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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: That clears up a lot!

You need to read the quote carefully. My statement presumes flat response and very low distortion in both units, which is not always true because sometimes response errors are deliberately built into high-end units to make them sound different -- or so it seems. At any rate the errors are there.

But assuming the conditions are met in the system -- and I only say that to make sure some badly designed preamp isn't loading down one of the players and changing the response -- then the statement holds, yes. If the distortion is low and the response is flat for both players, there will be no audible difference in the blind test. The fancy components, the arcane decoding schemes, or any of the rest of it -- all inaudible when you're not peeking. The "resolution" of the system has nothing to do with it.

As with other claims of this type, this one is backed up by lots of negative results in careful testing. Positive results in open testing don't disprove it, but a single positive result in a level-controlled blind test would, especially if it could be duplicated elsewhere, but pretty much even if not. There would be a real flurry of people trying to do the same thing.

You may think that this is just proof that I don't know anything and/or can't hear anything, but think for a moment about what a splash it would make, and how easy it should be according to your point of view, for any of the high-end journalists who write about this stuff to just do the test and pass it, once and for all. Not one of them has ever done so, despite having all the best equipment and instrumentation and time in the world. Why do you suppose that is? They've cut down acres of trees to print elaborate justifications for why they shouldn't have to do it. Why, if it's so easy?

Of course, they used to argue about power amps too. I did a double-blind test of two amplifiers and passed it easily with pink noise or music (it was written up in Sound & Vision and is on their web site). That was kind of a special case, because the speaker had a weird impedance curve that produced widely differing response curves in a tube vs. a solid-state amp. So the explanation for that turned out to be simple and any reasonably experienced listener (including the owner of the speakers in question) could pass that one. But I digress. -- E. Brad


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