Cable vs. Electronics: biggest bang for the buck

I have great respect for Nelson Pass and his regular posts here are always well worth reading. Unfortunately, I don't think the article referenced above is his most valuable contribution. The date 2/1980, means that it necessarily misses the great advances touted by the wire industry for the last twenty years. The analysis is the classic RLC/impedance matching analysis that has been the bane of those trying to find reasons to pay huge amounts of money for wire. It inevitably leads to the conclusion, in all but a very few instances, that there is no reason. This is why you so often hear cable proponants argue so strongly that measurements don't matter.

His conclusion seems to indicate that he could have been a great politician as well as a great audio engineer. After saying basically that he cannot "assess" the differences except at the "extremes" (he doesn't define extreme but leaves the impression he means very long runs of wire) he falls back on "who am I" to judge line and says money spent on "quality" cables is money "well spent." Never saying what a "quality" cable is or what is a reasonable amount of money to spend.

Was he running for office in early 1980? I'da voted for him had I known.

I remain,

A lot of writing goin on here! I'll repeat what RCrump said a number of posts up because it says it in 3 lines.

Quote "Spend your dollars on better gear before you think about better wires.....10% of the cost of the system will get you down the road just fine for wires.....There sure seem to be a lot of folks out there that have 15K in their systems with 1/3 of that in wires which is just ludicrous..." End Quote.

I remain,

Cd's and the newest incarnation of cable. Hummm...Didn't Sartre call that hell?

Sincerely
I remain,

Hey, I think you're insulting Harpo.

Sincerely
I remain

Asa : Guess I disagree.

you say >”In other words, both a piece of wire and an amp are just pieces of matter rearranged into different LOOKING forms, both which pass energy (music signal) through a lattice of molecular/atomic/quantum energy which we choose to call “matter.” If you are a true scientific person, then how can you say one rearrangement of matter is the source; and another is the mere conduit for that source, as if one appearance is somehow inherently more important than another? In a Newtonian way, how are they different?”

Well, for openers I just do not understand the first paragraph. A “Newtonian” explanation will not speak to the molecular/quantum distinctions you make in the first part of the sentence so really I don't see what you mean. Newton had no clue what an electron was much less molecular-quantum distinctions did he?

More basically, components do more than LOOK different. It's not about “appearance.”
They DO different things. Some complex - Some not so complex. It's all technology but at different levels. You say “it's all matter and its all passing energy.” ( So are you and I , are we no different than a wire?) Well yes, but a lot more is true too. A wire's job, for the most part, is simply to “pass energy” as you put it. A signal goes in one end and should go out the other. Unchanged. It does not have to transduce it like a driver or amplify it like a tube circuit. A driver must transform energy from electric charge to magnetic energy then to mechanical energy then to acoustic energy. Each transformation requires distortion and presents special problems. A tube, driver and a wire are all components -- but one has a relatively easy job to do and one has a far more complex one to do.

I know (or they tell us) at some quantum level we and all around us are the exact same. But for purposes of audio and everyday life a failure to see the differences in 18 inches of wire and an amp's circuit topology is simply amazing to me. Even in Physics (as currently understood) the laws that explain big things (gravity) do not apply to or fully explain small things (quantum physics.) Your attempt to explain away all of the differences in everyday life based upon things that apply to tiny quantum worlds seems a madness if you ask me. It's like deciding to walk out in front of a car because at a “fundamental quantum-molecular level” the car and you are basically the same star dust and almost entirely empty space. Unfortunately you’ll be dead.

In any event, I think the differences are more than "irrelevant variables" and the issue is not that they are "different looking forms" of some fundamental single micro reality but that they function very differently and have very different levels of complexity in the world in which we live. Anyone who has tried to make a cable and an amp circuit can tell you. See Sean's point above.

> “wire and amps are ***** in their fundamental nature, are no different for purposes of comparison.” Again this argument proves to much. From a micro genetic point of view you could probably say that a mouse and a lion are the same in their “fundamental nature.” That being the case, it’s a fool who does not see the differences in them for practical purposes.

