I agree, all this is tricky, our minds do play funny games with us. One day I feel I hear enough bass the other I don’t. Why? No idea, same room, same stereo, same source, same song. A different mood I guess.
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Because music, sound and hearing is an experience that involves not one center in the brain, like vision, but many disparate regions. I’m surprised our auditory sense is as consistent as it is after reading this article.
I don’t understand humans need to argue what others claim to experience as right or wrong or can or cannot be. Its futile.
Me too. It’s those times I wonder if I’m listening too much to THE SYSTEM and not enough to THE MUSIC.
It is a fraught subject, but fascinating. And will likely never be resolved.
I was asking myself earlier, if a similar sleight of hand had occurred, and someone had substituted my old HDMI for the new…But between my Oppo and TV, rather than in the audio system…what would I think?
As a separate question - If you asked most folks if they could tell the difference between speaker cables, then taken the subset who responded, “No” and asked if they could tell the difference between video cables to their TV’s?
Endlessly fascinating topic, perception.
As my ROTC instructor, Capt Cash used to tell us. “Perception is everything. To a worm, a day spent digging in the hot sun bears going fishing.”
A Good 'Un!
All a matter of perspective.
Ironically, Darren is fishing with his dad in (warm-ish) North Carolina as we write. I replied that the fish weren’t biting here:
Went from 75 on Sunday to snow and headed for 0 tonight.
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Completely different analogy/comparison:
Have been going through hard drives trying to find an old recording I want to preserve (at least) and possibly augment/remix/re-record, blah blah. Found some old HD broadcasts of shows I recorded off the air from 15+ years ago.
I’ve seen the Maltese Falcon a bunch of times. As a video/audio “professional” (worked in it all my life, “studied” film at college), I perceive/look at/hear certain things every time I see it. My mindset going into the viewing bears heavily on what I see and hear.
Last night I watched from this batch of shows (also for the nth time) an American Masters PBS show from (at least) 2007, on John Ford and John Wayne.
Having recently watched Scorsese’s The Irishman, and then the same week, seeing him as an interviewee/fanboy on this old show, expressing his love for some of Ford’s films which were, let us say, less “cinematically awesome” (my choice of words), but which were more about the Actors and the story…
THEN watching Maltese Falcon…again. I’m just watching the actor’s faces, and not as much the Cinematic aspects. Totally different film🤷🏻♂️
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Do you think you were biased by the $640 cost of the new HDMI cable? or otherwise?
I know it’s a bit of trick and rhetorical question…
Indeed! Yet another aspect of this conundrum. If a given individual is concerned about cost, and another is not…
Typically it is best to leave price out of it, unless you are able to survey everyone involved and figure out what their Pain Level is for a particular product, and adjust for that. Best to assume someone paid what they thought was Worth It for a certain thing. Otherwise it is, as Paul SImon put it, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor”.
This (discounted) WW cable was, for me, owie-wise, likely on a par with Brod’s purchase of his Latest Set of Magicos. Or Stands for his Magicos. (Not to pick on you Brod, but you started your own thread on it.)
It was one of the more “OMFG” cable comparisons I’ve made over the years. IMS (in MY SYSTEM), at this point. But I was certainly going into it biased by a bunch of stuff, including my prior experience with cables. And I would never make some sort of proclamation along the lines of , “EVERYONE must skip paying the rent/mortgage to have this!!” Completely system dependent. And money and taste and so on.
GUTMAN: (get it?
)
"Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.
Now, sir, we’ll talk if you like.
I’ll tell you right out, that I’m a man who likes to talk to a man who likes to talk"
It’s like this time around, I’m noticing only faces and lines, and not the Cinematic aspects🤷🏻♂️
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Cryptogram’s, Badbeef, some of your posts are like cryptograms to me. Working my way through them in order to try and get to the next level 
Honestly - not worth worrying about ; )
The difficult art of communicating little known references along with a dose of sarcasm…the reason high-level negotiations still occur face to face.
Not sure that we listened to the same podcast. I heard not a single word of rant against people not spending enough money. I heard a conversation about all aspects of “do /can USB cable make a SQ difference”.
Just an observation and maybe/hopefully a valuable feedback: you are the one constantly bringing up the “money issue”. Why is that?
