Kettle leads

Ben Goldacre in Bad Science has been excoriating hi-fi freaks. The argument goes on a bit, but basically it’s about whether you get a better sound with an £1800.00 power lead than if you plug your amplifier into the mains with the lead off your electric kettle. Goldacre says that on blind listening tests nobody can tell the difference. And this is where the argument gets a bit interesting, because seemingly the editor of Stereophile (there’s a suffix that’s lost its innocence, your mind flashes up input abuse without your even wanting to look at it) - anyway, him - he says that if people can’t tell the difference between one piece of equipment and another on blind listening tests, then perhaps there’s something wrong with blind tests. Because, he says, if I the editor of Stereophile most definitely can tell the difference, very obviously and clearly, between a £3000.00 (I’m guessing here) cheapo old amplifier and £10,000.00 (still guessing) slightly more expensive one when I know which is which, then the fact that I can’t distinguish one from the other when I don’t know which is which means that that test is invalid.
And Goldacre rightly rubbishes this claim. He says it’s just the kind of argument used by homeopaths and reflexologists and herbalists and all the alternative Wellbeing and Mindbodyspirit constituency to justify the fact that there is no objective and scientific evidence that these practices do anything more than move money from the gullible to entrepreneurial; if the tests don’t come up with the right answer, maybe we should change the tests.
But I’m sure Ben is also missing something. There were some blind tests on wine tasting. These really were blind, in the sense that the tasters had their eyes covered so they couldn’t see what they were drinking. And it seems that not only could they no longer distinguish between butteriness, attenuated steely highlights, a slightly composty pong and a vibrant vegetality, but most of them couldn’t even tell red wine from white. Well, clearly blind wine tasting is useless.
I drink a fair bit of wine, mostly red, and without a blindfold, not only because I want to see the colour, but I also like to read the label. I do know what I like, and I like to know that that’s what I’m drinking. But to be honest my sense of taste is fairly vitiated by time and abuse (see Oenophile), and if I had to choose by taste alone between la Paz old vine tempranillo, Casillero de Diablo cabernet sauvignon and the Rioja that was half price for £4.49 at Sainsbury’s last Friday (Mmmm, tannins a bit past it, wouldn’t you say?) it would be just random guessing. Even if I can taste the difference, I can’t possibly remember which is which. But, Benny boy, that’s hardly the point.
Isn’t most pleasurable human experience half learned and half imagined? Even a simple song, if you like it, you like it more thoroughly the third time around. Food, drink, love, music, we bring elaborate structures of memory and expectation, appetite and fantasy to them. What would they be without? And all of us in our chosen vocations and pursuits have tools and gear and equipment that we value for their virtues, which of course must partly be inherent in the objective world (bad tools are bad tools), but which beyond that are constructs of our own brains. Look at cars, and the astronomical amount of garbage talked and written about the functional distinctions between them, just because what a lot of people bring to their cars is an elaborate construct which ramifies through their whole lives.
So if a person’s destiny is to be editor of Stereophile, it’s likely that a lot of his waking time, and maybe his dreams, will be taken up with amplifiers and speakers and bits of wire and stuff. And we hope for his sake that he is enjoying this supererogatorily detailed propinquity (I have no real idea what that octosyllabic word means, I just feel everybody should use it from time to time so it doesn’t become extinct) to tweeters and woofers, because if he isn’t his life must be sad. But if he is happy there, then he is going to bring enormous constructs of - well, I have no idea what the stereophile equivalents of bouquets and noses and rotten medlar and complex tannins and Provençal September dungheaps are - to the experience of listening to amplifier A as against amplifier B. And the stereophiles he is writing for will do the same, somewhat by proxy as they may not be able to get their hands on a new £15000.00 turntable every week. And I feel smugly superior to them, secure in the knowledge that not many people suspect my particular area of gear obsession. We all have our secrets.
So, for MindBodySpirit, I say yes to blind tests. For music, drugs, love, bicycles - technology has its place, science has its place, but human daftness is first among equals.