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Speaker cables.

To me there are differences in hifi sound which are not simply tonal variations. There aren't adequate words to use but 'realism', 'air', 'thwack' come close. There is no known way to measure these, but I can detect these, and my subjective choice would be different to others. I have detected differences in these parameters according to cables and equipment isolation, and how warmed up the kit is. My ears do vary from day to day, some days I am cloth eared, others I can hear pin drop.
 
I stated many times I believe we are the biggest variable in the listening chain. Many times I’ve sat down and just not been drawn into the music, is it because my system is sounding off or me just not in the mood.

We always say our systems sound best late are night. Some say it’s because of mains purity, to me it’s cause I’m relaxed and more likely because I’ve had a couple of glasses of red.
 
suzywong said:
But don’t forget, Keith has his agenda. He is in the HiFi business. While he doesn’t sell “expensive audiophile cables”, he does sell “expensive DSP based solutions”.

Of course, one day this may change, and then the rhetoric will undergo a sea-change. Not dissimilar from that which transformed a well known manufacturer whose mantra used to be that the best cable for use with their equipment was “the one that came in the box”. That was until they discovered something that had a higher profit margin...er, sorry, I meant “sounded better”.

Upshot is, if someone is trying to sell something (anything), always take the advertorials with a very large quantity of NaCl.
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No I don’t sell expensive DSP based solutions, I only sell really fine measuring products whether that be electronics or loudspeakers, I firmly believe that the loudspeakers and their interacion withthe room make by far the largest contribution to sound quality, that’s it.
Keith
 
Just get the Naim cable, the system listed above costs a lot of pounds, why worry about the cost of 10 meters of NACA5 as a starting point ??
 
I'm sure Keith could have sold expensive cables at the outset but followed a different path for what seem like sound reasons. I do think cables have an impact but only buy sensible, well constructed MarkGrant/Blue Jeans/Mogami level cables, new at least. Unlike Keith, I also think good linear supplies can help even well engineered products, if only for removing as many SMPSs as possible or giving me a warm placebo effect. Nonetheless, I would agree that room and speakers have far greater impact. Anyone who doesn't is a bit odd.
 
Dealers who post on Forums are always in a lose lose situation. Look up and see that there is always one who, no matter how simple and neutral one tries to make a comment, will always see a dealer before a man who like HiFi. Keith is a good bloke who want's to make a living. That's not unusual or a bad thing.
 
The problem for non technical people such as me who loves music is that my only attribute for better or worse is my ears. I lived in a house for thirty years and other than some Monster midnight speaker cable bought for a very low price did not have any problems with my system, I then moved to another house (currently for twenty years) where I encountered a completely different set of circumstances which determined that following the technical experts would mean that I could not have a decent hi-fi system. I apparently did something so appalling that I tried a Russ Andrews cable ( some others are better) and found that my system improved enormously my cables throughout my system are all weaved, my voltage of 247 volts with the aid of a regenerater provides me with a steady 230 volts and musical bliss.

My speaker cable is big fat and ugly and sounds better than the thin fat and ugly previously owned.

I tried Copper and Kimber KCAG and found that Silver Arrows cables with woven silver foil to be a great improvement.Ran a separate Radial circuit etc. Expertise may be correct as in my previous home but is next to useless now and I suspect for lots of others.
 
Marky-Mark said:
The same reason for when such testing is done, and differences are heard, and it turns out there was only one cable used.
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Can you give an example of this please.
Blind testing will determine differences, if one cable were used, then one sound will be heard.

Carried out lots of blind tests back around 15 years ago, what you suggest would not happen.
 
Ragaman said:
Can you give an example of this please.
Blind testing will determine differences, if one cable were used, then one sound will be heard.

Carried out lots of blind tests back around 15 years ago, what you suggest would not happen.
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I don't have a direct link, but I definitely recall such a test being conducted whereby a single cable was used in blind testing with various results.

Why would you not think different people would hear the same piece of cable differently? I mean, people can look at color swatches and not agree on color.

Power of suggestion intermingled with confirmation bias and a sprinkling of Retail Therapy: just what the doctor ordered for purveyors of common wire bejeweled with bling!
 
Ragaman said:
Can you give an example of this please.
Blind testing will determine differences, if one cable were used, then one sound will be heard.

Carried out lots of blind tests back around 15 years ago, what you suggest would not happen.
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I regret to say that people do report hearing a difference when there is none, as well as reporting hearing no difference when there is one.

There are four possible outcomes from a test where a subject is presented with A and B and asked are they different? These are:
  1. difference=YES and the subject reports difference=YES (AKA true positive)
  2. difference=YES and the subject reports difference=NO (AKA false negative)
  3. difference=NO and the subject reports difference=NO (AKA true negative)
  4. difference=NO and the subject reports difference=YES (AKA false positive)
I think Marky-Mark is saying that false positives happen and you are saying they did not in your tests (sorry if I mis-interpreted). However false positives do happen, in general at least, and statisticians do have to deal with them (and they know how).

I could only find an online audio example of false positives from Stereophile's tests, not of cables but of "is there a difference between a regular CD played on a regular player (A); and a tweaked CD played on a high-end player (B)". This is at this link.

Each subject listened to seven different pieces of music four times. The last two times were (randomly) either A-B, A-A, B-A ,or B-B and the subject was asked is there a difference? On page 2 of the article you will see results showing from 0 to 7 right answers from each subject (true positives and true negatives). The wrong answers comprised both false positives and false negatives. Table 4 combining all subjects specifically shows they both exist.
 
Marky-Mark said:
I don't have a direct link, but I definitely recall such a test being conducted whereby a single cable was used in blind testing with various results.

