jeffmilner.com/backmasking.htm

Is a good start and you can make your own experiments in minutes without expensive leads etc just by playing tracks backwards to people with and without the words showing. Stairway to Heaven backwards is the classic! I saw Simon Singh do this at Hay Festival. Played it backwards, asked if anyone could hear anything, no, anyone hear the word Satan? Couple of hands in big audience went up. Then played it again with words on the screen, wow! Just try it.

Most web threads argue whether it was Led Zep or the Devil himself that did this, given the limited technology at the time . One lecturer at Leeds (from memory) tried it on his students but with different words.

I have tried it on an opera singer and ‘tone deaf ‘ people with 100% result, no stats analysis needed with this experiment.

My suggestion is that Hi-Fi shops should have a sign saying ‘this sounds great’ visible when demonstrating expensive kettle leads and oxygen free sexed cables, or they could do as now and just tell people….

Problem I have is I want to buy a new amp and speakers, how do I avoid self and salesperson deception.

www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm

www.positive-feedback.com/Issue21/audioramblings1.htm

What intrigues me is that (again, with reservations over speakers) the audio quality coming from from a reasonable component system or even a midi system may now have surpassed that from audiophile kit (look at what happens to Bose prices while everything else gets cheaper). Imagine how a maker of handmade valve-driven computers in cherrywoood boxes would have fared against Dell in the last decade. (but I can hear it now…the 0′s are more vacuous, the 1′s are more unified….).

Somewhere I have a little book of audiophile nonsense from the analogue era which I’ll try to dig out. Highlights I recall are: disconnecting all the lights on your amplifier, only having even numbers of LPs in your room and using channels of mercury to connect your speakers. There was even one audio guru who claimed to be able to tell which channel your television was tuned to–even when it was switched off–just by listening to your hi-fi.

In practical terms I have learned that at the very highest end (Transparent Cable company sells a pair — One Pair — of speaker wires for $30,000 US) the point really is simply to allow very wealthy people to completely distinguish and dissociate their products and systems from the commoners.

E.g., why go out and buy a $10,000 DVD player when you’re just going to hook it up with the same cables that a commoner could buy?

But on the serious side of testing:

(1) Many arguments by the “tweaker” community (an industry term for those people who think they can milk out more performance not through better actual main products but using accessory / pseudoscientific “tweaks”) say that these special power cables and wires and what not help bring out “more” sound from the recordings they are listening to.

(2) Recordings are produced in studios using certain equipment.

(3) The goal of a musical recording is to capture and mix / produce as well as possible the desired sound of the studio engineers and artists.

(4) If your equipment changes, rather than reproduces their originally captured and produced recording, then you have ruined the product.

(5) So by their very arguments, all these tweaking solutions are not better reproducing the original intent of the artists, instead (if anything at all is changed) they are creating something new and different than the recording actually purchased.

(6) If this is the case, then the tweakers need to stop buying pre-recorded CD’s, LP’s, DVD’s, and SACD’s, and go to small live shows, and then tell the artists and performers that the sound is wrong and bring along lots of little gadgets to hang about the performance space to make the artists “sound better.”

- PS: If you’re aiming for actual fidelity, bear this in mind: the studio engineers who produce the recordings to which you (and the tweakers) listen do not use $30,000 speaker cables or $3,000 power leads. They might use $100,000 mixing boards, but these actually do something and have the computing power needed to produce today’s mixes, but they connect their $100,000 mixer to a $800 speaker using a $20 speaker cable.

I’m in Barons Court in London

I thought hearing acuity was varied , and would have guessed that someone who spends a lot of time listening to music would be able to tell if there was a difference, more so than someone who spends all day with an mp3 player ?

I suppose expensive audio is no better than a cheap midi system either, and that all CD players sound the same ? and if the signal is the same when it reaches the amp then all amps would sound the same ? and all amps draw the same current from the mains, and as speakers are driven by watts and drive units operate in basic terms by vibrating , then there can be no difference between them etc etc ?

Regarding optic cable, I thought RCA could transfer more data than optical ?
And an RCA connector is not all that good at preserving a true 75ohm signal.
And most interference is generated from the mix of mains, interconnect and electrical equipment in close proximity to each other ?

I would also have thought not all people into music would want to spend money on cable when they could buy more music, yet some feel the cables make a big enough difference to take them home and demo them, and choose one after listening buying what they thought sounded best.

Its also interesting the amount of claims made about why cables should not make a difference, yet no one questions the acuity of the measuring equipment or can make there mind up on what it is about recorded music that means so much to some.

If CD was so good why are manufacturers still trying to better it, it does not carry more information or recreate music more than analogue, and due to the nature of digital and jitter, are you sure every time you hear a CD it has the exact same errors as the first time ? or could it be that the measurements and engineering we are applying is too crude compaired to human hearing ?

If you use a dog-whistle to call your kids to dinner, at least you will be able to use the well-worn line “Your dinner’s in the dog”.

Ben,

How about testing the Russell Andrews kettle-lead to see if it can be used to make better tea or coffee ?

It would be sufficient to show that a CD player with any chosen lead yields back a bit for bit copy of the original to show that it would be impossible for any cable to have an effect (whichever one Ben chooses). Even if there is jitter in the signal, we will have demonstrated that that jitter has no effect in the data being passed to the amplifier (where of course our debate can start all again) which will mean that whether or not it is there, it will necessarily be inaudible (assuming the DAC in the amplifier is independently clocked).

Such a claim would be testable- but a lot harder to do so.

I guess it makes sense to take things a step at a time though.

The point is that this argument is technically invalid. Effects on digital outputs aren’t hard to detect. They’re very easy to detect. As has been discussed to death above, once you show that the stream of 1s and 0s is the same, it’s only things like jitter *at the DAC stage* that can make a difference.

In any event, I completely agree with you that we will never change an audiophile’s mind with a test like this. The aim is always simply to shine a light on the truth, and try to prevent any fence-sitters from falling on the wrong side.