Fahnsen:
Perhaps this is said before in this thread, but it can't be said too often:
Of course experience makes it easier to judge, and getting familiar with a certain component we might discover subtleties we might not recognize right away.
But:
1: There isn't such a thing as an exact memory of sound. Unless two sources are switch immediately, we are simply not able to compare the sound. What we compare, is our memory of the sound.
2: Changes in the acoustic environment will outdo any other changes anytime. If your speakers are moved only sightly, or even if you turn or move your head, the sound that reaches your ears will change.
3: Our expectations and prejudices influence our judgement. If we believe a cable to be better, chances are it sound better to us. Or it might be the other way: Because we can't really hear the improvement we expected, we believe the sound to be poorer.
The human hearing is not comparable to technological measurement. While different meters can do very accurate measurements of single aspects, beyond what's audible to the human ear, no meter can mimic the human mind's registration and processing of various simultaneous inputs. Still, every bit of information that's physical can be registered individually by a meter, and calculated according to the laws of physics. So even if it's impossible to measure 'what we hear', what's not measurable is not audible, in the physical sense.
Therefor, if someone claims to hear a difference between components (like cables) that should not, according to physics, cause any difference, the obvious reasons are that 1, the time elapsed between listening to the two samples was more than a few seconds; thus a real comparison actually never took place -- 2, the physical relation between the listener's ears and the sound source were changed -- and 3, the listener was biased in some way or other.
There's more than enough tests by now, to prove that alleged differences between cables vanishes, even for trained ears, when the aspects mentioned above are controlled. What's more, there's tests showing that people easily hear differences between two identical samples, if they believe them to be different.
Hmmm.... the problem with talking about DBT is that DBT has NEVER proved the non-one can hear differences... What it shows is that when they average out all the persons tested, the result was a failure to hear differences... But there were still participants who passed the test... For example, 2 Reviewers at a major North American Hi-Fi Mag took part in a blind test and 1 got 4/5 correct and the other got 5/5... But based on the average result for the test it was concluded that no-one can tell the differences... Which is silly considering that the 2 experts in the test both passed...
Also, you might want to check out the measurements being done by Nordhost (I believe) that claims to show the differences in cables etc...
A possibility that measurement Gurus always neglect is that just because the "existing" tests don't identify differences, doesn't mean that using different kinds of test might not show differences... So for example, two amps might measure identically in a frequency response test, but be very different in a distortion test... So as Nordhost seeks to prove: the existing testing methods may well be inadequate...
The world was flat until someone proved that it was round...
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