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.
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.
If you lose the childish and ignorant attitude, I would consider explaining it to you, but I doubt both that you have the relevant knowledge to understand, or that you will accept the answer given the childish, and technically ignorant first post.
I just read through all of your posts on this topic and you are the one being rude continually. The point is there are multiple points along the signal path where the physical wiring of the amplifier, pre-amplifier and other connections inside which are in capable of carrying a signal that speaker cable companies claim they’re cables are capable of. Are you suggesting that the cables can restore lost signal? Speaker cables can absolutely color the sound but they cannot improve on the signal. How about you take a physical driver out of the speaker and look at the terminal, if the terminal on the driver cannot carry the signal that your speaker wire is sending to it then what is the point? Is this some metaphysical magic or wizardry that is happening?
The Audioholics basically labels true audiophiles as stupid, gullible people. Yet well known audio companies advertise on their website. Why would they seek to alienate customers?
glupson5,731 posts07-10-2020 1:10amJust to remind everyone, on a consumer level current world is cableless.
Ask any 20-year-old what cables are for. She/he may not have even one in their possession and yet be entirely functional. Many, if not most, have only cable for phone charger. Some not even that.
If you truly want to advance signal transmission, figure out better quality wireless and not novelty cable.
The problem is a bit ’off’, as you see..there is an inherent and so far unsolved problem with ADC devices. They cannot parse a signal fine enough for high fidelity to actually ’be’ in the world of wireless. That they miss the point and the ear hears it or rather covers it up and hums along, in most people's cases. (most people have no idea how the ear/brain works, much to the loss of high en aduio, overall)
As, for wireless to work, we have to digitally encode an analog signal, every time, unless it is all electronic music being reproduced. As all signals in audio were originally analog and then converted with the FAULTED ADC devices. You know, the ones with the fundamental problem that has yet to be solved, that no one like to talk about. They talk about it so little that the vast number of audiophiles do not know the problem exists.
when we get to the end of all that, we find that analog cables, in an all triode or v-fet system, is the only real functional signal capturing and playback chain.
The rest is just distorted derivations, reduction after reduction until we’re left with a turd.
Which is how we got to the current stories about all the kids freaking out about how WE...the older crew, somehow had all the magic music during our time.
The loss is due to the slow erosion of the carrier, medium, the delivery system. Pidgin carrier means pidgin language means pidgin meaning/mind/people/message/etc. It’s a simple thing, if you can reach it. Garbage carrier means garbage message...
The art of making it work with the human ear was never realized as the problem or issue that it really is .... and the whole thing got thrown in the garbage over convenience and money. Reduced to a turd for the convenience of the modern average man. We lost the thread and the meaning behind fidelity, or, more properly never really realized what it was about and how it related to the human ear.
We are finally getting to understand how the human ear works with all this stuff and we can go back and correct the 35-50 years of mess that we call transistors and digital.
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?
The only people who make the claims you make Teo are people who don’t truly understand the technology. I have heard enough live and recorded music in short succession in a variety of situations to know, without any doubt, that well implemented high-res digital is the most accurate recording and playback, superior to analog tape at any speed. People who make claims about "missing resolution" in digital especially high resolution do not understand the technology. It is an ignorant position taken from a position of lack of knowledge and experience.
p.s. ever heard of FM or AM radio? ... been around way before digital.
when we get to the end of all that, we find that analog cables, in an
all triode or v-fet system, is the only real functional signal capturing
and playback chain.
No, that is just silly. You are confusing pleasing with accurate and they are not remotely the same thing. You are trying to take the complexity of sound, the ear and the brain, and claim the equivalent complexity in a signal in a cable or the storage of "data" required for that signal whether analog or digital. They are not remotely of the same level of complexity. It is a weak argument that is again, only made by people who have not thought this through.
The magic of the music has nothing to do with the format, it has to do with the industry. You seem to be joining mahgister on the conspiracy front.
@drbarney1 , you should question most of the marketing w.r.t. cables. Most of it is made up with no evidence that what they claim is what is causing any audible difference. This is not a "measurements" thing. If what they claimed was true, they would show it with good old fashion listening tests, heck, they would at least "try" to quantify what they claim, but they don't. Why? ....
You accuse me of conspiracy like if it was an insult without even reading my point about statistics.... And you are the one arguing about the fact that people had no argument .... Very funny....
It is easy instead of understanding someone complex viewpoint to put him on your chess board with black and white colors....Childish games.... Reality exceed what we think about it....
The map and the reality are totally different.....
Pretty much all recorded audio and video of analog or digital types is “sampled”. It’s bits of information, but easiest to show with videos, we all know 60 frames per second for film, and we believe we see motion as we do in real life. It boils down to how much resolution does there need to be before we can no longer see or hear a discernable difference, this is of course simplifying it, but makes the point. This is one place I can agree with Robert, current hi rez can contain more information than Anolog. Vinyl is “ bits” of information, cut into the vinyl. High resolution compared to say mp3 for sure. Cassette and reel to reel is also bits of info. It’s possible maybe for someone to feel analog sounds better, or more musical to them, because hi res might have more detail, assuming they’re able to hear it, and therefore maybe doesn’t seem as sweet or smooth. That has been suggested before.
