This is a long post; Ricky, I hope you'll read it in its entirely; you continue to selectively ignore valid criticisms of your position.
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Originally posted by Ricky
Man, we're not going to arrive anywhere with this type of discussion. |
By "this type of discussion," I'm assuming that you mean you continuing to ignore the facts presented, and just repeating over and over "just take my test, please!"
If you want to test whether or not good cables make a difference,
test good cables vs. cheap cables in a controlled environment using good equipment. You can't "prove" your argument using a flawed experiment.
If you had used a cross-platform codec, people who aren't using Windows could at least try it.
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| What fact? Where's that fact? Where's any serious study claiming that humans are able to hear things that science cannot measure? |
*sigh* I'm not going to do your research for you. I even posted a link last week, directed to you, quoting a prominent physics professor; you must have ignored my post.
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Part of the difficulty is that there are still unexplained acoustic phenomena. William Morris Hartmann, a professor of physics at Michigan State University in East Lansing, works on psycho-acoustic projects, which investigate the way sound is perceived, rather than the way it is produced.
There are examples, he said, of sounds that measure beyond the range of human hearing, and yet some people seem to perceive them. |
Are you going to just dismiss him, as well, since he disagrees with you?
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| It's easy to disprove, there's no need to do a serious study, because the differences DO dissapear from sighted to blind. |
WRONG.
Some perceived differences disappear when going to a blind test. That is
not the same thing as
all differences being eliminated and/or controlled for.
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| I wasn't talking about a large-scale study, I'm only interested about your experiment with you as subject. The statistical results were about your number of trials. You say here that you were successful 100% times. I'd like to see the exact procedure you used for every trial, and series of trials. |
I outlined them quite clearly, several times. Were you in "ignore" mode then? Sorry, but it's utterly frustrating to keep going over the same argument when you don't even bother to read about the things which you're criticizing.
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| Everyone? Then, your test setup must be flawed, as many people can't hear any differences even on sighted conditions, not to talk under blind conditions. |
OMG? Are you serious? So if an experiment simply proves you wrong, rather than admitting you might be wrong, you suddenly pronounce from on high that the test must be flawed? Give me a break, Ricky. This is actually becoming quite funny.
Couldn't it have been, just maybe, that there WERE differences in the cables? Naaah...
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| Still, your test lacks effective level matching and additional measurements, things that could spoil your test. |
How does it lack effective level matching?
You're making it clearer and clearer with every post that you don't even read what is being presented to you. If you had read my description carefully, you'd see that there was no need for level matching, because by design the levels were perfectly matched. And even then I controlled for that by swapping the outputs and re-doing the test.
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| Not "very similar to mine," since you're using all cheap, poor-quality cables. |
Well, the cables are the subject of the experiment, I was talking about the procedures. |
The
point of these "experiments" is to find out if "better" cables sound different from "cheap" cables. My experiment actually tested that. Yours tested differences between various cheap cables. Therefore, our experiments were not the same.
In addition, my experiment did not use switchboxes, cheap cables, and a poorer quality system. My experiment was also double-blind, eliminating experimenter bias; your's apparently did not, according to your description.
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| It's much more likely for bias the reason of hearing differences that don't exist, that don't hearing differences that exist. [snip] Yes, I'm skeptic and that could have influenced me. But then, there's no need for a blind test. [snip] but when not hearing differences, blind tests are irrelevant, can be only relevant if the listener is more sensitive under blind conditions. Blind test are needed when trying to prove if differences are real or self-induced by external factors to sound. |
From those statements, it's obviously that you have
no experience or training in psychology, experimental methods, or sensory perception.
Precisely
because you're a skeptic is
why you have to do not just a blind test, but a double-blind one, in order to get any sort of validity out of your conclusions (not to mention using equipment that actually has the resolution to reveal difference that might exist). Even then, someone with your skepticism is not likely to hear a difference, even if (in your all-important condition) the differences are measurable. That's why you need a sample size of more than one.
Since you don't seem to understand experimental methods, or results, here are the possible outcomes of a single run of such a double-blind test using a single test subject, along with the possible conclusions you can draw from them, assuming you have controlled for other factors.
