I have two PS Audio AC3 and two Pangea AC 14 cables I don't use. My thinking is that Ayre wouldn't supply cables that are inadequate for their components. Is that thinking flawed?
I wonder how many of the nay sayers who claim power cables do not make a difference have even tried upgraded PC’s? To me, they either have not tried or can not hear. And it is usually them who cite science to explain away any possible benefit.
Yes, I have tried upgraded PCs. For instance a selection of Shunyata power cables of varying price. I tried them against the stock power cables in my system.
And with the really expensive cable I heard a difference! An obvious difference! Smoother, richer, darker, bigger soundstage, all that good stuff!
But then I did something more. I actually decided to trust my hearing.
I mean...*really* trust my hearing. Not the "trust my ears* with fingers crossed behind my back, the one where I also used my eyes and knew which cable I was listening to.
I had a friend help me do a blind test shoot out in which he could switch between the cheap, stock cable and the shunyata. Well, once I was no longer allowed to peek, those "obvious" sonic differences suddenly didn’t seem to be there. No matter how I tried I couldn’t hear any difference between the stock and the expensive cable. My guesses were random.
It was another fascinating lesson in the power of sighted bias. One that many audiophiles never bother to learn ;-)
I certainly did not want to hear the difference I did, it would have saved me money. I did try and I did hear...and not subtly.
I recently substituted the stock power cord I got with my Mytek BB with a Shunyata Diamondback I fished out of the closet. I won't tell you how it got there because I'm not really sure. Short story shorter... Dad gum, it actually made my stereo sound better. Practically every single audiophile parameter, from soundstaging to understand-ability of lyrics to orchestral string tone, got a five to ten percent boost. This happened with every source, as I use the Mytek as my phono amp in addition to using its streamer/DAC functions. Huh? Wha?
I have a feeling that geoffkait does not reside in the nursing home and neither do I.
You know where a thread is going when it is called "Are manufacturer AC cables good enough?". It is going the same direction as the one "Are manufacturer fuses good enough?" You should not blame geoffkait or me for that.
You know where a thread is going when these two guys start participating.... they should seriously consider cutting the Internet off nursing homes 😂😂🤭🤭
Munching a good Filet Mignon, makes everything better, doesn’t it? Of course: many appetites could be satisfied with a filet from Costco, which would, "do the job" (like a spare computer cord). That’s up to no one’s palate, but the muncher’s. For other appetites (biases): there’s Wagyu Beef Filet Mignon (not American, but- the real deal, from Miyazaki, Japan). As I mentioned, in my first response to the OP/this thread: As long as you’re willing to settle for, "good enough"........
Modjeski designed, made, and sold modestly-priced speaker cables (he stopped including a power cord with his amps, saying everyone already has a spare computer cord that would do the job ;-) , and Keith Herron makes interconnects. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess nether are directional. Yet both somehow managed to make superior sounding electronics. Thank God for good ol' blind luck.
@tomic601, maybe on my next trip down to SoCal I'll stop by Vandersteen's place (it's not far off I-5) and give his new stuff a listen. I spent an interesting evening at CES drinking the expensive wine Richard bought for the dinner part (he, Brooks & Sheila Berdan, myself & my woman, another couple), eating Filet Mignon while listening to Richard and Brooks talk shop.
I had been planning to go to Modjeski's new place in Berkeley/Oakland and listen to his direct-drive ESL's (OTL amp driving the stators directly---no step-up transformer), but that's no longer possible. Bummer.
@bdp24 someday, hopefully soon you can hear RV’s liquid cooled amp and speaker combination with speaker wire he helped design... ( credit to Dick Kleinfelter of PSE fame for detail design )
they come with a gasp !!! Cold welded, molded locking power cord... fun
I guess Nelson's designs sounding great is just the product of blind luck, not knowledge and wisdom (knowing what's important). I'm reminded of the old expression: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
It's a shame so many with superior listening skills don't share that gift with the world by applying it to designing products that would surely sound better than those of the tin-eared engineers who can't hear the sound of a fuse (in "either" direction), or a power cord, or whatever.
Speaking of cords, Roger Sanders in a white paper on his website explains why ESL loudspeakers benefit from a speaker cable designed in accordance with that speaker's electrical characteristics: good old capacitance, resistance, and inductance. Engineering----how boring.
I had a good friend and fellow band member in High School who majored in music when he started college (San Jose State). In his music theory class were a number of the guys we knew in bands around town, some pretty good musicians. They soon learned that being able to play an instrument in NO WAY helped them be able to grasp the intellectual complexities of music theory, much of it mathematical. Kent ended up doing the classwork for a number of them. He himself developed into a fantastic songwriter, but devoted most of the remainder of his life to studying JSB and recording the composer's keyboard works on his (Kent's) German piano.
Are the two above topics related? I think so. Electrical/electronic theory & design and music theory pose difficult intellectual challenges. Both require the ability to comprehend abstract concepts such as advanced mathematics (I was humbled when in my second advanced math class in college I realized I lacked the required intellectual ability). That's why it took the genius of J.S. Bach to compose the works he did, and the talents of Nelson Pass, Ralph Karsten, and Roger Modjeski to design their amplifiers. Oh, if only they had golden ears, they could have designed some REALLY good sounding stuff.
