[deltaqueue]

I love that this is still alive and well in 2014.

Psychoacoustics are still very much apart of the audiophile world; although, the internet has helped reduce the hype to some degree. People believe whatever they perceive and aren't inherently objective.

A/B tests do crop up from time to time in various audio / video communities (AVS and some car audio forums hold some pretty objective events) but science doesn't always provide an answer people want to accept.

[bch]

> Psychoacoustics are still very much apart of the audiophile world

Psychoacoustics[1] is the study of how people interpret sound -- things like loudness, limits of perception, how localization works...

I think what you're talking about would better be described as placeboacoustics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics

[masklinn]

> A/B tests

FWIW the standard of audio and video is double-blind ABX[0] sessions, not merely A/B (and ABC/HR[1] for "fine-grained" comparisons)

> AVS and some car audio forums hold some pretty objective events

HydrogenAudio's community is (or was when I still visited) all about objective testing.

[0] http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ABX

[1] http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ABC/HR

[OneOneOneOne]

In 2012 I attended an A/B blind test for speaker cables... https://sites.google.com/site/audiosocietyofminnesota/Home/a...

It was interesting that there was a preference for the higher priced cables. It is too bad that I did not save my votes to see if my poorly trained ears matched what the others preferred. It is hard to say if there is justifiable benefit in spending big money for cables but I would say it is worth spending a little bit more than the cost of lamp cord based on this test.

With the digital cables to me it seems like a high data rate, low error rate and decent buffering system is all that is necessary for good sound. Given the data rates required for audio (even SACD is in the low MiB/s range) a cheap USB cable should do the trick.

[Tloewald]

Speaker cables are analog so they're going to have some impact on sound, and the study mentions a measurable difference in capacitance (the highest capacitance cables ranked best, the lowest worst — although the middle two are flipped).

[epaladin]

It makes sense if there was an audible difference with speaker cables, particularly if the amps were high power and the cables represented a range of gauges. Trying to power a line array with 22 gauge speaker wire isn't going to work very well.

The stuff in that article makes monster cable look like a bargain.

[secstate]

No, but you can do some pretty straightforward electrical engineering math to determine that 22-guage speaker wire will fail in that case. Show me the physics and math that show failure with a USB cable. One of the major issues here is that USB is like the AK47 of the interconnect world, designed to work it some pretty terrible places. So when you experience jitter, it not actually the GD cable, it's most likely one of the devices on either side using a shitty controller and not handling data loss gracefully.

Audio is so subjective anyway. You'll never win an argument with these people. You just have walk past them and try not to laugh. It's the same as the issue on wines. Doesn't matter how many double-blind tastings you do, some assholes will just sleep better knowing they're not drinking shit I made in my bathtub, even if it tastes the same a Bogle sauvignon blanc.