Stewart Pinkerton wrote:
On 6 Oct 2005 02:38:23 GMT, wrote:

Steven Sullivan wrote:

Not important at this point in the argument. Pinkerton denies that I
heard the difference. He cannot do that.

He denies you heard a real difference. He doesn't deny that you *think*
you heard a difference.

Proof?

He is correct, that is my position. Since you refuse to do a blind
test, you have no way of knowing which is true.

It doesn't matter. Do you understand that point?

But *physically*, not at all necessarily equivalent. Not all beliefs are true.

But in this case it does not matter. If it is IN PRINCIPLE impossible
to distinguish between:

A) A cable that ALWAYS sounds better because of something in the
listener
B) A cable that ALWAYS sounds better because of something in the cable

what difference does it make? The observed phenomena are the same.

Rather than being impossible, it is in fact very easy to make such a
distinction - you remove from the listener only the *knowledge* of
which cable is connected. If they remain distinguishable, then it's
something in the cable.

Consider the computer in 2001, HAL. Let's say HAL predicts a component
failure. Dave goes out to replace the component and finds that it is,
in fact, defective. Is HAL right or not? Let's say HAL does this with a
100% success rate. Later, we find out that HAl had no way of knowing
that the component would fail. Does that make HAL wrong?

It does not matter! If the correlation is 100%, that's all that matters
in science!

No, that is not where the answer lies, because things *other than*
the actual sound can still highly influence the 'perception' -- enough
so that one can still come to the 100% wrong conclusion about whether
the sound is different or not.

Read my lips: It does not matter.

Perhaps not to you as part of a buying decision, but when you insist
on claiming - as you have done - that it's due to some audible
property of the cable, then you come unstuck.

I'm claiming that if the perceived difference correlates exactly with
the presence of the cable in my system over a period of many trials,
and that similarly-conducted trials of other products have shown NO
differences at all for some products, that there is nothing wrong with
the method per se. I have repeatedly stated that I have found no sonic
differences at all with a spray-on cleaner whose producer made
extravagent claims for it. I tried this product in exactly the same
manner as the cable, and founfd it utterly worthless.

So, now you have to explain how 'my head' not only can make differences
in cable that appear only when the cable is in my system, but also
refrain from doing so when the CD's are cleaned with the wonder-cleaner
Optrix. The simpler explanation is that the products are responsible
for what I hear or don't hear.

Optrix made no difference whatsoever. The cables did.

http://www.amusicdirect.com/products...sp?sku=AOPTRIX

Do you understand how this presents a problem for your hypothesis?

It's Occam's razor time!