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Re: Jon - about one of your comments

If someone was utterly convinced that audio cables did not make any sonic differences, then why would they want to post such a belief here? To try and convince all the regulars that they were right? To convince all those people who in many cases feel quite strongly that they DO make a sonic difference?

What purpose would such a post serve? I seriously doubt that it would convince anyone to change their minds, and anyone who reads this board for more than a day would soon know that sonic differences for cables is taken quite seriously here as being real. It would seem that the only real purpose would be that such a post was a troll.

By the same token, if they did not believe that they needed anything but zip cords and OEM interconnects, why seek advice here? There would be no need to ask any questions of anyone, they already 'know' the answers.

That leaves us with the classic "I am saving you from yourself" scenario. Again, this will not 'save' anyone who is already convinced that cables are sonically different and worth dealing with.

That leaves the subset of the above, the ostensibly benevolent concept of "save the newbies from the misguided cable nuts". This has the same inherent problem as the larger set stated above, that someone has judged that someone else needs saving. A rather large and assuming role to take upon one's self.

With all of that said, on the whole, I am generally rather tolerant of posts in these various categories, even though they do not help many folks, but rather can cause folks to get unruly and generate flaming and personal attacks.

Once we reach this point, then some sort of action must be taken, or we no longer have a moderated board, just anarchy.

As for my posting on AR, there are a few folks who lean toward the objectivist stance, and a straggling of new comers who might only see posts that are completely one-sided: just forget about anything but lamp cords and the cheapest IC's. The hard core naysayers there will not have their minds changed anymore than hard core believers here. I know that. But some of the other folks might begin to get the idea, and try something out for themselves. Many who do so with an open mind end up finding that they DO respond positively to high performance audio cables.

I think that this is one of the fundamental differences between the so-called subjectivists and so-called objectivists: in many cases, the objectivists tend toward recommending NOT getting or trying anything beyond lamp cords and freebie/OEM IC's, while most all subjectivists will tend to tell folks to check it out for themselves.

With that in mind, just about everyone here has 'tried' lamp cord as speaker cable, and they went on from there. So many of those who insist lamp cords are enough refuse to even try aftermarket cables, and if they do, the bias factor is so high, they are very unlikely to hear anything if they did try them.

I once had a hard core cable objectivist fail to differentiate between correct L-R relative polarity, and one of the channels reversed polarity (with the resulting Out Of Phase condition) in a blind test.
He was so convinced that "there weren't any sonic differences" he couldn't even pick out such a gross change in the system! He denied the reality of what was presented strongly enough to be unable to notice even such a major change in the sound.

Jon Risch


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  • Re: Jon - about one of your comments - Jon Risch 11/24/0123:15:54 11/24/01 (0)


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