DBT Report

Michael,

I thought we'd passed that and that the Dudester had gone back from whence he came. Sadly he's still hanging around like a bad odour.

Oh well, sorry if my post caused offence to you Michael, I just hope it got through to the Dudester.

I won't bother responding to his rather course language, it's a shame his verbiage lacks the imagination that his perception of himself suggests.

Anyway, nice to see him discussing hifi above rather than just having a dig at forum members. Hope to see it again before the dawn of the next millenium

 

Merlin,

I've said it before dudester and I'll say it again. You really are a bad judge of character. Sulking at people's comments or insults and disappearing from forums as a result of such comments are not my style. You of all people should know that by now.




Enjoy the music,

Lawrie.

 

Good comments Steve. IMO this industry is no different to any other. It's our individual resposibility to make value judgements and purchases where our perception of value meets the restrictions of our pocket. There are examples where this balance stacks up and many where it doesnt. The Nordost Valhalla power cord debates were classic examples of the above. I attended the Nordost demo at Bristol and concluded the value/price ratio was left wanting.

Whilst I do feel cabling (from power to i/c to s/cables) *can* have considerable influence (this being relative to my perception of *considerable influence*) on the end-results of a components based system, this means I nether believe price is a guide to the net effect (ie. value), nor that all cabling has a noticable/any influence at all.

If most/all non-believers (to quote MichaelAB "there is no difference") are not willing to use solid core, t&e (or similar) from beginning to end in their system, then surely they also acknowlege cabling has some influence. If so then this must be a debate about measurement of value and thus degrees of belief/disbelief in the effect.

The response from some people to this is likely to be "I'm not actually saying cabling has no effect, just that cables with similar electrical properties but differing prices are not different", Well then this is a value based argument which undermines the apparently increasingly polarised camps. Ie. there are degrees of common ground/balanced views which are being deliberately ignored by a few.

In essence, my view point?
- Whist I have in the past found non-clinical A/B comaprisons useful I wouldnt aim to improve my system via this method alone.

- I have found some cable changes to have considerable benefits (to my ears) and others to have no benefit at all

- I accept some people have not in their empirical experience found cables (expensive or cheap) to benefit/affect their system

- The Hi-Fi press does not present a balanced view regarding cables.

- I think cables are increasingly overpriced and their vendors quite successful (I guess) in using seemingly illogical value/price ratio's to actually circumnavigate the sensibility of some people - ie. "£1750 for a power is so bizarre it must actually make sense". but if I had a £30K+ system then this may well seem to make sense, yet there are still better effects to be gained elsewhere for less.

- That when trying new components and cables, the initial improvements can sound inconsequential, yet if the *upgrade* (or downgrade in some cases) is removed after an extended period (say a couple of weeks), the loss of the component/cable can be far more dramatically noticable and missed. I.e DBT would not help provide this appreciation.

- I find the determination of both extremes to stick to simplistic and absolutist positions (in some cases) now to be more about posturing ego's, their insecurities and point scoring than about the subject in question.

- <piousness>Some of the ongoing bad feeling to be a pretty poor show considering what we are talking about</piousness>.

- If you read this line then thanks and all that, but shouldnt you be working too?

 

I'm actually a good judge of character Lawrie, it's just that I don't get on with people without it.

Agreed, but you do disappear only to reappear to pour scorn and ridicule whilst desperately trying to even scores you feel exist from months back (often ,and exitingly accompanied by the corresponding links, plucked at some cost from your personal archive system!)

Or am I confusing you with your good mate and alter ego Conrad Johnson, the master of the dacside and guru to many who shall remain clueless as they are showered with horseplops from on high.

 

Not necessarily. I'm prepared to pay a bit extra for something that is obviously well made and looks nice even if it doesn't make it sound any better.

I've posted this line of thinking myself in the past but I've increasingly come to think it must be nonsense. It's simply not logical that a change should be dramatic in one direction but not in the other.

