IME, no component is perfect. Just like music, you put together a system based on personal preferences. You just need to make sure there is enough ‘synergy’ among the components to enjoy music cause that’s all it matters at the end of the day.
Sure Shadorne, so happy you are fortunate enough to have gear that you just plop down and enjoy without a care in the world! Sometimes a judicious amount of ignorance goes a long way to happiness:). Enjoy
If the audio chain consisted of one box connected to the master feed via lossless transfer on the input and your brain connected directly to the output via cyber/lossless transfer then perhaps you would have a bit of a point. As it is, everything matters and does alter the sound to varying degrees on all equipment.
It depends on the meaning of “high fidelity”. I interprete that to mean “faithful to the source recording” which means that “more twitchy it can be to the subtlest changes in the audio chain” is NOT high fidelity but “highly finicky”.
I understand that “high fidelity” can mean different things to different folks - a highly euphonic (distorting) tube amp may be marketed as “high fidelity” when it is really adding a great sound of its own circuitry to the recording...far from faithful to the original but a sound that is nevertheless highly desirable to those who enjoy it.
One of the world’s top mastering engineers (Doug Sax) used his brothers proprietary tube designs to master countless pop and rock - giving it just that touch of tube warmth that made his services in highest demand for decades. A high fidelity setup will allow you to hear what the mastering engineer intended.
Ian, your summation is fairly spot on...all I can offer is extensive experience with tons of gear and cables...the preferred remedy is of course in the ear of the beholder.
Shadorne...you are incorrect, IMHO! I’ve had $20k preamps etc.. the more high fidelity a component, the more twitchy it can be to even the subtlest changes in the audio chain. Then again, not everyone can hear that well nor care as much as the next guy or gal.
And thanks very much to Ian as well. Your lengthy second post makes many excellent points IMO, some of which indeed point out variables whose potential influence on cable and component comparisons is commonly under-recognized.
Your reference to Rod, btw, I assume is to Rodney Herman, co-designer of the original SOTA turntable. The one I purchased in 1983 still functions as well as ever, by the way!
Another thing your post does, when juxtaposed with the responses by some others earlier in the thread, is to reinforce a perception I’ve had for some time that some here are much too quick to hurl accusations of trolling. Which can often turn what might have been a constructive and informative thread into a series of pointless exchanges of insults and ugliness. The "believers" and the "non-believers" are often equally culpable in such exchanges, IMO.
My face is red. I had no idea AES gave a crap about high end cables or wire or fuse directionality. By the way there’s a perfectly good reason why fuses are directional in DC circuits and AC circuits. See if anyone can guess what it is. Without blowing a head gasket. 😡
@mr_m - I'm a long time lurker. A post mentioning a fuse that has directionality and another about letting 'overburned' cables rest were the last straws. Directionality? On A/C? As far as lions, bring 'em on. I love skewering.
@dave_b - Spot on. For those who don't know, those networks are LRC. My current cables have them :-)
@almarg - Isn't science great!
I have a bin of cables in the garage. Silver, Litz, MultiGuage, OFC, Linear Crystal, PE, PEP, PET, PP. Everyone of them sounds different. More than 40 years ago I realized that they are not universal across all systems. I use 'video' cables with my sub because they SOUND BEST of all 6 foot lengths in the bin in that application.
When consulting for Monster Cable Pro, we took cables to many top LA studios. At ALL BUT ONE, the MCP made a difference. Some better, some not.
I ran a cable audibility workshop at AES in the mid 80's. It was run as A/B. For each pass, cables were removed and either swapped or replugged with a timed [30s?] interval. Participants were able to learn as we ran several passes identifying A and B. Participants included a wide range of engineers and audiophiles. During several tests Rod[?] from SOTA and I wrote C because it was not A or B. After a couple of days of standing and talking, I wrote "too tired to tell" Ditto Rod, unbeknownst to me.
Some achieved better than 80%. YHS 84% prior to 'too tired to tell.' When the results were tabulated, overall it was a wash. For some, cables make a difference, some not.
Later we investigated 'C - neither' and determined multiple factors: - Line voltage and noise - 80's error correction sometimes got lost - Thermal effects
Later, c. 1990, I was involved with modelling a well regarded
analog mic pre for a digital console. IIRC, 24 bit ADC, 32bit DSP, 20 bit DAC. Only by getting the correct
balance of frequency response, harmonic distortion and phase shift of the original
transformer and circuit were we able to get very close, but only close. Technically, it
was inferior.
