Blind Listening Test Finds Audiophiles Unable To Distinguish Copper Cable From a Banana or Wet Mud

Source: Slashdot

Overview

An anonymous reader shared a report about a blind listening test conducted on the diyAudio forum. The moderator, known as Pano, set up an experiment to see whether listeners could differentiate audio played through various unconventional “interfaces” such as pro‑audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud.

Setup

Pano invited forum members to listen to several sound clips that were presented in four different versions:

1. The original CD file (baseline).
2. Audio recorded through 180 cm of pro‑audio copper wire.
3. Audio recorded through 20 cm of wet mud.
4. Audio recorded through 120 cm of old microphone cable soldered to U.S. pennies.
5. Audio recorded through a 13 cm banana (followed by 120 cm of the same microphone‑cable‑penny setup).

Each participant was asked to identify which version corresponded to each wiring setup.

Findings

Initial test results showed that listeners found it extremely difficult to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring configuration. Pano remarked:

“The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn’t. All of the re‑recordings should be obvious, but they aren’t.”

The experiment suggests that, at least in this blind test, audiophiles were unable to distinguish between the conventional copper cable and the more exotic “interfaces” like a banana or wet mud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.