I completely agree. If I have come across as absolutist then that wasn't intentional. My view is that I haven't heard any siginficant differences between cables. The overwhelming evidence on the subject backs up that view but I wouldn't deny a real difference if I heard one in the future just out of bloody mindedness. I think it's a good policy to always speak from experience and as such I think that always responding to any cable thread with "there's no difference, save your money" is not helpful. However, I do wince when I see people contemplating a spend of several hundred (or even several thousand) pounds on cables and I feel I have the right to point out that I think they're making a mistake just as I would if I thought there was a more cost effective solution to any other question about a CD player or any other bit of hifi kit.

Michael.

 

:ffrc::lol:

 

Sure thats a reasonable and balanced comment though very much value based - ie values of aesthetics and quality.

I dont agree, I think the benefits/or deficits can take time to appreciate, particularly across a range of music and perhaps when you are more relaxed.

In the case of food, you dont need to be able to taste every single ingredient in a dish in order to *sense* its qualities, its value, yet as your eat and your sense of taste becomes adjusted, you focus less on trying to identify the individual ingredients, you can then better appreciate the balance of the dish. I think the same applies to wine too. I think time and mood can be essential to appreciate the subtle, yet valuable qualities. Ones that once you have stopped analysing are suddenly very obvious when withdrawn.

IME, the benefits of my cable changes have presented me something akin to the final touches that brought to life the emotions in the music. Emotions I could sort of hear but not quite feel before. Taking the use of a Eupen p/cord on my CD player, I couldn't say there was more detail, or more bass after the addition, yet there was a greater sense of *reality* in the music that wasn't there before. The difference wasnt night and day, but then are night and day differences the only kind worth bothering with.

For me the fact I have found myself listening to CDs considerably more since then is nothing to do with wanting to justify the 28 squids I paid for a used Eupen.

My experience doesnt remotely touch the issue of expenseive cables, apart from a few demos here and there, but again that is a value issue. I absolutely agree that many lurkers and people looking for advice need to easily see a range of opinions on the subject - I would expect a consierable proportion of readers of the Hi-fi press believe it to be absolute fact that cables are of considerable importance. However I do think you have become increasingly absolutist on the subject, though partly I suspect because of the flack you have received which has been OTT.

Incidentally where is this overwhelming evidence?
If you are talking at an electrical level, then surely the whole idea of buying hi-fi based on listening sessions is now irrelevant. We should start buying amps based on their distortion and transformer stats.

 

Greg,
You have a lot of good points. The issue above is interesting. Michealab has already tries to address it. This has been mention more the once before. We never discuss it well enough and until we do I could see why some would use this personal experience to discredit the validity of group ABX. It is not required that it must be a quick comparison of A/B only with a few minutes listening to each. All it need it for the 2 to be switch easily to allows immediate comparison but level match to keep it fair. The subjects could compare A and B in the comfort of their homes for hours or weeks on their own. It is just that the logistic to organise a formal bake-off like this will a bit more difficult. Further more the tests reported by magazines like in Stereophile will a large group of people in a lecture hall are IMO done by advocates of ABX to let everyone little taste of what ABX comparison is like. It seems some serious magazines reviewers or engineers are convinced by the methodology and now claim to audition or design equipments like this in the comfort of there own environment.

For my part my experiences has been after months living with cables A and B when I finally believe I have indeed manage to recognise them apart to a degree in a blind comparison I ask my friend to test me. I never manage it.

If you claim that after a prolonged exposure to cables until you are able to truly recognise the benefit of it but miss it when it is suddenly replace by your wife in secret without our knowledge them that is truly a valid observation. However, correct me again if I am wrong. If you replace it yourself you would expect some differences if you have grown so attach to the more expensive/favourite toy.

 

Bottleneck,
Since Statistic was not my major I have been doing a bit of Googling. The closest I could come to is this article.

http://www.statmodel.com/download/FinalSEMsingle.pdf

Ps Anyone who finish reading it and could understand all of it could you please explain it to me? Could we just say sample of 50-100 is a good nice figure?

 

Sure I agree there and as Wolfgang points out it's one reason why ABX testing might not be particularly useful for measuring subtle differences however you have in a sense contradicted your own previous argument by saying "benefits or deficits can take time to appreciate".

