Do you guys realize how ridiculous this board really is?

Yes. Placebo effect is a known phenomenon and from a purely scientific viewpoint sighted listening tests are unreliable. All well and good.

BUT THIS IS A HOBBY, FOR GOD’S SAKE.

Anyone who describes his listening experiences here is immediately castigated. Which takes all the fun out of the hobby, except for those who get their jollies out of constantly criticizing others (which, of course, is why I hang out here so often).

Scientifically, it has never been proven that similar cables can sound different. I suppose that is true for a lot of similar components also. However, as an aside, I doubt that there has ever been any serious scientific attempt to test such things (other than speakers).

BUT, the experience of thousands of high end enthusiasts has led them to believe that there are differences. You can drone on all you like about placebo, marketing hype, ect. In the meantime there’s a whole bunch of intelligent, articulate people hanging out over at AA having a good time and enjoying their systems, their hobby and the camaraderie of the hobby. As someone mentioned, there is virtually no mention of CES at AR. Why should there be? Here all one needs to know is the location of the nearest Home Depot.

The boys over at AA are interested in equipment and what they believe equipment can do to enhance the enjoyment of music. They are not interested solely in music – otherwise they would post only on the recording boards. They don’t post here because this board has virtually nothing to do with what the hobby is for most who enjoy it.

You can rest comfortable in your self-anointed intellectual superiority and moral outrage at those who insist on enjoying something from a lay perspective, although I prefer to be reminded that true wisdom is possessing a healthy respect for how little we really know. Intellectual arrogance and an intellectual approach to a subject are not one and the same.

Or, as often is the case, you can read all kinds of claims and statements into this post that I am not making and spend the next year filing up the dead space here haranguing against statements and claims I have neither made nor implied.

Some people I’m sure enjoy spending their free time experimenting in their home-based chemistry lab, rather than simply picking those chemical based products that seem to work best for them for the use intended. Others apparently prefer home-based audio labs to listening rooms. To each his own.

Yes, human perception can be seriously flawed. But human experience and perception, occurring in a non-lab, non-controlled environment is the essence of life – without these perceptions and experiences impacting upon our consciousness, life as we know it would not exist. Reduced to its essence, human life is solely the experiences of our conscious mind – nothing more, nothing less.

We humans are on this planet with physical, mental and emotional capabilities that are the end result of evolution as it just happened to unfurl on this planet. That evolutionary process took place in a pre-industrial world, and now we must deal with the industrial world with capabilities designed for survival in the jungle.

Most will choose to go about enjoying life, using what capacities evolution has bestowed on them, without sweating the small stuff – such as constantly questioning whether their perceptions can be validated scientifically. Others will find joy in feeling superior to those Neanderthal-like masses.