[QUOTE=SamNOISE;4105083]Well, it’s been a few weeks now since I public ally asked the owner of the cable company in question if he would take me up on my offer to set up an unsighted audition at his home, under his terms – so I guess it’s on to ‘Option 2’.
‘O2’ goes about the issue quite a bit differently: I’ve looked at the various ways that we could all share in the ‘auditioning’ of products online. My trials and errors have found me working with an unlikely partner: a fellow who goes by the handle ‘Elk’ on (of all places), the Stereophile forum. Elk is a ‘cable-believer’, but one with an open mind to logical experimentation. He is working with me on a process where we put together a decent group of equipment and simply record a passage of high-resolution music from a CD player to a quality recording device, while said devices are plugged into the wall with standard ‘computer’ power cables. After we create a high-quality / lossless music file, we then swap cords and re-do the recording. We present both resultant recordings as downloadable, lossless digital files that you can D/L and audition in many ways:
On the PC with headphones
On the PC with headphones and an outboard headphone amplifier
On the PC with the headphone stage of your favourite DAC / headphone amplifier
On the PC hooked up to a large stereo system / through a DAC (or not)
On the stereo system by burning files to CD and playing the CD on random shuffle
…I’m sure you can think of several other possible scenarios
I’ve taken several stabs at this process, as those who read my www site will attest to, and realize that my methods / equipment don’t represent absolute state-of-the-art. However, Elk appears to have access to better equipment than me - and so I strongly suspect - do many of you. What I’m asking is this: will at least some of you folks with absolutely ‘over-the-top’ audiophile equipment please step up and create a couple of high-resolution / high-quality lossless .wav files (or whatever your favourite lossless file format is), swapping cables as mentioned above. I’ll offer to host these files on my server, obviously free of charge.
If enough folks do this, with enough types of hardware, we’ll be able to get past the “but it works on my equipment combination” excuse and get on with a meaningful dialogue - one that we can all share in - not one that simply involves folks making blanket statements without any fundamental facts / framework within which to frame them.
But that is too rational an approach, I thought this was an audiophile forum.
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