This method of cable evaluation, as an alternative to DBT.

[E-Stat]

I keep forgetting, cables are in the same category as cars. No wonder you treat them as such.

Actually cables would be more like transmissions. High fidelity music systems are like any number of complex electronic and mechanical devices in that they are the sum of the various parts. I use the car analogy because most folks own cars and more readily identify the automotive high end.

rw

[pctower]

I was really PO'd when you called me a "refreshing exception", not that I know what that means. But "exception" didn't seem good.

The "all wires sound the same" claim reminds me of an old post where I tried out a $50 RCA CD player at home and found I could enjoy music when listening to such a cheap CD player (suggesting differences among CD players were not all that great). I hadn't mentioned it was a "remanufactured" CD player that normally sold for about $80 at the time ... but that didn't matter to Risch who blathered in response that one needed to spend at least $300 to get a decent CD player. Of course I went on the counterattack telling Risch he had just "evaluated" a CD player without ever hearing it based solely on the price and then came up with some arbitrary $300 limit as if he'd listened to every CD player under $300 and found all of them to be unsatisfactory. My point, and I do have one, is that conclusions that are not based on auditions are embarassing ... sometimes conclusions based on sighted auditions are embarassing too (deception tests) but at least one has heard a component before commenting on it.

In my opinion, some percentage of differences heard among wires, especially speaker wires, are due to thin wire / thick wire SPL differences and/or loose connections ... and some percentage of differences among speaker wires and interconnects are due to corrosion and/or oxidation on the terminations.

Add in the percentage of imagined differences among wires, and then subtract from
100%, and what's left are real, meaningful sound quality differences ... assuming we hadn't reached 0% after subtracting ... or became confused by all the math as I was ...
heh heh

I'm sure a speaker cable that drove an amplifier into oscillation when connecting a difficult load such as some planar speakers would be audible. Or at least mistaken for new electronic "music" one hears when walking past night clubs these days.

Politics:
Before you call me a "left pinky" please be aware that my last vote for a Dumbocrap president was George McGovern in 1972. You could just as well call me a "right pinky" as I voted for Reagan in 1980. That was my last vote for a Repooplican president.
Libertarian since then.

Neither party comes close to my positions. I would like to find a party consisting of:

1. Neocons who would demand very good inteligence;

2. Fiscal conservatives, who would make an exception for a national health care system;

3. Social liberals who reject the religious right;

4. People who are serious about eliminating our dependence on foreign oil by way of government financed efforts to develop alternative energy sources (I know - another exception to #2); conservation and opening up domestic drilling;

5. People who are constantly in search of ways to balance our ongoing need for a healthy free-market based economy with coping with the problems of world-wide poverty and gross disparity in weath and the broader issues involved in the long-term preservation of the world's ecosystem; and

6. People who believe that state and local communities must find ways to salvage our educational system.

I don't ask for much, do I?

[skeptic]

Did I miss something?

What does any of this have to do with cables?