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Cable elevators - conventional wisdom wrong?

Reluctant to put any considerable money in them, the reasons for using cable elevators seemed intuitively correct to me: decouple cables mechanically from vibration and insulate them from the carpet's static. I have therefore built cheap elevators myself using Lego building blocks. (Plastic with a more or less complex internal structure; moreover, there is enormous shaping flexibility, for instance you can also build gates with suspended strings on which to rest the cables)
In their advertisement/report on the Dark Field elevators, Shunyata now claim that conventional elevators are actually (very?) detrimental in that they enable a strong static field to build up between cable and floor causing signal degradation.
Can anyone with more technical knowledge than I have assess how serious the described effect is likely to be? Would there, theoretically, be less distortion with cables lying on the floor? Has anyone actually experienced this?
karelfd

Showing 2 responses by carl109

carl109
134 posts
 
I doubt there was any "conventional wisdom" to begin with. As Shadorne said, there is simply no reason to bother suspending speaker cables off the floor.
They're not susceptible to low-level vibration the way your turntable or CDP would be, and static (from man-made carpet fibers) is unlikely to be an issue; if it was, high-end speaker cables would be shielded.

Unfortunatley our passion has an equal mix of genuine products and snake-oil sellers. If you're really keen, try to find some old glass or ceramic mains power insulators. They look ok and cost much less than branded ones.
carl109
134 posts
 
There's a few interesting points here.

Firstly, Justin who has the Shunyata's, says he thinks the lego would have much the same effect. This is what I meant by snake-oil sellers; I'll bet the Shunyata's are a bit more expensive than Lego!

Secondly, Shunyata's own website says that the Dark Field elevators are made of "...electrically conductive foam. This allows static charges to migrate through the elevator eliminating the build up of static field differentials between the floor and cable that would otherwise create noticeable signal degradation."

Now, if you're going to use a material that conducts static charges, you might as well leave the cable in contact with the carpet in the first place, as this will have the same result. Static charges wont dissipate into the air unless the voltage is massive (millions of volts), so all the Shunyata's are doing is allowing the static charge to spread up the elevators to the speaker cable sleeve. Leaving the cable on the floor does the same thing.

And thirdly, I still advocate that the only true way to listen for such small variations (like the 3% mentioned above) is with moderately quick A/B comparisons; trying to compare any sense (hearing, sight etc) to the memory of a sense (what we heard/saw a few minutes/hours ago) is very unreliable. Not only are you relying on your memory for comparisons, but so many other influences can change in the time between comparisons that you can't be sure what caused any difference.
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