I think if an improvement takes time to appreciate then removing that improvement will also take an equal time to appreciate. I don't think you can have an improvement that takes time to appreciate and have it's reversal be noticable more quickly.

Generally speaking, the more significant the change, the more quickly it can be noticed. So, I don't see how a change can become more significant (more quickly noticeable) when it's reversed.

The "overwhelming evidence" in relation to cables is twofold:
- that there is no scientific basis why any cable should sound different to another, something that can't be said for amps, CDPs, speakers etc.
- that no one has ever been able to reliably identify differences in cables in a properly run blind test (again, something that is not the case for sources, amps and speakers).

One might suggest that all the audiophiles who claim to hear differences and buy special cables is evidence to the contrary but would you take all the reports of UFO sightings and abductions (many by perfectly sane, reasonable people) as undisputable evidence of ETs?

Michael.

 

Originally posted by michaelab

Not really, I'm saying that subtle differences can take time to recognise, whether they are improvements or not.

I would agree in most cases, but significance in the level of difference isn't the be all and end all anway... but to use wine as an analogy: Big Aussie wines got me interested, and I didnt really enjoy Pinot Noir's from Marlborough or Burgundy for a while, but gradually I understood them better, and now prefer them. At first I couldnt really understand why a Chablis could be more enjoyable than an oaked Aussie chardonnay but I grew to like the more subtle, unoaked wine, with better fruit and acidity. Now an argument for why Aussie wines have become so successful, apart from the informative labelling (ie. less snobby), is that many producers actively aim for their wine to taste fantastic at the first glass - as such they often do well at wine competitions, and get to put nice medal type badges on the bottles, they get picked up by supermarkets and bob's your uncle they sell well.

However these wines often dont taste so great by the third glass - the sugar content, lack of fruit concentration, flavour of the oak chips they chuck into the steel VATs (ie. they dont mature them in individual american oak barrels!), etc. starts to ruin the pallate. When I drink a more mass produced wine I now notice the difference in quality immediately, but before my tastes matured this wasnt the case, I couldnt realy recognise the difference so accutely. I propose this is the case for appreciating subtleties in moderate cable differences - ones tastes and mind adjusts over a more extended period than an A/B listening test (note: not in all cases naturally). I would also underline the idea that these subtleties can make ALL the difference between a good sound and and great sound.

Superb!
Dont forget you are still using *special cables* yourself, what does that tell you?
You are the vegetarian who enjoys a bacon sandwich on a Sunday morning <based on any potential religious affiliation replace bacon with alternative meat as required>

 

Well said.

 

Could you recognise a glass of wine from taste alone without looking at the label?

Could you describe all these characters of tastes again without first looking at the labels?

Some wine buff tells me they could. They even prove it convincingly with ease with DBT again and again.




Now how come the cables aficionado could NOT do the same?

 

a) who says some "cable afficianados" can't?
b) the variables between wines, grape varieties, etc. are well documented
c) the variables with wine tasting are limited
d) publicly demonstrating ones ability to recognise a wine/grape/terroir/vintage is nothing more than a dog and pony show
e) some other reason...
f) et cetera

 

That'd be the fully documented reports of properly conducted listening tests.

 

no, who says *some* can't. tests smests, are you saying they are definitive on a planet with 7 billion people?

 

:lol: Fair enough, can't argue with that

 

Sorry Pete. Must have slipped be by. Along with all the other people I know who claim to hear positive results.

So I guess not all or indeed a representative sample of audiophiles form part of these hallowed sessions.

Could you point me to a meaningful and representative test report please? All the ones I have stumbled across whilst surfing have sadly been little short of laughable.

 

I'm afraid that, not being in industry or that particular academic circle, I don't have access to journals like the JAES so I can't give you definitive references as I haven't read the papers myself, although as far as I'm aware you're basically looking at Toole and Lipshitz. If dat19 shows up in this thread he'll be able to help you out...

 

Now aren't those unfortunate names