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A challenge to the "measurement" camp

I’ve watched some of his video and I actually agree on some of what he said,
but he seems too confident on his insistence on measurement. For those
who expound on the merits of blind test and measurement, why not turn
the table upside down?

Why not do a blind test of measurement? That is I will supply all the measurement
you want, can you tell me which is a better product?

For example, if I have a set of cable, and a set of measurement for each
individual cable, can you tell me which is the best cable based on measurement
alone? I will supply all the measurement you want.
After all, that is what you’re after right? Objective result and not subjective
listening test.

Fast forward to 8:15 mark where he keeps ranting about listening test
without measurement.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=katmUM-Xelw

By the way, is he getting paid by Belden?  Because he keeps talking about it
and how well it measures.  I've had some BlueJean cables and they can easily
bettered by some decent cables.  
andy2

Showing 1 response by drbarney1

drbarney1's avatar
drbarney1
193 posts
 
While I agree with listening experiments with cables, my quarrel is with the "physics" used to sell cable designs. The most common is skin effect, which is accused of causing high frequency roll-off and distorting phase angles of different frequencies. Cable marketers flatter the buyer with their discussions of these things, secure in the knowledge very few people understand it with enough depth to be able to calculate what these things do. Skin effect increases the resistance of a typical speaker by about 0.o1 Ohms at 20 kHz, something that can be calculated from any E&M textbook used in master's degree level courses. In series with speakers with DC resistance of 4 Ohms the roll-off is less than 0.01 db at 20 kHz. Cable designers should know this and if they do, they can't be bothered to admit litz construction of individual strands "solves" a problem that does not exist. Accounts of phase distortion from different length signal paths in stranded cable and the signal "jumping" between strands might vary the signal path by at most a centimeter or two and at 3 x 10^8 meters per second, the speed of light, phase angle "smearing" is on the order of 10^-10 seconds. Nobody can hear such a thing. If the "distortion" between grain structure of copper emulating littler diodes starting and stopping signal transmission a long radio or television antenna could not overcome a diode threshold conducting voltage at the micro-Volts off an antenna. Resistance in a cable introduces Johnson-Niquest noise due to thermal effects of conduction electrons and it is proportional to the Kelvin temperature. This can be reduced by thicker cable but in a speaker sub-micro-Volts is irrelevant. Thus, I ask, why should I trust a cable manufacturer who charges hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars for a set of cables and why would not someone who invested his ego in buying such cables convince himself the thousands of dollars set of speaker wires makes a difference?
Everything else designed in electronics relies upon mathematics and real physics, but cables do not.
Can I be blamed for my skepticism after catching cable marketers for scientific fraud?
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