Why would you not think different people would hear the same piece of cable differently? I mean, people can look at color swatches and not agree on color.

Power of suggestion intermingled with confirmation bias and a sprinkling of Retail Therapy: just what the doctor ordered for purveyors of common wire bejeweled with bling!
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Have you ever carried out a blind test, none of the above comes into effect.
 
John Phillips said:
I regret to say that people do report hearing a difference when there is none, as well as reporting hearing no difference when there is one.

There are four possible outcomes from a test where a subject is presented with A and B and asked are they different? These are:
  1. difference=YES and the subject reports difference=YES (AKA true positive)
  2. difference=YES and the subject reports difference=NO (AKA false negative)
  3. difference=NO and the subject reports difference=NO (AKA true negative)
  4. difference=NO and the subject reports difference=YES (AKA false positive)
I think Marky-Mark is saying that false positives happen and you are saying they did not in your tests (sorry if I mis-interpreted). However false positives do happen, in general at least, and statisticians do have to deal with them (and they know how).

I could only find an online audio example of false positives from Stereophile's tests, not of cables but of "is there a difference between a regular CD played on a regular player (A); and a tweaked CD played on a high-end player (B)". This is at this link.

Each subject listened to seven different pieces of music four times. The last two times were (randomly) either A-B, A-A, B-A ,or B-B and the subject was asked is there a difference? On page 2 of the article you will see results showing from 0 to 7 right answers from each subject (true positives and true negatives). The wrong answers comprised both false positives and false negatives. Table 4 combining all subjects specifically shows they both exist.
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Iirc There’s an AES paper, I think by Tom nousaine, which pointed to there being a significant bias in favour of identifying things as being different

I think this is borne out in the Stereophile article you linked to. It looks dubious though. Did the subjects just guess “different” more often? Is saying same a false negative if they actually sound the same?
This seems to me to show why ABx
was invented.
 
The famous Hawthorne experiment into worker productivity conducted in I think, the 1930s, involved changing the working conditions in an assembly plant. Many parameters were changed and the final conclusion was that any change resulted in increased productivity.

Not sure how this applies to hi-fi, but I do think that very often a change is as good as a rest.
 
I dare say hifi fiddlers have certain tracks which they know intimately when comparing items, I know I do. I've done a few online tests eg mp320 vs flac or whatever. I've done ok, but it's very hard if I don't know the tracks intimately. I'd be ok doing blind tests on tracks I chose, but for A B on unfamiliar ones, very unlikely to tell apart.
 
Mullardman said:
The famous Hawthorne experiment into worker productivity conducted in I think, the 1930s, involved changing the working conditions in an assembly plant. Many parameters were changed and the final conclusion was that any change resulted in increased productivity.

Not sure how this applies to hi-fi, but I do think that very often a change is as good as a rest.
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I’m not sure whether this is the same thing but I think there is a known observer effect: you get in a man with a clipboard and productivity goes up temporarily. See “miracle diet” , “reality tv”.
 
venton said:
I dare say hifi fiddlers have certain tracks which they know intimately when comparing items, I know I do. I've done a few online tests eg mp320 vs flac or whatever. I've done ok, but it's very hard if I don't know the tracks intimately. I'd be ok doing blind tests on tracks I chose, but for A B on unfamiliar ones, very unlikely to tell apart.
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This is easy to test on the foobar ABx plug in. I’d be very surprised if familiarity with the track made any difference for well encoded 320 Kbps (eg recent LAME), unless you find a killer sample. Try taking a flac, encoding it and see if you can ABx it. If you can the people who devise the codecs will be pleased to hear from you.
 
adamdea said:
I’m not sure whether this is the same thing but I think there is a known observer effect: you get in a man with a clipboard and productivity goes up temporarily. See “miracle diet” , “reality tv”.
Click to expand...

I did this in my factory a few years ago. We had a concern over waste and productivity on a machine. No implication of human problem, but we could not understand what the root cause of waste was. We created a clipboard form where operators recorded more stuff about the machine, time a job started, time it finished, waste recorded for each job rather than just weighed up at the end of the day. Miraculously waste went down (by a lot) and we had changed nothing.
 
adamdea said:
Iirc There’s an AES paper, I think by Tom nousaine, which pointed to there being a significant bias in favour of identifying things as being different
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Thanks. I didn't know about that paper. However it is in the AES library. The summary starts:
"Examination of published blind listening tests reveal that listeners are strongly disposed to report differences in sound quality when given two alternatives that are identical. The tendency was found in every published test over the past 15 years where analysis was possible and ignorance of the effect caused some tests to be improperly designed or analyzed. ..."​

I remember long ago reading the original version of the Stereophile article to which I gave the link. Tom Nousaine published an article for the Boston Audio Society re-analysing the results. He claimed his analysis was statistically correct and Stereophile's was not (but I am not a statistician so I can't comment).

adamdea said:
I think this is borne out in the Stereophile article you linked to. It looks dubious though. Did the subjects just guess “different” more often? Is saying same a false negative if they actually sound the same?
This seems to me to show why ABx
was invented.
Click to expand...
​
As a non-statistician I don't feel qualified to comment in detail on AB vs ABX, although I do feel that such tests are often more appropriate to the professional audio field rather than the hobby side.

The Stereophile article I linked to seems to be a later version of the original and seems to have been edited if my memory isn't playing tricks on me. I thought some of the original conclusions were certainly dubious. However, how to do the statistics properly is often not well understood unless you are a statistician and I didn't think it worth the effort to become familiar with this analysis myself.
 
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