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Hi Philip,
I don’t know how you did not hear them referring to people who find cable quality not important. We must have been listening to a different podcast.
DARKO is about attracting new people to this Audi hobby, meaning people who must be cost conscience for the simple reason that for most of us money is not of an abundance. Especially not for young people.
The Audio cable sector is one sector where prices are skyrocketing and the sales price does not seem related to cost but to people tremendously exaggerating the impact of the cable to the sound. Allowing prices to be asked that are far beyond reason.
I fully agree that cable quality matters, there are good technical reasons to proof that. And there are companies out there that have reasonable priced Audio grade cables. Like I bought the Atlas Element series cables which which I am very satisfied. But if you climb up the ladder in the in the catalogue of some cable manufacturers you get very easily to price levels that exceed the cost of electronics and speakers. In quite some cases the sales price is totally cost unrelated and when people check price lists they see that and it puts especially newcomers off.
If they had spend just a bit of those 45 minutes to provide some examples what budget (for example %-wise to the electronics or speaker budget) makes sense for:
- budget minded audio enthousiasts
- dedicated audiophiles
- those who have unlimited budgets
It would have been a very useful 45 minutes.
Also DARKO doesn’t seem to see the benefit of DSD and when he interviews those whose option he seem to share about that subject he even makes 2 interviews with Mike Moffat, but when he speaks to one of the very Advocates for DSD he avoids the subject and beats the cable horse for 45 minutes.
I do like much, very much of the other stuff DARKO publishes and respect him for that, but this interview is a missed chance.
Rudolf,
vs.
are, at least for me, very different in projected intent and experienced expression.
When I read your initial post and would not “know” Darko and Paul I would think they are high-end snobs and are laughing at folks who can’t afford to spend a ton of money on shiny gear. From all what I know, this would be a very wrong description of any of them.
Nelson Pass once said: “…I am centrally aware that all this is just entertainment, mine and yours. The objective needs (of amplifier users) are largely solved on a practical level, and as [Marshall] McLuhan perceptively noted, when that happens, we turn our technology into art.” There we have it. We are talking about pieces of art. And you know the most crazy market when it comes to pricing? Yes, the art market. Why is that picture made by xyz worth 25 million? Who determines that price, who pays that? Is it fair? I want one, too. Hey, IKEA sells that print of that for 10 Euro - including a metal frame!
My advice: find a product that is worth the price (for you). Stop talking / worrying about the price itself. It won’t change anything but only lead to frustration. The good news: there is choice. Don’t spend so much energy on the ones, that are not to your liking.
The only prices I go into arguments are for things and services that are needed for life, e.g. water, food, medicine and health care, housing, energy, education, communication, public services like transportation, police, legal help… Most other things are somehow nice-to-haves or luxury / art. I work in product development and the pricing topic is in itself a whole universe, starting with how money historically originated and not ending in philosophy, and deep economic and behavioral science.
I enjoyed the Podcast very much. I did not have the impression that it was target towards people new to this (“attracting new people to this Audi hobby”) but towards the experienced hobbyist, as the (USB) cable question is usually not the one you start with.
For me, it was one expert (reviewer) talking to anther expert (designer) about his expert opinion on a very specific question. I liked the question, I liked the answers, I liked the style. Why not?
Both Darko and Paul have published numerous videos and podcasts about budget planning, where to spend the money (allocation), diminishing returns, synergy etc. Do you want another episode on that issue? Just listen to the old ones again. Should they not talk about stuff, they (and maybe some others) are interested in vs. always repeating the same thing?
I don’t know why I’m writing all this… Maybe because I struggle to understand the kind of media critique that is unhappy with chosen topics. But that is another rant 
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Different perceptions. I am afraid we agree to disagree.
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That’s a good agreement. Nothing to be afraid of. Cheers
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Prosit! Frohes Wochenende!
This sequence about the benefit of fuses or cables reminds me of my own psychological weakness. As a boy when a washed and polished my bicycle; it seemed to me to pedal smoother. As a teenager I washed and polished my dad’s car. It then “seemed” to ride smoother. Point is if you invest time, effort, or money into a project that you enjoy; you will feel good about it, expect improvement, want improvement, The result has to be really, really bad, to make us believe that a mistake was made.
When the fuses became those not paid a high price for; they were immediately inferior. Kind of like the inverse of my personal confession above.
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