Here’s an interesting article that turned up in my inbox a few weeks back. Excerpts follow:
“It was no surprise, then, that in 1983, the magazine jumped at the opportunity to conduct a double-blind listening test, which editor-in-chief Bill Livingston and his colleagues hoped would reveal, scientifically, that high-end cables were indeed a hoax and provided no higher performance than the everyday lamp cord in common use at the time.”
“The resulting article created a firestorm. As you’ll read, the panel identified, to a statistically significant degree, the 24-gauge from the other two contenders with pink noise as the source. More critically, they also identified, again with statistical significance, the Monster Cable from the 16-gauge with pink noise. But the latter results didn’t hold when choral music was used, and none of the Monster versus 16-gauge results passed the higher threshold of a 75 percent or greater detection rate said to be psychoacoustically significant.”
“SR’s editors, however, rewrote the ending to create something akin to a blanket condemnation of the category and pressured Greenhill to accept the changes, a decision he later regretted.”
“Today, 35 years later, the debate over audiophile cables remains as active as ever.".
In other words. Folks have heard a difference between speaker cables. The article way back in 1983 should have settled this there and then. But something got into the way of the truth. You can read the Sound & Vision article in full here, and here is the article “The Horse’s Mouth” mentioned in the S&V article.
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! That’s a story for another day perhaps. It was this experience that taught me to be extra vigilant in setting this up. Hopefully not going to repeat the same mistake twice (*touchwood*)