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Originally Posted by tourmaline  And i also gave my reasons why. 
And i think, the more experienced audiophiles would agree with me. I have done blind testing before and i clearly could hear the differences and tell exactly what they did to the system. So, clearly i don't have to prove anything for myself. Do i have to prove anything for somebody else? certainly not.
Would i be willing to do a blind test in the envirement i posted about earlier, certainly. And as i stated before, i have done my share. Even to a point that an owner of an audio shop got pissed and told that i heard everything in a system. He couldn't take the bad news of systems or new equipment that didn't cut the cake.
On another event i came in an audioshop and the owner let me hear his amplifier, you have to know that i auditioned it before, so i pretty much knew how it sounded at that time, and played some music. Within minutes i told him he had done something to the amplier, since it sounded quite different! He then told me that he replaced the internal wiring! You cannot go blinder then that situation, unexpected test! |
Don't ask me to cite references, because I can't off the top of my head, but I think it's something like less than 5% of the population have unusually acute hearing abilities like this. It's like any other gift, you can use it, abuse it, ignore it, or loose it. Like any other innate abilities we're born with, it doesn't make one person better than another person overall. That's why we're stronger together than alone. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Teamwork my friends. A true "Team" will always go farther than a band of indiviruals doing their own thing, no matter what their individual talents. In some endeavors, teamwork is obviously mandatory. In audiophillia, it's not a necessity, but we will all go much farther, much faster, together, than we will on our own. We can all learn from one another.
Some equipment is more revealing of differences than others. Some individuals' hearing better able to identify subtle sonic differences than others. Some of the ability can be learned, but some is innate. You either have it or you don't. If you have it, you can train it to be of further value to you.
A good spotter can, by natural hearing alone, identify range, direction, and elevation of a report or other sound sometimes better than any instrumentation in adverse field conditions. You're born with that ability, but then you have to train and develop it.
As a photographer, in the old days, I learned how to develop my ability to accurately judge distances. We were shooting with wire frame 4x5 cameras. You could get awesome action/spontaneous photos by setting your distance and exposure values before hand, then in a large venue you could hang out on the sidelines, and when your gut told you that action might be about to take place, you could start walking towards it and when your preset distance exactly coincided with the developing action you could fire away, and you were all set. No fiddling with focus and exposure values, you could just concentrate on the action and framing it properly, etc.
Much of that technique was taught/learned, but if I didn't have stereophonic vision to start with, there would no use training for that skill. It just wouldn't happen.
So we have to be aware of our abilities and limits and work within that envelope to maximize benefit.
Then if we work together/cooperate with one another and rely on someone else who has strengths where we have weaknesses, and they, us, our combined effort is far more powerful than all of us working as individuals. Ego's have no place in this sort of co-op society. Honor and personal integrity do.
Don't see why I'd need to do that, I already have two cables that I think sound rather different, and I like the Zu. What I want to do is to convince myself that I do hear the differences between the Zu and that other cable; that my brain is not being deceiftul to me despite all my conscious attempts to not let it. That's why I'd like to do the blind test myself.