IMHO, Your focus on the similarities of objects (abstraction/generalization) at one level (usually the micro) has caused you too lose site of the more important differences that do not fall within your chosen categories of abstraction. Abstraction is dangerous that way. It tends to emphasize the similar and ignore the particular and individual. (I have to laugh; I'm starting to talk like you)

Sincerely
I remain

You put Heisenberg and Jung together Detof? Interesting. I much prefer Jung as a man. I'm not trained in that as you are but I suppose I've read about half of his collected writing in amazement. An amazing life. Where do you think he stands as a psychologist(if you want to label him as such) in the 20th century if you don't mind me asking?

(Also, I think I misunderstood Asa more than disagreed with him and my point was epistemological in that you have to apply a system of thought where it is meant to be applied. Einstein if you want to know gravity, Q physics if you are subatomic, Newton's calculas if you want to go to the moon and yes, even audio has a certain structure all it's own too.)

Sincerely
I remain,

Det/Asa
Not to "defend" his shortcomings but here in the states women were not given the right to vote until 1920. Jung was certainly of his time and unfair to the women in his personal life as well. I believe Asa also thinks he has been romaticized and mythologized and I think that is true too which is why it is better to read him than what other's have said about him. Anyway...

> you say "What has to be fought against and refuted, though, I find, are the absolutists, who cannot differentiate between essence and outer form as it appears to our searching eyes. This seems to me, given that I understand him correctly, also Asa's point."

Well if that is his point (Asa you are a difficult read in small pieces) I agree totally. To the meager extent I understand electronics it is almost completely a formal mathmatical model. Most of our science these days is purely mathmatical invention and has been at least since Galileo. We do not ask questions re underlying causes, the "essense" as you put it, but look for numerical relationships between different measured quantites. We (the observer)have to step in a isolate a quantity in order to measure and when we do so we can cause more problems than we think. This reminds me of Heisenberg in a way.

Nonetheless, if we did not do this, none of us would be listening to audio systems. So it has its place. That was the point of my post above. Tis a strange world.

Oh and Detlof, when you find the "essence" you're talking about, drop me an e-mail will you? That way I will be able to distinguish it from all the riff-raff I usually think about.(hehehe)

I remain,

"Absolutist", "disingenuine", "inauthentic", (Asa, You forgot to throw in “witch”) and, oh yes ...of course, we've only been around "less sophisticated" systems.

Sincerely
I remain,

Said above > As you know the Nazi party was more of a religious movement than a political movement.

All politics is religion…. or at least it has been up until now. Hitler relied, after all, on what were (and still are) primarily Christian prejudices and symbols (even as he disavowed them). The separation of church and state has been fought for here in the states for a short two centuries but anyone who follows this administration (Ashcroft) certainly understands that the two are still closely tied together. One nation under God….ect. The “oh so easy” separation of the two realms would have made Jung smile. (The one denied is the one in control.) In most of the rest of the world it is even more so. Our experiment with secular democracy is so short and fragile.

>Is Jung influenced by the occult ?

Of course!! Read his take on alchemy. It is not that he is “right” or “wrong.” (Mark will surely lecture on the mistaken assumptions underlying the duality of such an approach.) It is simply so amazing and fantastic a production!

IMHO there are few easy answers with Jung. I am going to say difficult things in very little space so you experts (Detlof) please excuse my layman’s simplifications and over generalizations.

He wrote his dissertation for his medical degree, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena”, about his 15 year old cousin, Helene Prieswerk, who claimed to be a medium. She claimed to be controlled by a variety of spirits. He attributed it to dissociation-multiple personalities. He was not so easily taken in.

