regalma1;689163 Wrote: > There are a number of rules in the audio world that haven't held up. For > long time it was considered that we could only hear differences of at > least 1 dB. That has been demonstrated to not be correct. I remember > reading about a double blind test in Stereo Review that went bad > because there was a .1 dB diffenence in levels. The listeners could > pick it up. Bell Labs was able to show that filtering out everything > above 30 KHz was detectable by a person who was tone deaf above 10 KHz. > Jim Smith in his book "Get Better Sound" has a great story about > discovering that he could pick out sounds that were below the noise > floor in analog recordings but not in a digital recording of the same. > The human ear is pretty amazing. > > The naysayers about cables always claim that only resistance and > reactance count. We in the wireless industry are being increasingly > plagued by a distortion called PIM, which occurs in cables and > connectors. It is every bit as possible in the audio range as the > microwave. And no one except maybe a specially built research lab can > measure PIM in the audio frequency range. We only recently have > developed the ability to measure it easily in the microwave range, > which is orders of magnitude easier. > > If people are consistently hearing differences even though the theory > or instruments say they shouldn't we should assume it is always a case > of self delusion. We knowledge is dwarfed by our ignorance.
There is an easy answer to all this: a statistically significant double blind test. If such a test proves to an acceptable degree of certainty *that* a difference exists, then we can move on to investigating *why* it exists. But not until then, because there are an infinite number of things we could "assume", and we don't have the time to investigate then all. -- darrell ------------------------------------------------------------------------ darrell's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13460 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93483 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
