hammill said:
You have missed the point by a mile as is often the case. I greatly enjoy music and wine. I think it is joyful that the £5 wine I drink will probably taste just as good to me as £25 wine and I do not have to waste my money. It would also be a boon to me to know definitively whether buying a new HDMI cable makes a difference to my system - currently I don't trust the information I have and that is what the argument is about. I doubt that any of us who would like to see more rigour in testing sit at home with an oscilloscope - we want other people to do it for us whilst we sit listening to music
Truthfully I feel you're missing the point on both counts. I enjoy good wine and abhor bad wine. Sometimes truth a £5 may be as good or better than a £25 wine, but I have rarely found those gems. There is a noticeable difference between those price points as much as in AV. Wile many people don't noticemuch of a difference at first for an uprade, downgrading is often a shock of how bad the quality of lower end gear (and wines) is. Scientifically this should make little sense, but subjectivey from listening (or in the case of wine, tasting) there is a difference.
As for the earlier post regarding jitter, that is easily measured especially if you use HDM1.4a with Ethrenet. A simple packetsniffer can pick out any jitter that occurs, and poor connections or underspecced cabling is likely to introduce jitter or packetloss which, once there is enough, is very noticeable. In case of jitter due to poor connectivity you're also likely to have more errors in the packets than is acceptable, further qorsening the signal. Jitter in sound is much like listening to a broken record and in Video it is often visible as blocky pictures, the same as a high error rate. While true that the difference between different
good cabling is not noticeable, substandard cabling is.
However, different gear could certainly have a subjective quality, not measurable with the set we use today simply because terms are used that cannot be easliy defined. How would you define "warm sound"? Is that the same as the person next to you? If not you cannot measure it since you don't even have the same definition of what that
subjective experience is.
It has been proven that some persons have a more keenly developed sens of hearing than others, and some have a more developed sense of taste or smell. This could well be part of why we all feel we hear something differently. Or smell. Or taste.