[quote name='mart' timestamp='1321177591' post='1436031']
No. Sorry, but I can't let that stand. I've been on the Warwick forum a lot over the last few years, and I've seen a lot of sides to Florin, and as well as being an incredibly successful musician (bassist in the biggest band in the country!), he is also gentle and kind, and is absolutely the last person to deserve being called a "Profanity removed".
He doesn't come across terribly well on that thread, but then, look at that thread from his point of view. He approached these cables with an open mind, and did a careful A/B test, and heard a difference. His argument, then, is that somebody who hasn't actually used the cable has no right to tell him what he can or cannot hear. After all, he's a pro musician, he has good ears! If you approach this thing with a sufficiently open mind, then his point is perfectly correct, and it's a shame that he had to defend himself so much.
But. Those of us who look at this with some knowledge of the science cannot approach this with a truly open mind, because we know a lot of relevant things! We know that the cable [i]cannot[/i] make any audible difference, so it's all a matter of perception. Florin thinks he's countered that by doing the A/B test, and if you don't know enough about the placebo effect, then his test looks rigorous enough. But it's not, because the placebo effect is astoundingly hard to avoid, hence the need for double-blind tests. "Double-blind" is a phrase that gets bandied around too freely, and I suspect too many people use it without realizing exactly what it entails. When they do read what it involves, most people think it's totally unnecessary - surely it's enough if the patient doesn't know whether they're getting the real thing or a dummy. You need to have read a lot of the wierd things the placebo effect can do before you start seeing the need for such a complicated experiment.
I wish the scientists on that thread could have gently explained the need for a full double-blind test, and given some examples of how much we can trick ourselves, particularly with aural perception. But no, the scientists were too busy arguing to actually take the time to see where Flo was coming from. And I personally was too chicken to get properly involved.
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So someone being able to tell the difference between two pieces of equipment they've heard, vs. people being able to tell the the lack of difference between two pieces of equipment they've never heard.