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Please [fmw] take your crusade elsewhere. Some of us choose not to be slaves to the meaningless blind test. I'm happy for your revelation, but I really don't like listening with blindfolds on.
I received a nice PM from Rasta who invited me basically to introduce myself so I will take that invitation here in his thread. If you don't want to read a bunch of personal stuff and observations about high end audio, just skip it. I'm basically just introducing myself to Rasta.My father built me my first audio system in 1954 when I was just 10 years old. This was before the transistor had been invented and even before stereo had been invented for that matter. He built it from Maple plywood and finished it beautifully. It had a Garrard changer with an ortofon cartridge, a Fisher integrated amp and a 10" Wharfedale full range speaker in a sand filled infinite baffle. I've been an enthusiastic audiophile ever since. I'm also a musician (30 years of piano/keyboard) and an amateur recording engineer. I've maintained small amateur project recording studio since the mid 1990's.I followed the standard audiophile line for years. I was a subscriber to "Golden Ears" magazine (you may not be old enough to remember it) and even remember buying my first Grace tone arm based on a rave review in that magazine. I was a charter subscriber to Stereophile.In the mid 1990's my system consisted of an Audio Research CD player and tubed power amp, a Conrad-Johnson tubed preamp and a pair of B&W matrix 802 speakers. I also had a 90 lb. VPI turntable with Grace tone arm and Koetsu cartridge as well as a Nakamichi cassette recorder and a vintage Kenwood FM tuner. It was a pretty decent high end system by the standards of the day.I had an on-line vacuum tube business and even wrote some articles about tubes for a couple of third tier audio publications.At about the same time the internet was becoming interesting enough to me that finally ended up making my living on it. I engaged in the audiophile newsgroups of the time and was interested in the ongoing passionate debates about subjective vs. objective listening tests. After talking one day to an audio dealer friend, he suggested I go conduct some blind tests for myself. He explained how to do it and loaned me a box full of high end interconnect cable pairs ranging in price from $40 to about $2500. There were 15 pairs altogether.My wife and I spent the weekend putting them through the level matched double blind tests as we were instructed. To make a long story short, they all had no affect whatsoever on the systems sonics except for one pair. That pair had a high measurable inductance and tended to cut out some of the high frequencies creating a slightly dark sonic signature. I came to the conclustion that the pair was either defective or incompetently designed. The other 14 pairs were just fine and all the equals of each other, despite the broad range of prices.After that I started blind listening tests with a vengeance. I read scientific treatises on placebo effect and audio processing in the brain. I couldn't seem to get enough of it. It was destroying many of my preconceived notions and biases about audio. I had members of the audiophile club over many times for some of these tests and we used equipment from many of them in the tests. Every one of them became a blind test groupie like me as a result of these activities. This went on until about 1998. At that time, I sold the high end system and replaced it with what audiophiles would call a modest "British" system.So I'm quite a different audiophile today. I still love music. I still listen to it every day and play it every day on my keyboards. My digital player is now a Seagate hard drive and I listen to streamed digital files through a Squeezebox that feeds the Onkyo receiver in my decent but unspectacular home theater. What was a high end tube driven system upstairs is now just a competent one that keeps me entertained while I exercise. I keep the exercise equipment and media collection in the same room. I don't use it as a serious listening room any longer because the acoustics aren't good. The room in which I have my home theater as pretty acoustics and always sounds better than the listening room did.I have a new set of biases based on all the blind testing I did in the late 90's. I'm a firm believer that room acoustics are way and above the most important part of an audio system. Speakers are a distant second and the rest of the equipment is close to being trivial for me. It isn't that I don't enjoy audio equipment, I do. It isn't that I don't lust for the warm glow of output power tubes on an 80 lb. amplifier, I do. But I've learned over the years what it takes to make a satisfying music listening experience and I've learned how get such an experience from competent equipment that isn't as over-the-top as I once owned and used. I once paid $11,000 for a preamp. I wouldn't do that again. I'd go buy a motorcycle or put it in my retirement fund or do something that would make more sense to me today.So that's about it, Rasta. That's where I come from and why I view beliefs such as a DAC sounding better after a week warmup with a fairly jaundiced eye. I've experienced how familarity breeds sonic excellence in high end audio so I understand how a subjective audiophile would prefer the sound of the unit after a week of listening to it. Been there, done that. But I would need some kind of scientific explanation of how a week warm up would out do a 2 hour warmup, as an example. I would view it as what I call the familiarity effect and most audiophiles call "break in."Incidentally, I don't enjoy listening to music blindfolded either. Blind tests don't require a blindfold and they aren't part of enjoying listening to music. They are just to determine what really is and what really is not audible because the truth is we really can't always trust our ears. Blind tests don't take much time and they can teach some interesting lessons. Call me a recovering audiophile, I guess. Thanks for listening.
Hi FMW,You'll find "believers" to be in great majority here,
