"
Well, that pretty much sums up the 40 year old cable debate in a
nutshell. Here’s some advice for anyone with such extreme angst and
heartburn - get Better Business Bureau or Consumer Report on the case
and see how far you get.
"
Better idea - do some research on the people who own/run high end cable "manufacturing" businesses and find out what their professional qualifications are. You are likely to find a lot of people with sales, marketing, and business administration backgrounds and very few professionally trained engineers willing to stake their reputations on audible improvements that can't somehow be measured but can easily be heard.
We have microphones that can detect sound pressure signals that are much weaker than humans can hear at frequencies much higher and much lower than humans can hear. We have essentially free software that can run on laptops that can reliably record everything these microphones pick up - phase, amplitude, and frequency. If it can't be measured, it can't be heard. Any claims to the contrary are bupkiss and easily debunked if the claimant has the guts to submit to double blind testing - WHICH THEY NEVER DO!
|
"
Listen Mr. Smarty Pants, you don’t have to mention any names. Just cut
and paste this pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo you’re referring to.
" - geoffkait Seriously??? Where does one begin....How about a full Youtube video presentation with rambling mumbo jumbo about improving current delivery of an amplifier by using a power conditioner AHEAD of the amplifier in the signal chain?? Would that be a good place to start "Mr. Smarty Pants"? Did you just crawl out from under a rock or were you just joking with an insinuation that bogus mumbo jumbo isn't a huge part of Audiophiledum? Check out the Audioquest "presentation" at this year's CES. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGX3MbSnNKY&t=1951sThe BS, ahem, I mean "technical presentation" starts at the twenty minute mark. |
The fact that you had to ask for specifics confirms that you are in fact (shockingly...) clueless from a technical standpoint. But don't despair. If you stop yabbering for a minute and actually read/listen, you might actually learn something today.
Every amplifier has inherent current delivery limits - usually associated with the limited amount of magnetic flux that can induce voltage, and thus current, in the secondary windings of its transformer. Pulsed power supplies, while the details are a little different, suffer from the same limitations. It doesn't matter what you put in front of the amplifier (super duper "power conditioner"), you are stuck with this limitation. You can think of it as a big resistor connected between the mains supply and the load (speakers). You can boost input voltage all you want (not that any "power conditioner" does this anyway) and you won't get any more current any faster through the system to the load. With excessive voltage drive on the primary, your transformer will ultimately reach saturation, overheat, draw excessive current, and melt if it doesn't have rail and mains fuses to protect it. It's a simple law of physics - specifically attributed to a person named Kirchhoff - perhaps you've heard of him? In the video, Powell claims increased current delivery under transient loads but current delivery is limited not only by the transformer's magnet circuit, but also by accumulation of resistance in various factors like the power supply capacitors, output stage emitter resistors (if so equipped) and output transistor saturation. If you'd actually built a high fidelity amplifier, you'd already know this. I'm guessing you haven't.
|
They aren't "courses". They are called "majors". And it generally takes more than one "major" to have an adequate foundation to build/design good loudspeakers.
Electrical Engineering
Acoustical Science
Mechanical Engineering
This is why it's more than a little insulting when a fast talking marketing fake gets up on a stage and starts preaching about things he knows nothing about - current delivery, damping factor, slew rate, rise time, group delay, voltage regulation, psrr, cmrr....etc..etc...
It takes years of study to master these subjects. When people listen more to slimey salesmen than professional engineers/designers, it's not hard to see why industry professionals are somewhat miffed. Why would anyone work hard to educate themselves about the science if they could simply take some marketing "courses" and BS their way through to the next paycheck? Why insist on seeing a doctor to diagnose a challenging illness when there are so many nurse practitioners who can generate a faster diagnosis at 20% less cost?
|
blah blah blah....care to offer anything with insight or new knowledge to the conversation or are you just here to shoot fish in a barrel whenever they roll into town??
|
aalenik said " Here's what I've found in over 40 years of listening... 1. Cables (and AC cords) DEFINITELY make a difference. 2.
Interconnects cannot 'improve' sound. All they can do is degrade it.
The best ones degrade the sound the least (i.e. they transmit it with
the least 'damage' and 'loss' of the signal). 3. Generally, these
differences are MORE pronounced w/ better (i.e. more highly resolving)
components. If the signal is distorted to start with, a great cable
will only give a more accurate presentation of that distorted signal.
It cannot 'clean it up'. 4. Lastly, to those who say 'if you
can't measure it, you can't hear it'... You're assuming that we can
measure everything that matters; that our knowledge of electronics,
physics, and psycho-acoustics are all perfect. Absurd! If you think
there's nothing left to learn... well, that's extremely foolish, isn't
it?"
