To Paul graham - what question was I required to answer? Complete bullshit? Why such an angry reaction? If your tree is being shaken then maybe your tree is the problem. |
Who's the shill?
Rok2id, that's easy. In our case it is the cost of the materials that makes almost all of the difference. I suspect most are like us too, in that the higher priced cables have a lower percentage mark-up over materials cost than our cheaper cables. And our percentage mark-ups are much the same as equipment manufacturers have. There are some people with crazy mark-ups for sure though - I could name a few and quote some verifiable facts to support that - but don't tar everyone with that brush. |
We apply our best thinking on time-domain issues to all of our cables, so the difference isn't always that.
With the speaker cables the cost difference is simply using twice as much silver wire, and solid, high purity wire that has good sound characteristics costs real dollars. More so when there a couple of added stages where we apply gold and platinum to the silver wire. So no time-domain issues between the speaker cables, just more grip and articulation in the bass, and a bit more ease, in systems that need high current transmission. Both use the same wire, same insulation and same geometry (kind of).
With the interconnects, the Reference achieves better resonance control (which is an important time-domain issue) through using solid gold wires together with the silver wires. There is one gauge of wire that we need to have in the mix to get a balanced result with the Komako, that if we replace with gold wires, gives us a significantly better result. Applying the gold and platinum to the silver wire is good bang for the buck, but substituting this particular silver wire with a gold one makes a huge difference. And, of course, gold is many times more expensive than silver. We have many customers that bought Komako interconnects and then tried out the Reference in our upgrade program, and everyone so far has returned the Komako, not the Reference (for a refund). Many have come back to say they were astounded that the resolution and refinement could get that much better.
I am sounding like an advertisement, sorry. I was an enthusiast like the rest of you here, posting under the moniker Redkiwi for many years, until deciding to commercialise what came out of a lot of cable experimentation, and would prefer to interact in these forums as an enthusiastic audiophile (whose hobby got out of control) rather than to promote the business. But it is necessary to disclose my interest when I do that.
My purpose was just to put forward the view that time-domain issues are critical to the way we hear, and for what we hear to sound natural. And that achieving excellent time-domain performance in a cable is not easy. (And its not cheap either).
Electrical engineers are very inclined to a reductive view of physics, dismissing many known issues as irrelevant at audio frequencies. By that they mean they are too small to be heard. Convenient when making a competent product, but how exactly do they know we can't hear them? As I say our ear/brain is incredibly sensitive to time issues, as that system is constantly separating out what we hear, its direction and its location, and that system is far more dependent on time-domain accuracy than timbral accuracy. Not only are (some) EEs reductive about physics, they also make gross and unsubstantiated assumptions about how humans hear. |
Very interesting. I'm a cable designer and manufacturer, so feel free to think less of me than you might of another poster. And go on and believe that anything I say is only done in order to sell you my cables.
I have personally found that paying more for cables gets a better cable - at least in terms of resolution. You won't find any $200 cables that have the resolution of say a Stealth Indra or Nordost Valhalla.
The thing I think that is missing in these "Tis/Tisn't" debates in audio forums is an understanding of how the ear/brain processes what arrives at the ear. Some put it that all sound is invented in our brains. Of course, sound waves really do arrive at our ear, but what our brain chooses to 'hear' is an abstraction from that.
Our beliefs can indeed cause us to hear something that isn't there. The brain will fill in missing harmonics when the rest of the sound convinces the brain that they must be there.
This kind of thing is caused by the need for the brain to unravel from a single waveform the presence of multiple sources of sound. It does this from its auditory memory of timbres/objects, and from time-domain factors which tell it about the location of different sound sources.
Those that go completely deaf, after having hearing, are well aware of how the brain can invent sound - most that have suffered this still hear music playing in their head from time to time, just the same as if it was real.
Once you are able to manufacture audio gear that can faithfully reproduce timbre, so that the brain can identify a violin from a cello, Ella from Jacintha, a large drum from a small one, the next thing to get right is accuracy in the time domain. If the time relationships in a sound are unnatural then the brain is quickly fatigued trying to make sense of what it hears, and the music sounds confused. If the time relationships are accurate then the brain can make complete sense of what it hears, with singers/players/instruments occupying distinct and real spaces. These time-domain issues are two-fold; signal-smearing, and phase distortions.
Unlike equipment design, cable design to get accurate timbre is not tough, but time-domain accuracy is hard, and every design is a trade-off. What audiophiles perceive as dynamics or tonal issues with cables are all just time-domain issues (if the cable is competently designed). With steady state signals, wires perform well. But with rapidly changing signals, wires suffer self-interference and external interference problems. The effects are small, but the brain is very sensitive to them.
