Re: Cables again. For Arny, et al.

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 10:02:27 -0800, bob wrote
(in article <fp78fj0uc6@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>):

> Here's another take on the wire story:
> 
> http://www.musicmattersjazz.com/sound.html#article4
> 
> Note that one of the principals here describes himself as "VP of
> product development at AudioQuest since 1983." Needless to say, the
> combination of financial interest and expectation bias is pretty
> powerful here.

Yeah, that's true, But ostensibly he did not tell Garcia that anything had

changed between the first batch of masterings and the second. Garcia
NOTICED 
an overall difference in the sound between the two sets of four discs and 
asked the guy why. It was then that the MusicMatters engineer/AudioQuest
guy 
mentioned that he had changed the cabling. I would think that if I sent
you, 
without comment, two recordings made on the same equipment and they
sounded 
substantially different, and you noticed it ON YOUR OWN, that this would
tend 
to eliminate the chance of any bias on my part. 

> As for the TAS writer, they are known to be gullible fools, so it
> would be pretty easy to convince him that *something* cool happened
> between set 1 and set 2 (otherwise, why make a big deal of there being
> two sets?).

Well, the way the article is written, we are led to believe that Garcia 
noticed the difference between the two sets of pressings on his own
without 
being prompted. But who knows. Maybe the guy from music matters casually 
mentioned in a phone conversation something like "Oh, you might notice a 
slight difference in overall sound quality between this new set of 4
masters 
that I'm sending you and the first set." 

Who knows? I'm not prepared to actually believe that the cabling made any 
difference UNLESS by breaking the connections on each end and using new 
connectors to re-connect them resulted in eliminating some corrosion on
the 
old connectors. Then, I MIGHT believe that the masters made after the
cable 
change sounded cleaner than the ones made BEFORE the cable change. But if 
that's the case, the same effect could have been had by just going through

and cleaning the contact points of the existing cables. The article
doesn't 
say whether or not the AudioQuest guy used Stabilant on his connections or
if 
he even used a contact cleaner both of which can make a slight difference.