Does raising speaker cables off the floor really make a big difference?

millercarbon,

Have you ever tried anything from Geoff's Machina Dynamics website?

Never heard a difference.

As to the horrifying influence of speaker cables touching things:  I moved from a variety of speaker cables when my source components were in the same room as my speakers, to moving my source components to another room.   This required a 35 foot run of 10awg speaker cable, run down along ceiling, under floor, snaking through shag rug to speaker.   No sonic difference detectable at all.  Sounds exactly as detailed, pure...all the nice descriptors....as before.  That's just my own anecdotal evidence, though.


If all this "cables can't go touching things (what's that shielding for again?) stuff were true, the home theater realm would be suffering terribly, since even in the highest-end installs you have cables running through walls etc.  And yet state of the art sound is often achieved this way.  Aside from generally well-known cautions about how to choose and install cables (e.g. you want to avoid many cables running in parallel to power lines etc), this hand-wringing about "I can't let my cables touch things" is mostly reserved for the subjectivist audiophile world, and those selling products to them. 


Of course, if you are in the "if I do X to my system and think I hear a difference it's true" camp, many people will "hear" a difference in virtually any suggested tweak.  So it's up to you what type of "evidence" is sufficient.

You have to ask yourself, do you really think the sound stage, which is almost all a factor of recording and speaker/room interaction, would magically collapse due to some exceedingly low level interaction between a cable and the floor?

Exactly. And funny how such a dramatic "change" is something no one (TMK) has ever demonstrated in a blind test.

It might serve to balance things to do a little googling on some of the controversies that have arisen with...*ahem*....certain tweak-selling and cable-producing company’s show demos.

(Somewhat along those lines: One engineer on an audio site talked about how, upon seeing a demo and the associated claims from one of these manufacturers at a show, he started asking simple technical questions and proposing how the claimed phenomenon could be tested. He was greeted not with the type of exchange one might expect between engineers, but with suggestions that lawyers may get involved if he wants to pursue that line of questioning).


But...there are audiophiles who want to believe....so there’s a market that will sell to them.

As to soundstages collapsing due to cables not being treated as if they were unicorns: I have friends and acquaintances who are audio reviewers. I regularly hear whatever gear they have in, from expensive amps, to all sorts of speakers, all of them hooked up to super high end cabling.

Every time I come home from listening at their place I play the same tracks on my own system and...somehow....with my 35 foot long generic cables running under floors and over a rug....I experience glorious soundstaging and imaging (and clarity) of at least the equal if not more to what I’ve heard there. I guess I’m just lucky. (It’s ok, I’ll do this for you: "that’s because you have ears of cloth, not carefully trained golden ears like the rest of us")

Speaker set up/room acoustics/listener position will in all likelihood influence imaging/soundstaging far more than raising the average cable off the floor.

geoff,

I may have missed the post to which you are replying, but are you talking about isolating speakers/subwoofers from the surface on which they sit?

Can you clarify why you see it as easier to do so with a subwoofer?  Do you mean perhaps that a taller main tower speaker may become more "tippy" when you try isolation underneath?  


Not challenging your claim, just wondering about the details.

These are the type of subjects that self-reputed "Golden Ears" love.To them, it only re-enforces that they have Golden Ears, which is a psychologically-comfortable status.


I’m not talking simply about any audiophile who tries something out in his system, "hears" something he likes and goes with it. Cool stuff!Rather, I’m talking about a certain attitude, or defense-mechanism, found among some portion in the audiophile community.



It’s like psychics or spiritualists: "Oh, you can’t hear the voices of the spirits like I can? Poor thing, it must be hard to be so deficient in spiritual sensitivity!"


So the Golden Ear does some tweak "test" in the usual subjective manner, believes he hears a difference and...well...that’s that! Truth Has Been Found!



If YOU listen to the same thing and don’t hear a difference then, no it can’t be contrary evidence, it can’t be the Golden Ear could possibly be fooling himself; no, the Golden Ear’s subjective impressions method is inviolable so it MUST be some deficiency in you who "can not hear what I hear."


That’s why this always plays out with snipes against the hearing acuity of anyone skeptical of a Golden Ear claim. The Golden Eared Subjectivist assumes his own method as veridical. And since the Golden Ear usually won’t truly put his Golden Ears to controlled testing - e.g. with controls for "not peeking" to really see if he can actually distinguish what he claims. - then the Golden Ear is never faced with a true challenge to his claims.



So he can go on to his heart’s content claiming to hear whatever he/she wants, his Golden Ear status unchallenged (at least to himself/herself), with the added satisfying benefit that anyone arguing about negative results is simply hapless and hasn’t reached the GE’s "Golden Ear" status of acuity for the claimed phenomenon.