Hey GK, since you're the expert on relevance, what exactly is the relevance of your long cut and paste job about black holes? Oh and you never did give us your reasoning behind why vibration matters. Please. Share. Share. etc etc.
Irrelevant and lacking sufficient reading comprehension that he does not even realize when he proves someone else's point:
"The distance is THOUGHT to depend on the black hole mass,"
Gallo said.
"The larger the black hole, the larger the distance and the longer you
expect for light to be emitted from the accretion disk to hit the
broad-line region."
And as is well noted, things like the gravitation constant, which is ASSUMED to be constant, do not accurately model the universe we observe, hence things like dark matter, and fudge factors. As pointed out previously, there are theories of gravity that do not maintain gravity as behaving consistently over distance.
By knowing this number, the speed of the broad-line region, the speed of light and what’s called the GRAVITATIONAL CONSTANT.
Captain Irrelevant: so irrelevant, even when he cuts and pastes, still just as irrelevant as ever. Oh well. At least that was a readable departure from the usual word salad.
The question remains, is he capable of writing anything the least bit informative - in his own words?
@heaudio123 What are you bloviating about now? From Pysics.org news,
In fact, a team including University of Michigan astronomer Elena Gallo has discovered that a black hole at the center of a nearby dwarf galaxy, called NGC 4395, is about 40 times smaller than previously thought. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Currently, astronomers believe that supermassive black holes sit at the center of every galaxy as massive as or larger than the Milky Way. But they’re curious about black holes in smaller galaxies such as NGC 4395 as well. Knowing the mass of the black hole at the center of NGC 4395—and being able to measure it accurately—can help astronomers apply these techniques to other black holes.
"The question remains open for small or dwarf galaxies: Do these galaxies have black holes, and if they do, do they scale the same way as supermassive black holes?" Gallo said. "Answering these questions might help us understand the very mechanism through which these monster black holes were assembled when the universe was in its infancy."
To determine the mass of NGC’s black hole, Gallo and her fellow researchers employed reverberation mapping. This technique measures mass by monitoring radiation thrown off by what’s called an accretion disk around the black hole. An accretion disk is a mass of matter collected by the gravitational pull of black holes.
As radiation travels outward from this accretion disk, it passes through another cloud of material farther out from the black hole that’s more diffuse than the accretion disk. This area is called the broad-line region.
When the radiation hits gas in the broad-line region, it causes atoms in it to undergo a transition. This means that the radiation bumps an electron out of the shell of an atom of hydrogen, for example, causing the atom to occupy a more energetic level of the atom. After the radiation passes, the atom settles back into its previous state. Astronomers can image this transition, which looks like a flash of brightness.
Light echo measured from the central black hole in a dwarf galaxy NGC 4395. The time delay between the continuum from the black hole’s accretion disk (blue light curve) and the hydrogen emission from orbiting gas clouds (red light curve) is measured as ~80 min., providing the light travel time from the black hole to the gas emission region. Credit for NGC 4395 image: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona. Credit for accretion disk illustration: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M. Weiss.
By measuring how long it takes for the accretion disk radiation to hit the broad-line region and cause these flashes, the astronomers can estimate how far the broad-line region is from the black hole. Using this information, they can then calculate the black hole’s mass.
"The distance is thought to depend on the black hole mass," Gallo said. "The larger the black hole, the larger the distance and the longer you expect for light to be emitted from the accretion disk to hit the broad-line region."
Using data from the MDM Observatory, the astronomers calculated that it took about 83 minutes, give or take 14 minutes, for radiation to reach the broad-line region from the accretion disk. To calculate the black hole mass, they also had to measure the intrinsic speed of the broad-line region, which is the speed at which the region cloud is moving under the influence of the black hole gravity. To do this, they took a high-quality spectrum with the GMOS spectrometer on GEMINI North telescope.
By knowing this number, the speed of the broad-line region, the speed of light and what’s called the gravitational constant, or a measure of gravitational force, the astronomers were able to determine that the black hole’s mass was about 10,000 times the mass of our sun—about 40 times lighter than previously thought. This is also the smallest black hole found via reverberation mapping.
No, we can’t measure the mass of a black hole millions of miles away. We can "estimate" the mass of black holes assuming all the other calculations we have about gravity at vast distances and vast masses are correct (and there are some theories that the behaviour of gravity changes with distance). It is probably best not to get all your physics from a 1973 book.
By the way we have no problem measuring anything universe. Distance is not really an issue. We can measure the mass and spin of a black hole millions of light years away, no problem. Or the source of radio signals from space as they’re doing right now.
And again, this is 1970's ideology, and perhaps why this tired expression is mainly used by older audiophiles with memories of low THD (and often really bad IM) 70's amplifiers. We also know more now about what distortion creates what euphonic experiences. But that is all deflection, because what we are talking about is whether a wire can carry a "signal" power or otherwise, accurately, not, because rarely do we want to have our wires add euphonic colorings to our music, say like a turntable, or NOS DAC, or some tube and solid state amps do.
