Thanks, Beobloke. It must have been quite a step to de-cloak and write that,. I must say that I appreciate it.
A very good friend of mine (someone daft enough to trust his life to
two successive rally cars I'd welded together) left HP and went to a company I've long expected to bring out a turntable called Ekpensiv, where he managed the product development department for 20-odd years. He didn't speak much of goings-on there and I didn't ask. But I gather they had a succession of good times and thin times of shrinkage. It is a form of fashion industry and luxury goods. Their boss is certainly a showman par excellence. But Bill didn't go in for the hype and whatnot, he just did good solid engineering which he's excellent at. The magazines lauded this firm and it almost seemed they could do no wrong and could ask any price, they had a fan-base that seemed almost blind. I found this all a bit off-putting. If all those expensive later mods needed fitting to their turntables because they each made revolutionary, large improvements to the sound, then the base model, expensive as it is, ought to sound crap without them. I bought a B&O radial tracker and I'm quite happy with it.
Cables certainly can make a difference, but chiefly when some quirk of the equipment lets them or reacts to them. My inclination is that when I hear a difference where I didn't expect one, I'll dig and dig until I've unearthed not only the nature of the difference but what mechanism created it. I want to understand it.
Hifi magazines changed a lot in the eighties and what I read drove me away. THere were never any dead heats, there were never any small differences. It didn't seem real. It didn't seem honest. Not dishonesty as in getting bungs from distributors or manufacturers, more a case of sexing up the descriptions to get and keep subscribers on the edge of their seats. It sounded like all reviews were being done by Jeremy Clarksons a decade before he appeared on our screens.
Some people treat double blind etc testing as a sort of garlic to wave at vampires. It seems to be a formalising of common sense, and then worshipping it. My ears aren't perfect, my perception isn't either. Sometimes when listening to things i may wonder 'Did I really hear that?' so trying things out blind is a way for me to test whether I heard something or whether I wanted to think I heard something. People (you, me everyone,) are suggestible to an extent. Our senses also aren't absolute. Sit in your lounge, look at a photograph on your lap. Your perception of the colours will be influenced by the colours and brightness around you. No great surprise. It's how our vision works. Our perceptions are influenced by our surroundings, and also by what we were doing just before. I don't place absolute trust in my senses, so it's sensible to check when I have doubts.
Some decades ago I built three amplifiers out of curiosity. One used MOSFETs, one used Bipolar transistors, the third used valves. All were designed to try to perform to the same standards. The valve amplifier had to be transformerless and DC coupled, which made it rather extreme. I think I succeeded. I couldn't tell them apart. I tried other people and their opinions were pretty much random. So I broke the valve amp down for parts. It wasn't a keeper not at the size and heat involved. Was the nature of the device used important?... no not to the sound. .. but yes to the size, price and power consumption. I think I achieved what I set out to design, and I listened to them, and I tried to check them with other people's opinions. I concluded that any of rthem would do for me, and forty years later one of them is still sitting behind a pair of transmission line jobs in the lounge. I feel no need to change anything. It satisfied me then and my hearing is degrading not improving with time.
Speakers, yes I'm not surprised you can recognise them blind given an acclimatisation period. 2-dimensional frequency response plots till only a tiny part of the tale. Speakers are complex beasties and their interaction with the room is even more complex.
It seemed to me that hifi magazines switched from being for people who listened to music to people whose hobby had become buying hifi equipment. Some of them seem to be under the curse of the flying dutchman, to always be on the move changing things and never getting to rest and enjoy what they have.
It's a human trait. I've seen it in the horse world. Someone gets in a new type of bit supposed to improve some problem or another with their animal. It doesn't seem to make any difference to me, but within the blink of an eye, half a riding club has ordered them in from America or Australia.
Anyway, forty years ago I opted out of the hifi thing and got on with looking for new music. Hifi magazines may have changed in the intervening years, but I don't need them. Some of the things I see on the internet makes me think that fashion and suggestibility are still going full-bore. I just hope that there are some oases of common sense around nowadays. They all evaporated in the heat of the eighties.
I put signals up to many tens of GHz through cables, and I developed the current generation of instruments used to measure the noisiness of components and systems down to thermal noise floors at a few Kelvin. Audio is a bit easier
David