Quote Originally Posted by okiemax
From time to time on this forum, reference is made to research by Dr. Floyd E. Toole, who I believe is still Corporate Vice President of Acoustical Engineering for Harman International. Although I can't find the results of any studies he has done on speaker cables on the web, Mtrycraft and Monstrous Mike in recent posts claim Dr. Toole has conducted tests on different cables and found they made no difference on his speakers.

It could be I am misunderstanding what has been said about Dr. Toole, but if he thinks different speaker cables make no difference in performance, this is in conflict with the following advice quoted from the manual on his firm's JBL TiK Series speakers:

"Speaker cables and interconnects are important components in an audio system. With all the factors at an appropriate level of quality the speaker cable and the interconnect cable can make sigificant contributions to the percieved sound quality. Careful selection of cables and interconnects can add or subtract marked shadings in tonal character. Likewise different cables can have a dramatic impact on the dynamic contrasts experienced by listeners."

http://manuals.harman.com/JBL/HOM/Ow...Ti10K%20om.pdf

What do other forum members make of this contradiction?
I think Dr. Toole has been built up more by the yeasayers than anybody (including that fence sitter pctower) to be bigger than life so that attempts to chop him down will have a more lasting effect. Perhaps this is the reverse strawman theory.

To summarize, Dr Toole has published his efforts regarding his method of designing speakers. That is, the way he approached speaker design was to thoroughly control the testing of various designs using DBT testing procedures with trained listeners. He is admired by many of us scientifically-thinking forum members for his assertion that sighted evaluation of audio components has the real risk of introducing significant enough biases into subjective evaluations as to render them meaningless. He has written a peer-reviewed paper on this very subject with Sean Olive.

Since I am from Ottawa and being in the government working on technical issues, I have run into Dr. Toole's co-workers on occasion at the Communication Research Centre (CRC). Many don't really give it much thought but one did relate an informal test to determine in exotic cabling should be used in his speaker design if there was a performance impact. The guy didn't really even know what they were using for wire at the time and he guessed some sort of Monster 14 gauge copper stranded wire. Anyways, the test with the much more expensive wire, using the same testing criteria as his speakers, did not show any performance improvement and he dropped the matter. There are no studies or reports of this because it was simply a side issue of some curiosity.

While Dr. Toole has moved on to Harmon, some of his ex co-workers work in this lab: http://www.crc.ca/en/html/aas/home/home. If you care to read some of the work at that site, you will see that Dr. Toole's methods have formed the basis for subjective evaluation of audio signals. These techniques were used to develop the mp3 coding algorithms.

In the end, what we have is a proven method of subjective evaluation of audio signals. All that is needed is the effort to apply this method to a set of audio cables for a scientific evaluation. Everything is there except the willingness to exude such an effort. That's the point. It can be done. However, don't expect somebody who has an opinion that there are no differences to jump up and expend the energy to complete such a test. I know I have no desire to.

With opportunity for somebody to grab the chance at shutting people like me up for good, I simply cannot understand why it hasn't been done yet. Can you imagine the first audiophile club who could produce testing results that show conclusive evidence of real cable sonic differences? They'd be international heros in the audio community.

So what's the excuse for not doing this?