So when assessing cables, look out for certain things... If the cable creates a tonal shift then this is actually (unless the cable is incompetently designed) a time-domain issue. To assess whether the time-domain performance is actually an improvement, listen for dynamic linearity, subtle musical nuance, soundstage clarity and a sense of ease (when your brain is finding it easy to make sense of what it is hearing). This is a major reason why we often associate good soundstaging with good reproduced sound, when it isnt important to us at a real concert. |
Almarg
I tend to agree. We don't know, and we can't know - we can only cautiously make assumptions. I reckon that is why we have to rely to some degree on what we think we hear when we listen to something, rather than expect a scientific explanation or measurement for it. For example we can do a null test on something and get a sqiggly line error function, but the debate remains as to whether anyone can hear it, and if they can then whether it is musically meaningful. The trouble is that the ear/brain is what we must satisfy, but it doesn't have a digital read-out or have consistent and verifiable results, and it is subject to error and bias. Beyond a certain point we have to design by ear, and be prepared to alter our belief-sets in response to that. |
I am not used to the level of rudeness and anger I am encountering here, and since anger comes from fear, it makes me wonder what it is that you guys are afraid of. Or maybe you are just angry people and this is a safe place for you to vent some of it without getting a bloody nose. It seems an odd way to enjoy a hobby and the company of others.
To Audiofeil, sorry the point wasn't obvious enough for you. I can see why politics wouldn't be a career choice for you.
To Bryoncunningham. We can only experiment using listening tests, as there is no easy way to know whether measured differences will be musically meaningful or not. It may surprise some here that we do use blind tests at certain stages during the development process, but that is a long topic in itself and lengthy posts are clearly not welcomed. The main design characteristics we focus on to reduce time-domain errors are the conductor purity, dielectric, resonance control and geometry.
We make our wire ourselves and believe that certain characteristics of the finished wire are important. After making the silver wire we have a method by which we apply gold and platinum to the wire to break up the resonance of silver. The wire is coated in a natural oil and dried. We use four different gauges in a semi-litz arrangement. We use natural unbleached cotton insulation, no plastics. And our geometries are very different - particularly, we avoid twisting, braiding and screening as each of those have phase impacts we have little problem hearing.
To Rok2id, you appear to have lost it some time ago on this thread. Are you sure this is doing you any good? Anything I or anyone else says that doesn't fit with your model of cable performance is just labelled bs, so what are you achieving? If all that disagree with you leave this thread, have you won? |
I have an extensive background of study and experience in signal transmission, but recently spent some years studying human hearing and managed to make some connections between those. I have been working with some professors from two different universities on getting funding for some real research, but the funding hasn't materialised yet. The guys most interested are the physical chemistry professors. We have some hypotheses, for sure, and have written those up.
The purity one is not clear to me. My personal view is that it is the softness of the material, not its purity, that is most important (though they are related) and that the effect is more down to resonance than electron flows and eddy currents (as proposed by others). But the honest answer is that we are still divided on that one.
Dielectrics store and release the signal with some smearing of the signal over time. This is an area where conventional thinking accepts there is an issue but dismisses the relevance at audio frequencies. Our ears tell us otherwise, which leaves little room for much more than the typical "Tis, tisn't" debate.
Mechanical resonance seems to create an electrical resonance, though we only have theories on why this might be so. This is the particular area where my academic collaborators are most interested (though they find the idea of burn in fascinating too). The theory we have developed here would be a very long post.
Geometry affects resonance, but also there is mutual interference between conductors that needs to be kept low and constant along the wire. Most designs are poor at the former and average at the latter. Reducing this interference creates other problems and I find no easy solution other than striking a compromise.
I fear many will find that too waffly. Each of those a big areas and not simple. In most cases we have evidence of an effect, but are at the theory stage with inadequate funding to take it much further than that. I suspect all high end audio cable firms are in the same boat on that one. We can observe, develop theories, apply them in practise and observe again to hear if we like the change. Going much further is hard/expensive given the measurement difficulties. I am well aware that the alternative view is that the measurement difficulties aren't difficulties at all - just proof that we are deluded. The debate becomes entirely belief-based, which never goes anywhere. Hopefully I will get one of these research studies funded some day. |
"This is No time to be WASTING money on NONSENSE, such as wire and power cords. And EVERYONE on this site knows it's nonsense." I think this is a good example of what T_Bone may be referring to. |
