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I find it curious.....

that you would toss out 20 years of (presumably) pleasurable experience as a result of failing to identify differences in cables and/or components under controlled conditions.

If your 20 years as a subjectivist is anything like my 40 years as a subjectivist has been, you would never choose a component or cable under circumstances that would even closely resemble the typical DBT.

If I change something in my system (something I rarely do any more) it is because I have lived with the new component for several weeks and found that over time and from recording to recording I was noticing consistent improvement in one or more areas that seem to affect my enjoyment of listening – such thing as sound stage, localization of voices and instruments, rendering of detail, tonal balance, etc. (Note: phono cartridges is possibly the one exception where I have had to make choices based on pure faith).

But the most important factor in my decision to make a change in my system is the experience of greater enjoyment of listening with the new component in the system.

DBTs in my mind are wholly irrelevant to me as an audiophile. I base my decisions on my own hedonistic pleasure factor. If a change will improve my pleasure and the change is within my means, then I go for it.

Now as a subjectivist, if I attempt to publish a claim that one component is better or different than another without being able to substantiate that claim through application of scientifically valid testing (in audio that will likely be DBTs) then I’m leaving myself wide open for attack.

But my goal as an audiophile is not to make claims (I’ll leave that to the reviewers – whom I gave up reading many years ago). Rather my goal is my own personal enjoyment, and I can’t imagine why I would ever want to give up the opportunity to improve my own enjoyment of my system just because I couldn’t detect differences while under an “audio microscope”.

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