Now, audio is a different story since measurements oft don’t comport with listening experience.
heaudio123 Well most of universe is a very very far distance away making measurement a bit difficult unlike our audio systems. We don’t know if our gravity equations are wrong, or our measurement of matter is wrong.
>>>>Well, distance is all relative. You’re just used to very short distances. By the way we have no problem measuring anything universe. Distance is not really an issue. We can measure the mass and spin of a black hole millions of light years away, no problem. Or the source of radio signals from space as they’re doing right now. You know, like in the movieContact. In fact, now that I think about it they can measure almost exactly the distance to the edge of the universe. Hel-loo! Now, audio is a different story since measurements oft don’t comport with listening experience. That’s the way it goes sometimes.
The naysayers propose (perhaps, project), that, "audiophiles" are too ignorant, inept or deaf, to make a change, in their systems, listen to it and determine if it (whatever it is) makes enough difference, to them, to purchase (a simple experiment).
I am the one who is accused of being inept, ignorant and deaf not to mention a troll etc.. for simply pointing out "audiophiles" are human and subject to the same biases as all of us , including me. Acknowledging this it only makes sense to try and negate these biases as much as possible when making claims of HUGE improvements in the sonic abilities of amplifiers etc..power cords, which are fairly well understood passive electrical devices.
Well most of universe is a very very far distance away making measurement a bit difficult unlike our audio systems. We don't know if our gravity equations are wrong, or our measurement of matter is wrong.
We used to think that E = 1/2 m * v ^2, was totally accurate, and for most practical purposes, it is more than accurate enough. Audiophiles or at least audiophile marketers attempt to create reasons that would actual be pretty easy to measure within the limits of any necessary accuracy, whether we understand "everything" or not, and then make excuses about why they can't be measured and attribute that to this global "well we don't understand everything". They don't even try to reconcile their claims with what we do know, let alone the things they claim we do not.
Never said gravity couldn't be explained. The amount of gravity,
throughout this universe, has not yet been explained.
Again;
The hypothesis is (whatever the particular wire, tweak, etc); that a change (good or bad) can be heard. The naysayers propose (perhaps, project), that, "audiophiles" are too ignorant, inept or deaf, to make a change, in their systems, listen to it and determine if it (whatever it is) makes enough difference, to them, to purchase (a simple experiment). Without a knowledge of the root, which births such hubris, one could almost get offended. ie (the root):
https://www.britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect
rodman99999Never said gravity couldn’t be explained. The amount of gravity, throughout this universe, has not yet been explained. I cited a number of the theoretical attempts at an explanation. Jones brought up Einstein’s Cosmological Constant. I mentioned it sought to account for the amount of gravity, throughout this universe. He added that, in his Math, believing in a stationary universe, in keeping with that time’s understanding of Physics. Anyone, with even a minimal grasp of Einstein’s General Relativity, would have understood that point.
>>>>That’s all very exciting. Please keep us posted on any developments or breakthroughs. 🙄
Never said gravity couldn't be explained. The amount of gravity, throughout this universe, has not yet been explained. I cited a number of the theoretical attempts at an explanation. Jones brought up Einstein's Cosmological Constant. I mentioned it sought to account for the amount of gravity, throughout this universe. He added that, in his Math, believing in a stationary universe, in keeping with that time's understanding of Physics. Anyone, with even a minimal grasp of Einstein's General Relativity, would have understood that point.
No that was fake. The line, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, was the idea of Stanley Kubrick’s wife. It was spoken by Neil Armstrong on the unused set of 2001 A Space Odyssey while filming the lunar landing sequences.
Other than NGT being a popular scientist but no where near the leading expert, there is a big difference between being able to explain how something works and knowing it exists and being able to observe it's effects or measure them in fine detail. It's the same false argument against evolution, that because we call it a theory, because we don't absolutely know all the mechanisms, that that some how means it "doesn't exist". That is not at all what it means.
djones51, Neil deGrasse Tyson admits that gravity can't be explained! Interesting.....
Oh, I get it, you’re one of those guys who thinks nothing is real, only theoretical. Good grief! You realize they’ve proved this “theory,” don’t you? Or don’t you believe in proof either? 🤗
Here’s a quick explanation. Imagine spacetime is a big mattress and all the heavenly bodies are about the size of golf balls and oranges and sitting on the mattress. If you place a big heavy bowling ball on the mattress those heavenly bodies closest to the bowling ball will slide down a little bit toward the bowling due to the depression caused by the bowling ball. That’s what gravity is, the curvature of spacetime due to very heavy objects. It all stems from the General Theory of Relativity.
Everything you never wanted to know about the thorny subject of gravity is contained in this book, pub. 1973. Authors Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. Big guns. That was the golden age for gravity and black holes, following the success of the A-Bomb and H Bomb, you known, those guys had to find something to do.
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