![]() Skepticism about our own perceptions is healthy and can save us money, but too much skepticism is bad for subjective reviewing: If it's true that we hear what we expect to hearand to some extent it is truethen it's equally true that we can, in marginal cases, fail to hear what we expect not to hear. They can cause us to mistrust our own experiences, let alone the experiences of others. To those of us who like to think, rightly or wrongly, that we have some insight into what goes on inside an audio system at a mechanistic/electronic level, such experiences are mind-blowing. Poets, art historians, and musicians may find such stories easier to swallow than do former physicists (like me) and engineers. He obviously wasn't listening for a big change. But consider that his expectations were at first so low that he hadn't even remembered he'd swapped out the cable. My friend, though, is a solid guya scholar, a technical professional. The scientist in me finds this story incrediblein the sense of lacking credibility. ![]() If his ears and brain are to be trusted, not only did that network cable dramatically change his system's sound, it also "broke in" over those first few hours of use. Any improvement seems almost as unlikely as a network cable dramatically altering a system's sound.īy the time my friend figured out what was going onor what he thinks was going onhis system was sounding "glorious," he said: better than ever. Adding a preamplifieryet another active component, hence more noise and distortionshould not improve the sound of an audio system, but degrade it. From a scientific perspective, this doesn't make sense. Other reviewers have found the same thing. The relevance of this cable storyto which I'll return in a momentis this: Lately, I've reviewed a lot of preamplifiers, and I've often found them to improve the sound of the system I've heard them in. It's a review of Pass Laboratories' XP-22 solid-state preamplifier ($9500). This is not a review of an Ethernet cable or my friend's ears or the science of subtle cognitive bias. He'd remembered that, earlier the day before, he'd swapped out a meter or so of the standard Ethernet cable connecting his network switch to his DAC with an expensive, audiophile one. His system's sound was suddenly pale and unfocused. For those who listen with their ears and not their brain, perfectionist hi-fi offers many surprises.Ī friend called me up a few weeks ago and asked if the DAC we both own had received an automatic firmware update he hadn't heard about something had changed, it wasn't good, and he couldn't figure out what it was. ![]()
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