I use digital and i can listen to the true potential of digital with my controlled embeddings of the audio system....
But many digital audio system sound awful....I can understand others viewpoint also....
The key to Hi-Fi is the embeddings not the digital/vinyl choices....And certainly not cables differences even if they are real, and they are indeed....
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.
On the other hands, you can't disprove that either. That is you can't disprove that our hearing can detect the difference due to skin affect.
I know a guy who bitched how bad digital is. Compared to analog. Then I asked him what his digital chain was. It was a Chromecast Audio as streamer and a China DAC from Topping. He said because “bits are bits”, and if it works, meaning sound coming out of it, it’s as good as it can be. He also said Ethan Winer and AtDavid told him he had reached the apex in digital, and spending any more money on his digital chain was waste of money. He also said some Amir M. Guy famous on Audio measured his China DAC concluding measures just as well as a $12,500 DAC from Linn.
Meanwhile, the MSRP of his cartridge alone on his analog chain was like 12 times the price of his digital chain. Let alone his table, arm, and the rest. Heck... his platform where the turntable was seating costs a few times more than his digital setup. He said because in Analog everything matters, whereas in digital either it works or it doesn’t. Well.,.. no shit 😂😂
A lot of studios record everything in digital and use that as their master tape (or disc) because it's easy for mixing in digital. But that makes sense because they can afford top notched ADC (so it's not like some cheap ADC found in the garden variety receivers from Best Buy). Then they transfer that to vinyl using high quality DAC. So on paper, it's hard to argue how vinyl is superior since they all have to go through a DAC stage. Either it's the studio DAC or your own DAC at home.
"Which is how we got to the current stories about all the kids freaking out about how WE...the older crew, somehow had all the magic music during our time."
In my experience, that is what older crew likes to think about "their" music. I have not heard teens or twenties crew talk like that so far. They do listen to some of the older music, but they do enjoy music of their generation, too.
Current older crew tends to cherish music of long-dead ancestors much more than current younger crew cherishes music of their parents. Was it in this thread that surprisingly informative discussion about Chopin et al. surfaced? Beethoven anyone? Mozart? Bach? That older crew really had all the magic music during their time.
"when we get to the end of all that, we find that analog cables, in an all triode or v-fet system, is the only real functional signal capturing and playback chain."
To repeat, if you truly want to advance signal transmission, figure out better quality wireless and not novelty cable. Nobody says it is easier than advertising a cable, though.
^!^ Actually it's already been done in the form of Active DSP speakers, but it's a step backward in term of sound quality. So you can't have both. (You would still need two power cords - one for left and one for right speaker).
"^!^ Actually it's already been done in the form of Active DSP speakers, but it's a step backward in term of sound quality."
I did not mention active speakers not to disturb audiophile pretensions of separates.
"...it's a step backward in term of sound quality. So you can't have both."
At this moment in history, probably true. However, if all the cable manufacturers put their minds into designing better wireless techniques instead of better cable marketing, the progress could be faster.
"(You would still need two power cords - one for left and one for right speaker)."
Im not young, but I did buy the bw duos and they were so useless at playing anything reliably I returned them, and I never return anything. I bought the KEF LS50ws and they’re better, but need a cable between them and there’s issues with playing music to them also, but it’s doable with some patience. I like technology when it works and it’s easy to use.
Bad faith is alas! an obstruction to communication that is heavy load to throw off....
Too much konwledge in a field can mask the infinite mysteries around, and can be too easy and tempting to throw off at the face of others less knowledgeable....
This citation of Einstein is testimony of his intuition about knowledge but also about reality.... The map(measures) are radically different from the territory.... He was knowing that like some other awaken spirits...
In audio not everything that matters to the ears can be measured, and not everything that is measured matters to the ears... A perfect application of these words that Einsten inscribed on the opening door of his office...
The map must guide us but never at all cost.....If not,we reduce ourself to horse with blinders....
"I like technology when it works and it’s easy to use."
That is why most of the people may be better off if cable designers dedicated their talent into designing better wireless than better marketed cables.
A person I know had asked me if he should buy Sonos. I recommended it. He is in love with it. He thinks it sounds great, too. He did not have a spending limit. He would have not gone for an expensive cable, though.
I just discover a marvellous poetical delicate interpretation of it on modern piano....Christian Zacharias... One of the finest interpretation i listen to....
Scarlatti was admired by all composers there is after him....His music is a balm for the soul....
Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that is measured matters.
I am sure there are people in this thread will try to argue with this. I mean there's guy on another thread thinks he can tell which is a better cable by just looking at some basic measurements.
A good example is measuring amplifier THD. Amps with feedback tend to measure better vs. amps with no overall feedback, but we all know which ones sound better.
What happens is amps with feedback tend to have higher order distortion and our ears are sensitive to it. On the other hands, amps with no feedback may have higher overall distortion but the distortions are of lower order.
Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that is measured matters.
I am sure there are people in this thread will try to argue with this. I mean there’s guy on another thread thinks he can tell which is a better cable by just looking at some basic measurements.
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