You’ll recognize these Golden Ears by the attitude that challenging their perception will rarely result in their admitting to the possibility they have fooled themselves, but rather skeptical inquiry will tend to be met with some version of: "you don’t have the ears/gear to detect it" trope.
(And, btw, I happily admit that there ARE audiophiles who believe in various tweaks, but who go to some effort to produce some rational/evidential arguments in their favor).

It's interesting to see prof don't hear difference in cable elevators. First you have to be able to hear difference in cables first :-) It's like saying I finished the race first but I crashed out on lap 8 out of 80. 

Perfectly put.  Cheers.   ;-)

I got your point andy.   I think you missed the point of my reply.   ;-)

Trust your ears and leave the arguments to the know it alls.

So when someone says "Given the well known problem of sighted bias, how do you know you really heard what you think you heard?"

Your response is: "Because I JUST KNOW WHAT I HEARD. So I can ignore you."

And, somehow, it’s the people asking questions that are the "Know-It-Alls?"

Hookay. ;-)

andy,

We all come here to read other people's points of view and express our own as it may be.  Why would your many posts, or anyone else's,  be any less "self-indulgent?"   Seems a distinction without distinction.

Though you also seem to be saying I'm purposefully being illogical (and for that strange reason being "indulgent.")   If that's what you are saying, can you show me an example of where I've been illogical in this thread?

To spell out a point that seemed to be missed:  My initial reply to your fun comment/car analogy was to indicate you begged the question,  hence it was a nice, even if jokey, illustration of the type of replies I was describing earlier.  And your reply wasn't the only one in this thread that illustrated my point perfectly ;-)

I say show me the measurement.  NOT a subjective impossible to quantify.. "my ears or my ear "training" or my sense of hearing are more evolved an better than yours" like most claim.

Careful waving around demands like that.  Asking an audiophile who tests claims purely subjectively to show objective evidence is like raising a cross to a vampire ;-) 


(Especially many of the tweak-manufacturers, where you get pseudo-scientific sounding descriptions in the sales pitch, but in place of objective measurable evidence for those claims, you tend to get marketing and anecdotes.   Which makes business sense, given the rich market resource they have of largely subjectivity-oriented audiophiles whose methods of 'testing' the claims allow for all the bias necessary to hear what the marketing pitch suggests.  And I count myself among those who have been influenced this way).

@nonoise

I think there is an awful lot of projection from naysayers as of late. They cling to certain bias diagnosis (from afar) and neglect the ones they fall victim to.

Do you think I am a "naysayer" who fits your description?


If so, could you explain which bias you think I have fallen victim to?

Fear of change can be a large predictor of one’s perception to any manner of topic. The lengths one will go to to remain in their bubbles is astounding.

Human psychology is fascinating, isn’t it?


So lets compare bubbles. :-)


I’ve enjoyed subjective evaluations of audio equipment, and sharing subjective notes between my fellow audiophiles, for over 30 years.I’ve "heard" differences between amps, cables of different types, tweaks (footers under equipment and various others), between CDPs, DACs (and in video, between video cables).


I love the sound of my CJ tube amplification and always go back to it after trying solid state. Never done a "blind test." Even when some "objectivists" think tube amps are silly. I swoon over the sound of my "crazy expensive" (to the average joe), cartridge etc. No talk of blind testing, all subjective.


If you look through my own thread on auditioning speakers:


https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/contemplating-devore-speakers-and-others-long-audition-report...


IIRC, you won’t find any talk of measurements (let alone blind testing). It’s all happily "subjectivist" which is how I engage with my system for 99.9 percent of the time.


On some of the "more objectivist" forums I sometime draw the ire of some in those community for defending many aspects of a subjective approach.


So....I know what the audio subjectivist experience is. I’ve lived it, and still live it.


BUT...


I ALSO am aware of the general features of, and rational for, the scientific empirical method. And I can’t just pretend that audio is magically excepted from the complexities that bedevil any other careful empirical inquiry - especially the unreliability built in to human subjectivity.(And this is something the "blind test naysayers" seem to routinely misunderstand: accepting that human subjectivity is unreliable doesn’t mean "a subjective impression is wrong and due to bias" or "what you think you heard wasn’t real." It only means that in many cases it *could* be error, so it can be hard to unravel the objective facts from the subjective impressions).



When I was hearing differences between various gear and some engineers and science-types were suggesting how I could be imagining the differences, I couldn’t be intellectually dishonest and pretend I’m excepted from any such biases.


So I took myself out of my comfort zone, and REALLY put my powers of perception, and subjective beliefs, to more controlled tests. I followed the prescriptions of the engineers/objectivists to the letter, and tested my own assumptions. And I did this numerous times with various types of gear.


