Originally Posted by Prog Rock Man
Any cable, IC to HDMI, since claims of cables affecting SQ apply to all.
Since this is a cable science thread, lets work out an experiment designed to show that the differences some people experience with different cables is inherantly due to the cable.
Would getting two identically made ICs and then altering one to affect one of its its known properties such as capacitance and then a listening test do? How would be do a listening test that is acceptable to cable believers as they tend to hate ABX?
This is exactly what I was thinking of. First, measure the person's hearing ability with a variety of types of tones (some are easier to pick than others) and note the measured performance of their equipment, such as input and output impedances, then try a variety of experiments where the measured difference between equipment is around their hearing ability. Short tests, long-term tests (such as was done with un-labelled power cables whose construction was masked). If people could use their own equipment to try different things at their leisure it would be quite interesting. The only question I still have is, how does one measure the quality of recordings? What I'm thinking is, if a person only likes music such as highly compressed and distorted modern POP, this would be useless, but if they like well-mastered recordings with no compression, both simple and complex, there would be a better chance at getting useful results.
The theory I have is that there is a possibility that even measurably different results in equipment may not be discernably audible to the degree needed to "pass" a DBT in all circumstances. If cable differences (excluding where fancy electronics are attached to the cable) were quite subtle, ie: greater than nick_charles measured but still close to the limits of audibility, then that may almost always be below the threshold to pass any kind of valid test on those differences. It would, scary thought, mean that both "sides" to the cable argument are right, except in semantics.
I have a ULN-2 arriving day (if the music doesn't drown out the sound of the doorbell), which has a recording noise floor of something like -130dB so I hope to do a little casual experimentation myself.