When I logged in this evening and saw this subject line it immediately caught my attention, since if it wasn't just a joke(e.g., "without them you don't hear anything!") and turned out to be true(it didn't)this was major news in audio technology that I might soon be reading a paper on in my AES Journal. After reading both the Yahoo blog and the original WSJ article, there appeared to be no consideration of statistical probability, as a couple of replies here have mentioned. Using 39 trials with apparently 24 successful ones(the 61%)at a 0.5 probability, this calculates to a probability of .0998, which is about twice the 5% or less standard which is required in scientific testing for the result to be viewed as not due to chance. So, this result, contrary to both linked articles, was another blind test failure to support the claimed benefits. Not even statistical support was found, much less the extravagant language we sometimes might read when a $2,000 "cable" is compared to about $4 worth of lamp cord, e.g., "huge", "night-and-day", etc.
It was also interesting to see, of course, that the tests also failed to distinguish between the iPod playing the WAV file and the $3,000 CD player.