It was sometimes validating, sometimes quite humbling, always eye-opening and a learning exercise.


So now I don’t stay only within my "subjectivist bubble" believing that my own perception is the Ultimate Arbiter Of Truth. I have been face-to-face with challenging my perceptions, and I have owned up to my fallibility. I can see the very good arguments for an objective approach, while I also maintain arguments for the worth of intersubjectivity in audio matters.


And I do not move from my own experience, even blind testing, to claims that therefore YOUR subjective experience is telling you something false.That would be just as unjustified an inference as clinging to the belief that my subjective impressions are never wrong.


So, nonoise,


Have YOU ventured outside your bubble? To what degree have you challenged your beliefs? Have you put your own subjective impressions under any more scrutiny than the usual "If I think I hear it, it’s true?" paradigm? Are you willing to seriously consider the "other side" of the debate when it comes to your own deeply held convictions about audio, for instance that some of your firm subjectively-derived impressions about cables or whatever may be wrong?

I’d throw that question out to anyone else who feels the "naysayers" or those who ever ask for measurements or blind testing are the ones stuck in a bubble.

Cheers.

^^^^
Much obliged.  :)

wyoboy,


I suggest you’ve misdiagnosed the situation.

OK so initially you were happy in your subjective beliefs but some of your friends convinced you that you shouldn’t believe what you did so you left your happy bubble in order to prove that being happy was wrong ? And by golly you proved it ? So what was the point ? That truth is the goal regardless of how miserable it makes you ?

No, I am quite happy to challenge my own beliefs or subjective inferences, if it helps get closer to a truth. It’s even fun in of itself.Some people are worried about challenging their own perceptions (I mean *really* challenging them with controls for not peeking, not "I didn’t think this fuse would make a difference but I heard it!.*) They find the idea destabilizing. I’m fine with being wrong about them. (I did an undergrad in psychology and my favorite aspect was learning from all the research just how counter-intuitive some of the findings were, and the various ways our psychological heuristics lead us to errors. I’m often as happy learning I was wrong as that I was right, because that’s learning!)


As it happens, I actually had positive results for the initial blind tests I alluded to (I positively identified the CDPs and DACs in the blind test).Would I have been left "miserable" otherwise? Uh...no.


I’ve blind tested, for instance, expensive AC cables that I first thought I heard a difference. Was I made "miserable" when I couldn’t identify the expensive cables against a cheap AC cable? Not at all. It was fascinating and saved me money! I had a similar experience testing video cables back when they were purported to make "amazing visual differences" in AV systems. Didn’t find it to be the case.


Would I have liked to improve my picture with a high end video cable? Ya! I have a tweaker inside my like anyone else. But the flipside/silver lining was saving money and putting those agitating worries about video cabling on the shelf.

I came from the other direction--first believing solely in the empirical method and naysaying anyone who held solely subjectivist beliefs--and then i heard something i shouldn’t have heard--and it was not measurable--but it made me happy--so, bubble burst i entered the world of voodoo gladly and happily but with restraint on the wallet--like i’m about to try with the tweak of this thread.

Sure, that can happen too. Once you abandon demands for plausible explanations, any objective verification and don’t bother with controls for human error, it doesn’t matter how "objectivist" you have have started out, someone can perceive virtually anything to "make a difference." That is why such there are mountains of un-evidenced, contradictory claims flourishing in the world (take a stroll through your local New Age/Psychic’s Fair and see - they'll be giving you exactly the type of anecdotal accounts as you've just given).  And it’s why science is so strict about it’s methods. Doesn’t matter how objective or unbiased you think you are - it’s incredibly easy to let your guard drop and find "support" for a pet theory that isn’t there.



If going that route you mentioned make you happy, peace upon you! No one is trying to take that away.



As I keep explaining: I’ve gone that route too. For a long time I had some spongy pucks under my CDP (and some other gear) that seemed to me to make a sonic difference. I knew that it could be a form of sighted bias, but I chose not to care. Bias or not, I enjoyed having them in my system and they weren’t expensive. I also had some resonator thingies on my speakers for a long time for similar reasons. As I said, same goes for my tube amps, my vinyl set up etc. There is no Objectivist StormTroopers about to knock down your doors for simply taking the route that gives you most enjoyment.



But when subjects like tweaks come up, some of us will give reasons for our skepticism and why we feel more cautious about drawing conclusions for the efficacy. If that’s a threat to some people’s psychological equanimity or a challenge to their ability to enjoy this hobby, sorry, that’s on them.



Cheers and happy holidays/merry Christmas! I’m off to play some vinyl!

nonoise,

You have again missed the point.  Clearly the issue here as been the contrast between those who stick to a purely "subjective" paradigm where one's own subjective assessment is the ultimate arbiter of any audio claim, vs those who hold some suspicion of that sole approach, and who also look to objective evidence for claims as well as acknowledging the usefulness of controls like blind testing.


