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Re: A couple of problems with that

I'm waiting for better suggestions. I've been waiting for about 30 years. The audiophile cable industry hasn't offered any. Nobody else has either. Every practical suggestion gets shot down with a litany of objections which make little sense.

"You suggest listening to the cable in a different or artificial context, e.g in the tape loop."

Not necessarily. I said that the test should use a shunt. The shunt could be from external bus bar shorting the test cable for all I know. I just used the example of a tape loop as an easy way for me to satisfy myself. A scientifically acceptable test would of course have to be far more rigorous using specially designed equipment. Being passive devices which merely conduct a signal from one point to another, cables have the unique property that their effects can be alternatively inserted and bypassed in a circuit to observe what effect their presence has. Don't you accept that notion?

"The act of listening in an attempt to identify differences is a fundamentally different task than listening to music, so you have introduced another variable. Has anyone proven that the results are the same?"

If you don't belive that they are, then you don't belive in the math and science which tells us how to break down complex waveforms into simpler ones so that they can be analyzed to a far greater extent than a jumbled incomprehensible squiggle on an oscilloscope. At one time we'd have had to throw up our hands. But today, if that is what is required, computers can be programmed to analyze the squiggles that humans can't and to make sense of any differences caused by the addition of a wire into a circuit.

Are you saying that nobody can devise a method for correlating perceived differences and any objective electrical measurement technique? Is there something about it which defies analysis by anyone ever? What I am saying is that if you reject the analytical techniques available today, show us where and why they are flawed and point the way to developing satisfactory ones which will be acceptable.

"AFAIK, there are no switching methodologies that have been shown to reliably detect small differences."

Then show us where they are flawed and then there is the opportunity to devise new ones that will work.

So what is the logical conclusion of your arguement? We have no way to test or analyze cables objectively and we can never develop one? There is no way to ever find a correlation between the objective electrical performance of cables and their subjective effect. I think that is what you are saying.

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