This is nothing. Here are some of the highest prices :

Transparent Opus MM speaker cable. Lenght : 8'. Price : 23,500 $
http://gallery.consumerreview.com/audio/ga...res/opus-mm.jpg

ISM BI-WIRE The One speaker cable : 3 meters, price : 16,720 $

SILTECH G5 Ruby Mountain. Power cord. Price : 3,299 euros.



Of course it means something. It means that the guy was wrong. But the real meaning must be appreciated in light of the test setup.



This is not just a project. This is the full acount of the ABX test, with raw results and all. It failed.



No, the power cord test that you link was made by voodoo audiophiles in order to prove that power cords do affect the sound. The test conducer, Jason Victor Serinus still claims that power cords are very important, after having himself utterly failed the ABX test.
John Atkinson also claims that very expensive power amplifiers are worth their price after having failed to ABX them against cheap ones. And Rorominator (Toulouse test below) still claims that interconnect cables are important after having failed to AB them (simplified ABX, the listener had to tell wether the cables were AB or BA).



6th topic in the first page of our "listening test" forum : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=33951
It was in may 2005 and it was conduced by me.

Two voodoo cable audiophiles (Patrice, Marsupilami), one open minded (JC07), and two skeptical guys (Emmanuel Piat and Pio2001). A high end system, a small room. Interconnect cables from 2.30 € to 530.00 €.
We all kept describing differences when the randomization made us listen to twice the same cable. We sometimes thought that the cables were identical when they were different.
At one point, two cables were played at random.
I said "they are the same".
Marsupilami "They are different. I prefer the notes extinction with the second one. There is more volume."
JC07 "They are different, the first one has a more balanced image, the second one leans to the right side".
In fact, they were different. The first one was a TaraLabs (530 €, left hand side on the photo), the second one was made of more than 6 meters of standard cable with an additionnal connection in the middle (1.5 meters 2.30 € standard cable + 5 meters standard extension).
We ended the training session whithout having been able to recognize reliably if the cables were changed or not between two consecutive playbacks.

I took the time to measure the frequency response of the cables with my CD Player as a source. RMAA detected a 0.01 dB roll off at 20 kHz with the standard cable, and about 0.02 dB with the 5 meters extension in addition.

One month later, Rorominator, in Toulouse, France, organized another test. He had closely followed the development of the first one, and proposed to test his own cables in order to overcome two problems with the first test. First improvement : the test was run at home, on his own system, with his own cables, ands his own CDs. Thus the listener was not perturbated by the discovery of an unknown system in an unknown room with unknown CDs. Second improvement, he chose two cables that he knew he could distinguish immediately. A standard one, and an Ecosse one, worth 1,700 €.
The test involved 5 people who gave more or less answers. I was in charge of the maths, and it was a challenge for me to calculate a relevant p value with a number of listeners unknown in advance, with 5 to 20 answers !
Every session consisted in the two cables played in a random order. AB, or BA. The listeners had to tell the right order. This setup was decided after JV Serinus power cords test, and our interconnect cable test, so as to reduce the time decision interval to a minimum (one cable switching), in order to avoid auditive memory problems.

Rorominator got 9 right answers out of 20. Worse than random. However, PhoenixPrt got 10/10. Taking into account the presence of 4 other listeners, this lead to a p value of 0.005, which is significant. Several days later, after having examined the raw results, we discovered a mistake : Phoenix_Prt score was not 10/10, but 8/10, which leads to a p value of 0.25, which is not significant.
It is worth mentionning that 4 people out of 5 claimed to hear the difference when the cables were presented to them just before the test, while in our first test, only Patrice was convinced that we would succeed.

What's interesting in these tests is not the fact that they failed, but the fact that everyone gave wrong answers. This is especially the case in Jason Victor Serinus power cord test, where people rated the "differences heard during the test" from 2 to 4 on a 1-5 scale before they were told that they actually failed ! One of them even said that the test was too easy, because the sound was louder with one cable than with the other ("SPL should have been matched [...] the difference in volume made the cable identifiable") ! His actual result was 5/10.

Here are all the links to the french test discussions : http://www.homecinema-fr.com/forum/viewtop...r=asc&start=255

And let me recall also this ABX success between speaker cables : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ndpost&p=148461
The frequency analysis showed a 2 dB roll off above 10 kHz !



This article says that this have been done by Baxandall in 1977, and Belcher in 1985, proving that a decent power amplifier could be completely transparent to the human ear without needing exotic audiophile conception : http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm



We just have to apply the Baxandall cancellation technique in order to prove it.



This was done in the power cord and second interconnect blind tests above. In the first interconnect test, Patrice only listened once.



This was the case in the power cord test and in the first interconnect test at least, exept the CD player of the interconnect test, that was only 1500 €. The second interconnect test was done on a lesser equipment, but still high end enough.

True, their intent wasn't to show that there was no discernable difference between power cables, but their test showed it nonetheless...that was my point. At least they shared the negative results openly, even alongside continuing contrary claims.

And one interesting quote from the article... "John Johnson, who comes from a scientific background, suggests that if there are differences between cords, they appear to be so subtle that a blind ABX test cannot discern them with small numbers of participants." I fail to understand why power cables would be so "important" if the differences are "so subtle that a blind ABX test cannot discern them", even with small numbers of participants. The bottom line is why would you spend such a steeply higher amount of money on something that has been shown to provide no noticeable benefit? (If not for other reasons cited...status, appearance, etc.) This would be different if we were talking about a more reasonable expenditure increase (like <50% for instance). But this is a matter of $30 vs. $3000 (or more). I love my blue cables , and I did pay a few dollars more for them, but I'll be damned if I'd pay thousands more for the benefit of a better appearance.

