Without venturing into the debate over how much difference can be made by one cable or another, I just wanted to relate a simple experience I had the other day that showed me how difficult it would be for me to do a fair A/B comparison in my own setup:

I moved an inch or two.

I was driving for several hours the other day and I happened to have my ears/brain in ‘analytical mode’ as I was listening to some music I enjoy. In the midst of trying to critically listen to the way the music sounded in the car compared to the same music played on my home system, I sat up a bit. The positioning of my ears was raised one or two inches relative to the inside of the car. There was a noticeable difference in my perception of the ratio of different frequency ranges within the music had to one another. In the parlance of audio-speak, I would say that some parts of the upper mid-range filled in and that the bass was better defined … yet I had changed nothing about the system itself or the level at which the music was playing back.

If I were in my home, and had changed cables, then sat down for comparative listening with my ears as much as an inch or two displaced from where they were previously, my comparison of the two sets of cables would be flawed. This doesn’t take into account anything else that my have changed in the environment, or my sinuses, or any number of other variables that went unnoticed, while I was changing from one set of cables to the other.

This is one reason why, in my mind, people can honesty relate their experiences and yet sometimes not be able to offer truly valid information about the performance of one cable compared to another. I think that subjective comparisons fall short unless there is a sufficiently large number of blind, independent samples that are in agreement by a large majority. Yet, for subjective comparison within my own system, I have only my own flawed perceptions to go by. Se la vie?