Golden ear audiophiles are notorious for claiming to hear subtle things that no one else can hear. What's more they will attribute these differences to things like skin effect in the patch cables. Skin effect on signal that goes to 30kHz max? Gee, a whole micron's worth of the center of a 12 gauge cable might be getting dodged by the signal. This is the least picadillo one will read in publications like The Absolute Sound. They will use the language of art critics to make technical criticisms. One reads things like "The J13 speakers have a wonderful phase shifted aural spaciality but slightly overmunge the dibalanced low-band spectrum." Truly awful. They mangle fantasy and science together the same way flying saucer and new age enthusiasts do.
It's very easy to suspect that they are in fact full of....stuff. If you're in the business of selling high end audio then it becomes very important to discover to what extent the golden ears are or are not full of it. Bob Carver did a little hands on research at a mid '70s trade show to shed some light on these suspicions. He displayed an impressive system openly. I don't recall the model number but it had the separate tube amps for the right and left channel. It had the oxygen free gold wire to interconnect the type of components that ultra audiophiles have wet dreams about: hand crafted capacitors and resistors and transistors matched to six 9s precision in gain and so on and so forth. In any case the system displayed was in the $30k range at the time. The speakers were no less expensive and no doubt exquisitely hand matched to the amps. But here is where the joke comes in. The speakers were connected to a $200 dollar range bookshelf stereo hidden behind a curtain. Carver injected pink noise into the ultra stereo and displayed the result on a spectrum analyzer. He then set the bookshelf system to a moderate volume and EQed it with the same pink noise as input until it matched the spectrum of the ultra stereo. As long as the controls on the bookshelf were not tampered with, it's sound was good approximation of the ultra stereo at the same moderate volume. He told the audience that he had a top secret experimental system behind the curtain and wanted to field test it to ensure he was on the right track. With some audiophile grade vinyl classical as the input he switched between the ultra stereo (which they COULD see and were familiar with) and the "top secret" bookshelf system behind the curtain.
Lo and behold! The bookshelf system had far better "aural spaciality.........." I've known salesmen who have done this same thing several times with the same result. I suppose this goes a long way toward explaining the audiophile aversion to double blinded A/B listening tests. Those A/B switches must introduce some truly horrible "multiphasic inhibited frequency shifts" into the signal.
Now, it is true that a $5000 system will most likely sound far better than a Soundesign bookshelf from Wal-Mart. But there is a point of imperceptible diminishing returns. I have no trouble believing that point comes long before one has spent $140,000.
p.s. I'll tweak the tweaks a little more by mentioning that Don Lancaster has described similiar experiments in tweak psychology. Every so often in Electronics Now he would describe such shenanigans. Many of his writings can be found at www.tinaja.com. He also critiques would be perpetual motion machine inventers and "free" energy sources that are even BETTER than cold fusion.
The Bob Carver prank. (Score:5)
It's very easy to suspect that they are in fact full of....stuff. If you're in the business of selling high end audio then it becomes very important to discover to what extent the golden ears are or are not full of it. Bob Carver did a little hands on research at a mid '70s trade show to shed some light on these suspicions. He displayed an impressive system openly. I don't recall the model number but it had the separate tube amps for the right and left channel. It had the oxygen free gold wire to interconnect the type of components that ultra audiophiles have wet dreams about: hand crafted capacitors and resistors and transistors matched to six 9s precision in gain and so on and so forth. In any case the system displayed was in the $30k range at the time. The speakers were no less expensive and no doubt exquisitely hand matched to the amps. But here is where the joke comes in. The speakers were connected to a $200 dollar range bookshelf stereo hidden behind a curtain. Carver injected pink noise into the ultra stereo and displayed the result on a spectrum analyzer. He then set the bookshelf system to a moderate volume and EQed it with the same pink noise as input until it matched the spectrum of the ultra stereo. As long as the controls on the bookshelf were not tampered with, it's sound was good approximation of the ultra stereo at the same moderate volume. He told the audience that he had a top secret experimental system behind the curtain and wanted to field test it to ensure he was on the right track. With some audiophile grade vinyl classical as the input he switched between the ultra stereo (which they COULD see and were familiar with) and the "top secret" bookshelf system behind the curtain.
Lo and behold! The bookshelf system had far better "aural spaciality.........." I've known salesmen who have done this same thing several times with the same result. I suppose this goes a long way toward explaining the audiophile aversion to double blinded A/B listening tests. Those A/B switches must introduce some truly horrible "multiphasic inhibited frequency shifts" into the signal.
Now, it is true that a $5000 system will most likely sound far better than a Soundesign bookshelf from Wal-Mart. But there is a point of imperceptible diminishing returns. I have no trouble believing that point comes long before one has spent $140,000.
p.s. I'll tweak the tweaks a little more by mentioning that Don Lancaster has described similiar experiments in tweak psychology. Every so often in Electronics Now he would describe such shenanigans. Many of his writings can be found at www.tinaja.com. He also critiques would be perpetual motion machine inventers and "free" energy sources that are even BETTER than cold fusion.