What, you people don't believe that vacuum interconnects, while still had a

?

Hmm, another entry into the "interesting cable" sweepstakes...

http://www.puristaudiodesign.com/Catalog.html

Click on "rls". Not right after lunch.

And they used to cost US ~16K an 8' or so set, but I notice the prices aren't on the site any more.

Oh my great dog, click on the "services" link, too.

Or just click through all of the product descriptions. Best done in a pub with friends and lots of Hefeweizen.

In homecinema-fr.com, the subjectivist forum where I organized the interconnect cables, their results lead to the acceptation by the main part of the community that differences, if they exist, are subtle.
However, the question of the price have remained completely subjective.

Pio2001, interesting reading, tnx for a good post.

what's supposed to be so impressive about the price? I saw speaker cables of upto $50,000 USD for the length it would take to wire my 2 front speakers.

"At the pinnacle of Purist Audio Design’s achievement in audio cable technology stands the Radiant Light Cable System (RLS). By radiating light around the conductors inside the cable, this system in effect reinvents the electrical properties of cable insulation, virtually eliminating background noise."
Well this bit certainly made me laugh! So they are claiming to be insulated by light?

Umm - I read it properly now - they claim the light improves the insulator's properties - I'm not sure if the claim would be any wilder for sayiing it's light-insulated though.

Cro-Mag looks quite fascinating too - looks like they offer to demagnetise components at low temperatures but the explanation is horseshit, putting it politely. Fools and their money, as the saying goes....

Sorry, you are the one who have this other way around. And possibly your confusion is from this "beyond any reasonable doubt" sh*t.
This isn't about incorrectness, this is about existence of something defined. In which case, you absolutelly can't prove a negative. But positive - you just show it...

poor and envious ha communists, here.

btw, some informative posts here...as always...often similar arguments, etc.

Why not just create knowledge base about it and link to it when ocasion occurs...other than that it'll be enough to know that most of it is rubbish (well...I'd like to have tube-amp some day...but just for the looks/old style of it ; hmm...actually, "normal" amp and some dummy of tube amp would almost do probably, but not exactly the same... )

Anyway it's good to know that once some day I'll want to buy good enough, but not more-expensive-than-it's-worth-it equipment, I'll come here. No the dillema if I can get at least reasonable stereo speakers for 50€ must be enough for me...

W'e'll have to agree to disagree then - showing a positive doesn't prove it at all. There may be explanations other than the one you think is right. I really don't want to argue the minutae of this but I could give you examples. It's way off-topic, however.

But I've had the impression that we were disccussing mostsimplistic example, merely of proving existence of something, ergo: observation of phenomena.
Theory behind it is a different matter...

The best argument against super expensive cables is asking yourself: "What would it have cost to make this?"

@zima & antz

You two are talking about two different things and therefore comparing apples and berries. The idea that one cannot prove that something doesn't exist, and the idea that nothing is for certain(even positives may be wrong) are two seperate issues. You need to understand the differences between the two before merging them into a single paradigm.

The fact that one cannot prove that something doesn't exist has to do with the "observability". You cannot observe something which doesn't exist and therefore cannot "prove" it.

The fact that nothing is for certain is a different matter. It actually is about "probability". Since nothing is for certain, we can also never 100% prove anything. But you won't go anywhere with this insight alone - you couldn't even cross a street, because you could never be certain that you didn't error when checking if a car is approaching. So, the only way to make any decisions is by rating probabilities. This in turn means that "proofs" are not a black/white issue..... it is not "either proven or unproven"..... it is a scale. To be able to build any complex models at all, in science, once a certain degree of probability is reached, it is hypothetically asumed that it is "proven". If you take it strictly, all science is "hypothetically" - just as live itself.

The reason why people get confused about this is because they are unaware that all those "proofs" were never meant to be treated as "100% certain" but were instead just "hypothetically proven". This however is not a shortcoming of science - science just accepts that in reality, 100% certainity doesnt exist - that humans, technology, even science itself - is flawed and therefore imperfect - science is "learning"... ascendency. Some other schools on the other hand still try to maintain the illusion of being "perfect" to some degree - which IMHO is more than arrogant.

This is not to say that science is the only and best way to progress...... but it(as well as some other schools, like philosophy) got this aspect right...... as long as you are not the total of the universe(which could be aliased to "god") you are flawed... and therefore can never be 100% certain. I guess it is not a coincidence that science and philosophy have always been friends and often overlap.

Anh, it started about "noticing of phenomena"...that's all on my part.

BTW, about arrogancy somehow...why on earth "science" in ENG means only "hard" science...mine (social) excluded apparently...

More hilarity involving the GSIC device, for those who don't regularly read www.randi.org . They cracked the thing open and have a (admittedly rather poor) picture of it.

See: http://www.randi.org/jr/200512/12095intelligent.html

Just to add in this thread, since it's on nonsense, have any of you ever heard of the "Reality Check CD Duplicator"?

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=48855

Has some pointers to it, it appears the person who sells it does not have much web visibility?

Is it a wind-up? I don't know.

But is it real? Errrr......