By Peter Aczel Editor and Publisher

This is just a curtain raiser to get you in the mood: an almost two year old background story, told here for the first time "like it is." The technical/critical examination of the subject is coming next.

The protagonist of this story is David L. Clark, noted Detroit audio consultant under the name of DLC Design, guiding spirit of the Southeastern Michigan Woofer and Tweeter Marching Society, and notorious designer (with others) of the diabolical ABX Double-Blind Comparator. He is of course also known to our readers as that wry but rational voice on our Seminar 1989 panel. Dave should really be the one to be reporting here on his own work, but he is letting me do the talking because he is, as he says, a total burnout on the subject as a result of the apathy, insincerity, misrepresentations, and downright hostility he had encountered.

I must point out up front that Dave's story is not only about wires and cables but also (perhaps even primarily) about power amplifiers, but the latter are not our concern here for the moment. What happened was that Dave had approached the Audio Engineering Society to suggest using their 85th Convention in Los Angeles in November 1988, with its many knowledgeable and highly motivated partici pants, as an opportunity to run some serious double-blind listening tests in a workshop to be called "Esoteric Audio- Can You Hear It?" The way I understand it, the AES consented enthusiastically and promised three listening rooms, which they delivered, as well as nine assistants (three per room, to work in shifts), which they did not-not even a single one. Strike one against Dave; he was left to run the show more or less by himself, sink or swim.

Luckily, he didn't give up, enlisted a number of interested helpers, and managed to complete 434 speaker-cable comparison trials and 659 power-amp comparison trials over a two-day period. (Each listener opted for anywhere between 2 and 7 trials in cables and either 2 or 3 trials in amplifiers.) On the climactic third day there was a panel discussion of the results, of which a cassette recording is avail able, documenting voices as thoughtful and informed as those of Richard Greiner, Floyd Toole, and John Vanderkooy, and as tweaky and undisciplined as that of Michael Fremer. What emerged quite clearly from the discussion was that the flat-earthers and cargo cultists were not about to allow the facts to overturn their belief system. Strike two against Dave, and another reason for his frustration.

All I want to do here is to present the givens and the results of the speaker cable tests factually (this has not been done anywhere so far) and to comment very briefly on the meaning of the outcome.

Cheap industrial wire vs. Monster Cable's best.

The high-end speaker cable chosen for the double blind listening comparisons was Monster Cable M1, which at the time was that highly promoted company's top-of-the line model, at nine dollars per foot. (Since then they have come out with the "Sigma" insanity at almost five times that price.) According to Dave Clark, the Monster Cable people were then asked what they considered to be an absolutely unlistenable cheap cable of roughly the same gauge. Their answer was 10-gauge THHN industrial wire, so that was chosen as the low-priced foil for the M1. To give each cable the chance to assert its sonic personality, if any, 30-foot lengths were compared, switched by hand (no ABX box!) between a Perreaux amplifier and a pair of Tannoy "Dual Concentric Studio Reference Monitors." Now it should be noted that 434 trials by 86 persons (the very few persons who came back to try again are count ed as two) constitute a respectable statistical base permitting reasonably accurate conclusions. The score: 207 correct identifications out of 434 same/different trials; in other words, the participants were "batting" .477 in their attempt to identify the cable they were listening to as being the same as, or different than, the one before. Sheer guessing would be expected statistically to result in .500, virtually the same figure. So, to put it bluntly, no difference in sound was heard between the audiophile Monster Cable and the 10-gauge cheapo wire, not even with 30-foot lengths.

The reaction to this outcome by the high-end religionists was of course predictable. Sure, they said, the unwashed masses can't hear the difference, but we golden ears can- look, here's somebody who got 6 right out of 6, here's 6 out of 7, here's a 4 out of 4, and so forth. All right, class, what's wrong with that argument? That's right, we're dealing with the bell-shaped (Gaussian, or normal) distribution curve. In any large sample of a totally random process, a very few individual readings will be all the way to the left under the flare of the bell (lowest scores), and a very few will be all the way to the right under the flare (highest scores). For ex ample, if you toss a hatful of coins 1000 times, you could get all heads once or all tails once, but most of your tosses will come out half heads and half tails, or not far from that.

There were several 1-right-out-of-7 scores at the AES, in Gaussian balance with the high scorers. In one or two in stances, the same person had a high score in the morning and a low score in the afternoon. Thus 86 deaf-mutes guessing wildly about the cables might also have come up with a 6-right-out-of-6 score sheet among them. No, amigos, a convincing performance by a golden ear would have been, say, 4/4 in the morning, followed by 6/6 in the afternoon, followed by 7/7 the next morning. Either there is a difference in sound, in which case a golden ear will reliably hear it, or there isn't. Let's face it, there wasn't.

I can't blame Dave Clark for feeling disgusted after seeing his quite unexceptionable methods and conclusions met with denial by the emotionally vested interests of high end audio. Fortunately there was no "grungy" ABX box on which to blame the obscuration of the alleged sonic differences. That would have been too pat. The denials had to take a more convoluted, whiny, philosophically petulant course-witness John Atkinson's remarks from the floor side of the panel discussion and his report on the workshop in the "Industry Update" column of the January 1989 Stereophile. What I don't understand is why these subjectivist diehards never ask the obvious question of whether there exists any kind of mechanism whereby A and B could differ in sound. Were the two cables sufficiently different in resistance and/or capacitance and/or inductance to interact quite differently with the source impedance and terminating impedance, and thereby generate significantly different trans fer functions? But no-that's not what they ask. They look at the brand names, they look at the prices, and they just know which one sounds better. Part II of this series will ad dress in depth the electrical network characteristics of speaker cables and the resulting transfer functions at the amplifier/speaker interface.

--------------- Music & Video Systems For The Novice & Connoisseur Savant Audio & video

A New Oasis...

Where every client is given the individual attention they desire and deserve...

Where for every taste and budget you will draw the most pleasure from what music and video have to offer...

Where the sight, sound and feel of being there is beautiful and 'magically' created for you...

Where you are transported, elevated, *'liberated'' through art and science...

Realize your most cherished illusions. Come to us...

Consultancy - Custom Systems - Acoustic Treatment - Installation - Retail Apogee ; Arcici ; Audio Prism ; AudioQuest ; Basis ; Benz Cardas ; Chesky ; Chicago Speaker Stand ; Clearaudio Cogan Hall ; Creek ; Delos ; Distech ; Dorian ; Electron Kinetics Eminent Technology ; First Sound ; Garth ; Harmonia Mundi Klyne ; Last ; Lectron ; Magnan ; Merrill ; Mod Squad ; Mogami Morch ; Nestorovic ; Neutrik ; Opus3 ; Pro Ac QED e Rega Reference Recordings ; Rotel ; Sequerra ; Sheffield Lab ; Sims Sumiko ; Superphon ; Tara Labs ; Target ; Tice Audio Vendetta Research Wadia ; Water Lily WB T and More 800-628-0627 Princeton Junction, N.J. 08550

--------

[adapted from TAC, Issue No. 15]

---------

Also see:

Hip Boots: Wading through the Mire of Misinformation in the Audio Press: John Atkinson in Stereophile; Neil Levenson in Fanfare

Phono Paradise Regained, or Sao Win Rides Again: Win FET-10; Win SEC-10

Cartridge, Arm and Turntable vs. the Groove: Who's Winning? [1977]