1)
The person consistently does not hear a difference. There are three possible explanations: a) there is no audible difference; b) there is an audible difference, but the subject does not have good enough hearing to hear it; c) there is an audible difference, but the subject's own biases prevent them from hearing it.
2)
The person can sometimes or always hear a difference, but cannot consistenly identify it. a) there is no audible difference, but the subject sometimes or always thinks there is, for whatever reason; b) there is an audible difference, but the subject's hearing is not good enough to consistently identify it. There is also "c) there is an audible difference, but the subject's biases prevent them from hearing it consistently;" however, such an explanation is less likely than the other two since such a bias would generally either prevent the subject from hearing differences at all, or prevent the subject from admitting to hearing such differences. This is a difficult outcome to explain with certainty because of these possibilities.
3)
The person can consistently hear and identifya difference. There is only
one possible explanation for this result: differences exist, and the person has good enough hearing to not only hear them, but identify them. "Bias"
cannot account for such results, since "expecting" to hear a difference would still not allow you to consistently identify which cable was which. The only way this result could be achieved if a difference could not exist is if the subject was the luckiest person in the world and guessed the correct cable every time -- the more trials you run, the lower the chances of this already unlikely scenario occuring.
Because of these factors, a sample size of a single individual is MUCH more valid if the results are #3 than if they are #1 or #2. Even so, the bigger the sample size, the more confidence you can have in your results.
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| You seem to think that way, but indeed it's extraordinary claiming to hear things that are not measurable, since it has been never scientifically proven. |
Um, see above. You're again making claims that are not supportable.
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| I didn't say that proved anything. I just wrote it because you asked me to do it. I did say that I don't think expensive cables would make a difference. Please, stick to what I really said. |
You
did say it proved something. You've said many times that your own "experiments" showed you that there is no difference between cables.
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| Your equipment is very relevant. If your equipment is not up to snuff to begin with, how are you going to hear the subtle, but valid, differences between cables? |
Because it's not he point of my argumentation. |
The point of your argument is that cables do not make a difference. You use as support for your argument your own "experiments." Therefore, the equipment you use in such "experiments" is relevant to your argument.
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| I could say, try my test, and then come back and talk to me. |
Again, your "test" does not effectively measure the difference between a cheap cable and a good cable in a high-quality system. It simply doesn't measure that. Comparing a cheap cable to a good cable in a high-quality system
does.
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| If two cables objectively sound different, there must be easy to measure differences between the cables at audio levels and frequencies. |
Again, you keep repeating that statement as if it's a fact, when it is anything but. Have you
ever actually read up on this subject, other than the literature of the anti-cable brigade? Do you even
know any audiologists? First, read what I posted above (the quote from the physicist). Second, do some searches in the literature on human auditory perception. Third, go find an audiologist and ask them to teach you about human hearing.
I was at a get-together this past weekend where I was talking to a friend who is actually an audiologist. You know... someone who is
trained in the human hearing system and regularly does research in the field. This person works at the best audiology department in the western United States, and knows the people at Etymotic personally. This person is well-read on the topic of auditory perception. I asked this person point-blank, without any prompting: Can we measure everything the human ear can hear? The answer was quite clear: there are lots of things that human beings can hear that we cannot measure with existing technology, and there are lots of things about the human ear and hearing system that we, as a species, do not understand.
I don't know how much clearer I can be, Ricky. I appears that you simply don't understand this topic.
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| All degrading effects use to be additive. |
I'm assuming you meant to say that "all degrading effects will be additive," since that is one of the bases of your "test;" the problem is that it is not true. If a cable's defect is that it strips out or distorts certain parts of the spectrum, there will be no additive effect.
Of course, if he'd care to correct me by letting us know more about it, that would be appreciated.
I set up the experiment as methdologically sound as I could -- which was pretty darned good all things considered -- and did a bunch of runs using myself as the test subject, then using other people. I've since repeated the experiment several times with other people. Every time the results have been quite clear and quite repeatable. So, no, I don't have a journal article with the # of trials listed 
