Before you can measure anything, from any perspective you have to measure perception......of an individual.
Until that day. You experts can keep bringing the same numbers from the same machine, and mislead or any form of manipulation...
It simply does not work. You can choose to still be ignorant and act like you don´t know what perception is to you. Thats fine, but don´t force it on others.
Firstly, I had a genuine chuckle with that skit you shared, regardless of what you were implying.
Now, if you had actually been reading the latest statements from the past few pages, you would understand that for proper discussion,
perceived sound must be distinguished from
the physical sound signal. We are
not saying that you do not
perceive the differences you hear between gear, or I at least discourage statements like "You can't hear the differences" since as I have been saying over and over again, the "hear" in that sentence is being misinterpreted; if you understand this point, then there is no "misleading" being done.
For perceptual differences, all factors included (knowing what gear is connected and awareness of others' impressions of said gear), sure, human ears, brains, and language can do the "measuring" for the time being. On the other hand, electronics are quite capable of proving a lack of significant differences between how two chains pass on a signal. Are you of the stance that cables have immeasurable differences that some human minds can substantially amplify? If on the other hand, you believe that the "huge differences" are in some physical property we somehow haven't discovered yet, would that make sense if playing an audio file through a DAC, amp, cable, and ADC were to yield another audio file with absolutely minimal differences between the waveforms, and likewise between certain cables, DACs, or amps? Else, the argument is that those huge differences are indeed to be measured in
psychological responses to all factors involved, which is of course much more complicated and also has a social aspect.
Let's say that at least I am not "forcing on others" that they do not perceive the differences they perceive. And I suppose you too are not forcing people like me who actually own some of these cables to hear the differences, which I don't despite my last audiogram showing a threshold of around 5 dB or less throughout (and I would suppose there are still many with tinnitus who can hear night and day differences). What is
your explanation for the fact that some of us even with quite expensive gear (Meze Elite, HiFiMan HE1000se, say what you will of the FiiO K9 Pro ESS) do not hear the differences others claim? For me, the explanation is that these cables indeed measurably do not audibly differ in how they pass signals through,
and we happen to not be as susceptible to extra-sonic factors influencing our perception. Likewise, what do you think of the results of properly done blind tests? From my perspective, what they show is that when removing all extra-sonic factors, the tiny differences if any are not
perceptible; what they
don't say is that you should not hear those differences once the extra-sonic factors are reintroduced.
In that regard, it would be just as misleading for gear-believers to say that you are
guaranteed to hear differences from a given recommendation as it would be for us to say that you will never hear the differences. What the science suggests is that in most cases, the differences are not founded in the actual audio signals, but in the complex interaction of mind with various factors like knowing what gear is being listened to, and having been immersed within the social context of all the beliefs that evolved surrounding that gear.