You seem to remain stubbornly in the former camp.

I did so when it comes to fuses. After my experience with different brands on my previous integrated, it was apparent that they made a difference. With my latest integrated, I went in "knowing" it would and much to my surprise, they didn't. In fact, the one that came with it sounded the best.
As for raising cables, as I've already stated, I've never heard that big a difference, if any, all those years ago. It was only from reading this thread that I thought I'd try it and the difference was plainly evident, and much for the better.

So, in other words, to my question as to whether you ever went outside your own subjective "bubble" the answer is "no."   You've simply stuck to exactly the same paradigm where your own subjectivity will trump anything else.


Whereas I have used the subjectivist paradigm and also pushed myself outside of it to question my own beliefs and perceptions, by trying blind testing, and acknowledging the technical arguments against some of the claims made in high end audio.


You seem stuck in a subjectivist bubble unwilling to challenge your own paradigm, but like to pretend that the "naysayers" are the ones stuck in a bubble.  

As for the tangental, metaphysical argument of do I really hear what I think I'm hearing malarkey, don't go there.

At your command!  Wouldn't want to challenge your bubble.

I've seen you do this to others as of late which I found a bit distasteful and led me to contribute less as a result.

Sure, you have no qualms about describing those you disagree with as exhibiting "projection" and "bias" and going to ridiculous lengths to stay in their "bubble."


But should anyone challenge your critique with arguments against it, well....you get all sensitive and "don't go there" and consider this "browbeating."  



This thread is asking if raising cables of the floor REALLY makes a big difference.  This is a public forum, not a church.  You will get different opinions on the subject, and people will give their reasons for their opinions.  I'm happy to hear your views, none of which have made me cringe away from wanting to post because they challenge my own opinions.


If you are so sensitive in the face of encountering opinions that may be at odds with what you hold to be personally sacred in audio, you may wish to grow a thicker skin and re-calibrate your expectations for public discussions.  Otherwise, you'll probably just keep producing more straw-man critiques in an effort to protect your bubble.


And if you enjoy playing with fuses, power cables etc, :  Enjoy.  Doesn't affect how I enjoy my system.

Cleeds,

prof

I love the sound of my CJ tube amplification ... Never done a "blind test" ... I swoon over the sound of my "crazy expensive" (to the average joe), cartridge etc. No talk of blind testing, all subjective.

That’s quite a surprise, given what I thought was your faith in blind testing.

Only if you ignore the parts of what I write that won’t fit in to a strawman "Objectivist" caricature. (Note the other tweaks I mentioned as well).

Prof, here you state that you have engaged in blind testing.

Yes. I’ve only said so many times. But I haven’t blind tested my CJ amps.


If you please: What’s your point?



I have blind tested some items, not others. And I have continually argued blind testing isn’t necessary for enjoying a high end audio system. But human perceptual bias IS relevant to audio and controlling for bias *can be* helpful if you really want to get more careful about certain conclusions in the audio realm.


But no one needs to do it, to ENJOY this hobby. I just did a wine tasting menu at a restaurant. Could some of my perceptions have been influenced by the descriptions of the sommelier? Of course. It would be naive not to admit that. Did I care? No! I wasn’t looking to make a scientifically rigorous case for the nature of the wines. Merely going along with the subjective-flow was what I was after. The same rational can be taken for audio.

In this case, I’ve never done a blind test of my CJ amps (or turntable, or current DAC). I’m fine with that. But I won’t make any dubious technical claims for their superiority or for my own subjective enjoyment as the Arbiter Of The Truth Of The Matter.

andy, your dedication to following my posts, and the amount of time you spend commentating on them,  has me blushing!

When my forum essays are finally collected in to book form, you'll be first on my Christmas list!   (Maybe you could even write the forward for the book!).

Cheers :-)

... it keeps going ...

If I didn’t see the tree fall ... does it exist? If I can’t hear ... hear no evil, see no evil.

Maybe my posts are in a sort of superposition to your own, and if you never look at them or comment on mine, they won’t exist.

But at this rate, without your being able to stop yourself, we’ll never know... ;-)

We’re in this together, bud!

bubinga 

What do you think is actually happening when you raise your cables from your floor?   What was affecting the sound with the cables on the floor?  How?  With what effects?

If for instance you are posting some constant sonic effect on the signal, what’s the explanation?   If it’s some constant background noise, presumably if you have your system on without music playing you should be able to hear this “noise.”


Do you?


 I have cable running through walls and along shag rugs.  I can’t hear a thing coming from my speakers when music isn’t playing so what might I expect to hear a difference with cables raised?