference in our audio systems it doesn't mean that that perception is necessarily due to any actual audible stimulus. Indeed, it's been demonstrated time and time again that people may perceive differences even in the complete absense of any physical difference.
And of course these perceived differences in the absence of actual physical differences will seem just as real to us as those perceptions which are due to actual physical difference.
Which is perhaps why it's so difficult for some people to come to grips with well-established human psychology and physiology.
But this notion that simply because one perceives some difference that it MUST be due to some realworld, physical change in our audio equipment simply flies in the face of over a century's worth of well-established facts. You might as well start arguing against Ohm's Law.
Now, this isn't to say that ALL perceived differences are due psychological/physiological phenomena. Only that until those very real possibilities are ruled out (and ruled out by something other than sheer ego and insistance as you illustrate in your post), one cannot say with a sufficient degree of confidence whether certain perceived differences are due to actual audible stimulus.
<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>
Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">
I don't care about measurements. I care about sound!</td></tr></table>
That's fine. Seeing as how something sounds is a personal, subjective judgement, there should be no questioning how one goes about determining what sounds best to them.
But when you make testable objective claims, such as claims regarding actual audibility you're no longer in that subjective realm and your sighted subjective perceptions do nothing to substantiate such claims. Neither do your claims of being a professional musician, sound engineer or audiophile.
Professional musicians, sound engineers and audiophiles are all human beings and as such they are susceptible to the same idiosyncracies as other human beings.
<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>
Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">
Use your ears, people.</td></tr></table>
Using your ears is fine when it comes to determining what works best for you. They're not quite so fine when it comes to establishing objective realities such as actual audibility. That's because our ears are plugged into our brain and because of that, our perceptions can be altered in ways which can have nothing to do with actual sensory input.
There was an article recently in the New York Times that illustrates this quite well.
It concerned some research carried out by a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine.
It had to do with the old "Pepsi Challenge" ad campaign back in the 70s and 80s where they went out on the street and asked people to try both Pepsi and Coke, but without knowing which was which. The majority of people chose Pepsi over Coke.
The researcher repeated the Pepsi Challenge test on subjects while monitoring their brain activity with an MRI.
When the subjects didn't know which was which, the majority preferred Pepsi, and the MRI indicated that under these blind conditions, that when drinking Pepsi, the subjects had greater activity in the region of the brain called the ventral putamen which is thought to process feelings of reward.
So he decided to repeat the test, but this time, instead of the blind conditions of before, the subjects would be told which was which.
Now the results were reversed. The majority of the subjects preferred Coke over Pepsi. Further, this time there was now activity in the area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, which is said to govern high-level cognitive powers.
Basically, under sighted conditions, the subjects' higher level brain functions, i.e. the effects of Coke's "branding" practices and their images of Coke, overrorde the subjects' sensory input and produced an entirely different result when it came to preference.
While this doesn't relate directly to being able to detect simple differences, it's a prime example of how our perceptions under sighted conditions can be altered by that which has nothing to do with actual physical stimulus.
And that's why, when it comes to establishing whether something produces an actual audible difference, sighted listening tests carry little weight.
se</font>