Somewhat ironically, one of the more far fetched ideas (to modern western ears), synchronicity (you know.. the Sting Album …the idea that cause and effect are not so obvious and events are related in not so “common sense” ways), which sounds mystical-occultist to modern ears, was based on his collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist. Many of his ideas came together during the second decade of this century. The first and second decades were very productive in completely overturning the rather mechanistic Newtonian view of the physical world. In a way the “common-sense” understanding of “reality” became “non-sense” at the cutting edge of “hard science.” I think Jung was influenced by this and believed that psychology would follow a similar path. At least he was certainly not afraid to think about and explore such things.

He was deeply interested in what we term the “occult” because he believed that western thought had overvalued thinking and undervalued its emotional/unconscious roots. In a simplified sense he believed certain aspects of thought became habitual and dominant and that without some balance troubles would follow. To almost any western reader he is going to seem to leave the known-plotted-intellectualized world far behind. Again, the second decade of the 20th century saw a war by “civilized-scientific” western Europe that, to say the least, showed the underbelly of “the dreams of reason.” He, in fact, believed he envisioned the war. Like him or not, his writing for about a half dozen years after 1913 , after his break with Freud as Detlof points out, and in a state of mind that would have put most of us in an asylum is, as they say, stranger than fiction…. and richer too.

This is not to excuse his obvious shortcomings. He was a man. His insights were great and his mistakes were great too. Hindsight is 20-20. Thomas Jefferson banged his negress slave half step-sister. The reverend M.L. King was rather “prolific” too. Is this cause for concern? Well…yes. Does it completely undermine their insight and life’s work? I don’t think so (another thread?). One of Jung’s better known ideas is that of the “shadow” and he certainly had his own….but to expect too much from those who walk here is adolescent folly. To expect nothing is fatalistic. But where to draw the line?

Least we forget as we judge Jung. The topic of this thread is a set of cables costing more than the annual gross family income of about half the folks on the planet who are hungry (slowly starving) as we speak. Of course, we have a political/economic ideology that justifies our excesses. Actually, it makes a Virtue of them (from necessity of course). I wonder what they will think of us 100 years from now. Please understand that I include myself in the last comment. I am not aiming it at anyone else... least of all you N’archy. I spend enough on vinyl to feed a small village.

If Jung failed somehow maybe I like him more for it. Compared to most of us he did not take the easy way. He struggled with it and for that I like him.

Sincerely
I remain,

said above> Clueless, our "experiment in secular democracy". Uh, I didn't know we'd had one yet...

Uh….I was answering Narchy’s post where he said the Nazi movement was more “religion than politics.” My point was that they are not separate and that, to the extent they are, it is a fragile experiment. The dates would be 1776-89. If you see no significance that is up to you.

said above> The "overturning" of the "Newtonian Mechanistic world". Uh, when did that happen?

Uh…Anyone remotely familiar with physics would place it at least by 1905 to 1916 (approx) at the latest. Einstein’s two papers on relativity.

Uh...I am really tired of the hostility here and sign off. Uh...There are better things to do.

Uh...Good luck to all.
Uh...Adieu,

Important News Flash!
Price breakthrough on synchronicity

(And I said I wouldn't be back.)
Given the depth and intensity of the discussion here I felt none of you would want to miss out on this one of kind deal on a Jungian Synchronicity Machine.

The instructions clearly provide at Usage e:
"Leave your Wishing Machine running. In a few days or weeks you should start seeing synchronicities coming into your life."

Synchronicity Central

Holy Psychotronic Psionics Psionic!!!!

All this on 3 AAA batteries! I'm wondering what if I use a dedicated power supply with some of those Pursit Dominus cables Narchy talks about? I can have my life together in no time!

Maybe I can get a group deal on some treated ones!

Detlof, even with the upgrades I think the price is cheaper than the therapy you suggested for me.

Lets not get in a bidding war eh!

Asa. Contrary to popular belief I do leave my computer once in while. I have to see the branch before I can grab it.
I had the chance to see David Liebman blow his sax last night w/ very small crowd (35) totally acoustic. Kept me out late. very nice.

Peace.

I remain