If you've been listening and evaluating for 40 years and didn't know that one of the primary problems with interconnects is common mode noise, then pretty much everything else you have to say on this subject is useless. It took the "audiophile community" about 25 years to acknowledge what the "objectivists" in the pro sound community have been saying all along - BALANCED LINE LEVEL CABLES ARE REQUIRED FOR HIGH FIDELITY. Finally, after many, many years - "high end" components are more often than not using balanced inputs. The problem with interconnects isn't signal loss as aalenik proclaims above - it has always been picking up stray low level interence from adjacent power cords and rf - the longer the run the more chance for very low level electromagnetic radiation to get picked up in the interconnect and passed along to the input stage of an amp where it is magnified greatly. As for aalenik, there are very good reasons not to put your faith totally in the subjective camp or objective camp. Principal among them would be that the person inclined to do either is likely clueless. An open mind and intelligence requires that we respect both our direct audible senses and all the evidence our other senses can bring to bear to help us learn about that which we do not know. We measure. We listen. And we never stop trying to draw correlations between the two. When we do - we have disavowed the pursuit of "truth" in favor of "belief" and all scientific progress comes to a grinding halt.
|
Science re enforces religion on a daily basis - ask any astronomer for his/her views as to whether expansion of the universe is speeding up or slowing down. Ask a particle physicist about the challenges associated with measuring subatomic particles that seem to be able to travel faster than the speed of light - breaking one of Einstein's "golden rules". They all (probably most) inevitably wind up talking about the "Creator" and what all this stuff means to them on a personal basis. I think the clueless ones who just accept or believe what they are told have less "religion" than those who constantly push themselves to discover. To me, the drive to use every sense/skill to learn more about the universe around us represents the utmost expression of love and respect for the "Creative Force" that produced us and everything we see, touch, smell, and hear.
|
"
I just had a banana for breakfast. Does that mean I'll get mad bananas disease? 😄
"
Lol...nah, you'll be fine. It's just the eggs from chickens that eat other chickens you have to worry about....
|
aalenik
It's nothing personal and not a trolling attempt. You just posted something that has no basis in fact and it needed to be corrected. Throughout the history of Hi Fi, interconnect cables have been notorious for picking up stray signals (especially longer than average runs) - not signal loss. The best interconnect cables from both a measured performance point of view and audible performance point of view (vulnerability to hum an static) are balanced cables. If they aren't balanced, the next best interconnect cable type possess a braided shield to shunt stray electric and magnetic fields. This is one area in audio where measurement results have actually correlated well with audible results. The issue has been so well settled to the extent that the "audiophile" market has adopted what was traditionally a pro sound design technique - balanced inputs whereby common mode noise is essentially completely cancelled in a differential amplifier input stage. When it comes to "losses" sustained through interconnects, very little is contributed to the cable unless source impedance and interconnect capacitance are high enough to result in high frequency roll off. This generally only is a concern with tube pre amps that have output impedance in the range of 500 ohms.
This site is frequently consulted for advice by those looking for answers. While it's nice when people offer their advice whether it's based solely on their personal long time experience, measurements they may have taken, or both - it's important that the advice given be factual. We all want accurate, useful, actionable information for questions we have. Factually, your advice regarding interconnects does not square with my experience or that of anyone I've known in audio circles for many years - audiophile or pro sound. Before someone plunks down hundreds (maybe even thousands - yikes!!) for interconnects, it's important for them to have facts that are born out not only in anecdotal experience, but with measurements that back up that first hand experience when they are available. You can go for many years doing the same thing and never encounter hum from a power cord straying into an interconnect just based on the random layout of your particular equipment setup - nothing you intentionally did. Does that mean stray EMF isn't a problem for interconnects? I think you know the answer.
|
@ngen33r
Thanks for the much needed chuckle!
You may be missing something though. "Audiofools" may want the $3500 cables so they can hear the "errors" that were produced by the original $25 cables. It's a way of achieving greater (dare I say "master") authenticity....A true "audiofool" must never let ANYTHING get in the way of what the original studio engineers and performers "intended"....blah blah blah...
Carry on and thanks again for the laugh....it's always nice to encounter a little sense of humor now and then...
|
"
Actually good microphones and their associated cables are very expensive. An auspicious first post for you, sir.
" - geoffkait
Oops...did I pop in on the wrong thread? I thought this thread was about expensive cables - not expensive microphones.....
Let's go back and check.....Nope, it WAS about cables. Oh, that's right, it's geoffkait doing what he does best once again - making stuff up as an excuse to heap criticism on another poster.
Take a chill pill geoff - it's only an audio hobby, right? Have a laugh....
|
