My cable test enterprise - Page 16

Originally Posted by olblueyez

I also don't see spending money on cables as a wise thing to do if other parts of your system need updating. In another thread some guy was evaluating cables with a sound card in his computer. Not very smart. If there are people here who fit into that group of people who purchased equipment in the wrong order then obviously you have put yourself in a situation where you have eliminated some or all of your chances for getting positive results. This is very common for people to spend 100 bucks on a LOD when they could have bought a LD amplifier. That is just an example but you get the meaning. One misconception I ran across in the cable thread was a fellow named Bullseye who was under the impression that people were claiming cables added some sort of sound quality or coloring instead of merely allowing these sonic qualities to pass from your source to your amp. One thing I noticed while building my system is that quick change comparisons reveal nothing as you need to become extremely familiar with your listening material before changing "ONE" piece of equipment to be in a situation to hear a difference. If someone says to me that they listened to their favorite music for 3 months with their system unchanged before they add a tube or cable then I will go out of my way to lend credibility to that persons findings. If someone says I got 2 sets of IC's together and swapped them out repeatedly in one afternoon then I have no interest in his findings as the best you could possibly hope for is being able to find a change at all, but finding the differences and being able to accurately express them? No way. Comments like these I make a point of ignoring, and for this reason I ignore anyone who mentions this type of testing. I believe Nick should have everything he needs to find a difference since he is comparing Silver to Copper. If he doesn't find a difference then I don't have any answers for you aside from there will never be a definitive answer to all this and the best thing for me personally is to use the methodology as described above to evaluated what goes into my system. Too many different people and too many different variables to really nail down a definite answer.

Originally Posted by nick_charles

On the posted samples. All samples have been downloaded multiple times yet nobody has reported back, do I take it that nobody could reliably tell the samples apart ?

Originally Posted by olblueyez

..... One thing I noticed while building my system is that quick change comparisons reveal nothing as you need to become extremely familiar with your listening material before changing "ONE" piece of equipment to be in a situation to hear a difference. If someone says to me that they listened to their favorite music for 3 months with their system unchanged before they add a tube or cable then I will go out of my way to lend credibility to that persons findings. If someone says I got 2 sets of IC's together and swapped them out repeatedly in one afternoon then I have no interest in his findings as the best you could possibly hope for is being able to find a change at all, but finding the differences and being able to accurately express them? No way. Comments like these I make a point of ignoring, and for this reason I ignore anyone who mentions this type of testing....

Originally Posted by upstateguy

IMHO, It's just plain silly to say that.

Small differences can be identified from quick A-B comparisons as well as "it sounds the same."

We did this the last NY meet and it has been done by practically everyone here at one time or another after getting a new component.

You might not pick up some nuances but for the most part, it is fairly easy to hear differences with A-B compressions.



USG