SilverEars
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2013
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I tried swapping out cables to differentiate sound. I need to proper rig to switch between the two cables quickly. I don't trust myself to recall how it sounded like after after the amount of time it took to swap them out. It's quite difficult to decern, and it makes you hyper attentive at looking for differences and if you recall the memory imprecisely, your impressions are not accurate.As a Chinese person who spent most of the time on the other side “Erji.net” and have seen discussions on Erji on this very similar topic extensively, I think one important theory and aspect hasn’t been discussed in this thread yet is to really look at the placebo effect and the psychological state when using more expensive cables.
Hypothesis #1: People hear different sounds or have different perception of the same sound at different time during the day or different energy level during the day.
Hypothesis #2: Your neural and body reactions to all sort of stimulus constantly changes. Basically your body at this moment will be different from your body at the next moment.
Hypothesis #3: when listening to more expensive gears in general, the listener will tune their mental state to heighten the perception of sound and also lead him or herself to pay more attention to the sound.
If any of the above hypothesis is true, then listening to ANY cable at different time could sound different to the listener. And the price effect will make the “different” become “better”.
Now. If using experience gears help the owner heighten their senses subjectively, and get them to appreciate what they have more, it might as well worth it to buy expensive cables. All the sound we hear is nothing but an image stitched together by our brain and conciousness. The upgrade of cable in this case is an updgrade of a more careful listening mindset internally. It’s the same effect when you look at the same painting on your computer or a painted wall in an office building VS in a museum or gallery - the content is the same but your mental state of accepting those content are different.
The setup of cable dac and amp is undeniably a highly ritual process and all eventually leads to some sort of respect to the music and the eventual focus is the music.
I want to propose that from this point of discussion moving forward, we can at least separate the objective measurement and the subject perception when it comes to “does it make any difference”.
I have heard the argument that usb sounds harsher than optical or the usb sounds shrill or has glare compared to optically fed signal due to noisy line. How does that make sense, although at times, usb seemed brighter sounding than optical. Also, bit rate did change how I perceived sound as well.
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