I'm coming 'off the fence'

[Jwg1749]

Since I got 'Get better sound' I have been amazed by how much better I could make my system sound. This was my old system, not the one I have now. Since then, when I would be home from work, I had set my chair up exactly in the middle of the room because I had set my speakers up equidistant from the walls. In the small room it is, my wife got annoyed with it being in the way and asked me to move the chair over. This meant moving my speakers too. I did (the things we do for love). As it turns out that was a good move. The music sounded fuller and less edgy. I wasn't looking for it, I just noticed it. The explanation for it is easy; I moved closer to a window on the left, where there's less reflection, and further from the right, where there's just a wall with more reflection.

This is an example of a blind test as far as I'm concerned. And no, I'm not going to move my speakers and seat back to check whether I was right or not. I noticed a difference without looking for it and that's good enough for me.

If I decide to jump off the fence on the 'cables make a difference' side, it will have to be because of such a defining moment.

My old system was a Denon PMA720 amp and B&W DM14 speakers. I had that system for over twenty five years. Now I have a Devialet 200 and Dynaudio C1, my system sounds clearer, has better imaging, better and deeper bass and it sounds much more like real music than my old system. It also doesn't go as loud as my old system did.


I'm willing to bet my new system that I can pick my new system over my old system 100% of the time in a blind test, even though I never have before. And I also bet my new system that nobody on this forum really believes that this is of the placebo effect. 

IF I'm going to say that my new cable makes a huge difference I want to be able to bet my system on that statement. Otherwise I will jump off the other side of the fence. But jump I will. My ass is getting itchy on here 

I know you want to call your test 'blind', but I doubt many people would accept that definition. You say "I noticed a difference without looking for it and that's good enough for me". The problem is that you haven't removed sources of unconscious bias. Sure, you didn't want to move the speakers, but you did move them, and the act of moving them involved work. One thing we know is that people are unconsciously inclined to attribute consequences to their own work. So by moving the speakers you made it more likely that you'd hear a difference.

Notice I'm not saying the difference wasn't objectively present. I'm confident it was present. That's because speakers (and their interaction with the room) are by far the biggest source of the sonic character of a digital audio system. Speakers make huge, crass differences. We know this for three reasons:
1. engineering (mechanical components are much less easy to control than electronic ones)
2. measurements (although we may disagree about what to measure and how, the measurements themselves are dead easy to get right, and they show that speakers distort far more than other components, excepting cartridges)
3. listening tests (blind tests run by Harman have shown to a fairly high degree of probability that people reliably prefer speakers with flat FR, in other words people can reliably distinguish the sonic character of speakers in blind tests)
Put those three together and you can be pretty certain that speakers (and the room) are where the clever money will go.


If you were to make the same claims about cables, even if you claimed the differences were 'night and day', all these solid objective reasons would melt away, and all we'd be left with would be your subjective evaluation. And that, we can be sure as eggs is eggs, is unreliable.