In the mix, we could manipulate the 'sound stage' by adjusting the ratio of odd and even harmonics and phase. IIRC, more ODD made the image come forward of the speakers and narrow to a shallower triangle behind the speakers. More EVEN moved the image plane to between the speakers and extended directly and farther back, more like a stage. These levels were in the bottom few bits of 20bits, i.e. the bottom couple of bits of CD 16bit resolution. Phase adjustments could affect image height but were very speaker and amplifier dependent.
When we reintroduced the analog version of the mic pre, management wanted surface mount. While this would make sense from cost and reliability standpoints, I demurred. We needed the LRC from
PTH parts, including iron leads on some components rather than
tinned copper to replicate the sound. Or we'd spend years attempting.
EVERY recording has frequency and phase artifacts from microphones, cables, electronics. On any given system, choice of source material may enhance or detract interacting with playback system colorations. Unless one keeps a library of cables and components, changing per recording, the best one can hope is 'pretty good' across all programs. Sometimes one has to choose between the music and the sound.
When auditioning a new component, it must pass with a great multitude of cables and other components. Otherwise, one can build a superb system that could fall apart with the change of a single component.
A topic which receives little ink is thermal. I have a customized CD player that requires about 1 hour playing to sound its best. Not just on, playing. The best metaphor as it approaches thermal equilibrium is adjusting the focus on a camera whilst changing the illumination and color temperature with a dimmer.
It is instructive to log ambient and internal conditions along with perceptions. Not only electronics, but speakers and to a much lesser extent cables change with temperature. Like wine and whisky, people have preferences and some are better suited to summer and others winter. I love Burgundy and Islay's, the missus not so much. Vive la difference!
An instructive test is to play a particular favorite which has good dynamic range on a well warmed system. Make notes and sketches of the soundstage. Now put a low dynamic range selection on repeat, turn it up LOUD and leave for an hour or more. Come back and immediately replay the original at the original level [�±0.05 db max delta @ 1kHz measured at the pre-out]. Repeatedly play it and note the changes as the amp changes. If impatient, use a fan to cool rapidly. Dollars to donuts changes are evident. Class A amps not invited ;-)
As little as 3°C change in heat sink temperature on some amplifiers can subtly change its sonics. How many here note heat sink temperature, or anything for that matter, before prattling on?
Bottleheads are not thermally immune. I have thermally controlled fans just ticking over to maintain tube and transformer temperatures at what I consider the sweet spot. Citation II, multiple ARC, custom KT-88, PrimaLuna, etc. all benefit.
I did not say cables do not make a difference. I said cables have properties and those properties can have consequences. Only you can judge.
Oenophiles may relate: Jordan makes an excellent, well regarded cabernet. However, in Jordan cabs I always taste Dill, which I detest. Once a pal tried to fool me by putting Jordan in an another well regarded bottle. Nice try.
For years after the LA Auto Show, we'd all go out to a fine dinner. Everyone brought a favorite wine. The others paid for the meal of bringer of the wine judged best. One year I took a chard that cost $2.99. Against wines up to $200, it was judged best by a mile. I got my meal for free, but had to buy the cognac. The point? $$$$ does not always equate to better and there is no free lunch.
Of course cables make a difference. Sometimes audible, sometimes not. Sometimes preferable, sometime not. . Whether a difference is an improvement is system, program, ambient condition and most of all, LISTENER dependent.
Two of my favorite audio acronyms: YMMV - Your Mileage May Vary YOYO - You're On Your Own - no one else is wearing your ears!
In the end it boils down to the choice of components.
Are the components high fidelity or not?
Are the components designed to give accurate high fidelity that is independent of the cables used and their length or not?
A setup that sounds different with every slightly different piece of wire is obviously NOT high fidelity - the sound is all over the place and totally dependent on extraneous factors which can never be properly controlled or determined.
Roberjerman, you may not have noticed that Kijanki referred to the inductive reactance of a certain cable as being 1 ohm at 20 kHz, not to its inductance being 1 ohm. As you may realize, inductive reactance is the impedance presented by an inductance at a certain frequency, and it has a magnitude that is measured in ohms.
And of course 1 ohm will certainly not be insignificant relative to the impedance of some speakers at 20 kHz, especially many electrostatics. Some Martin-Logan models have impedances of 0.4 ohms at 20 kHz, which would cause a 1 ohm cable reactance to have dramatic consequences. On the other hand, though, low cable inductance doesn’t have to cost a fortune.
ieales 2-26-2017 Another’s opinion on a particular cable may not be valid unless they have a very similar system.
There is a significant degree of truth in this statement, especially given the use of the word "may." As many audiophiles recognize, cable behavior is often system dependent to a significant degree, and in particular may depend on the characteristics of what the cable is connecting. Some examples:
1)In the case of the speaker cable Kijanki referred to, a speaker having high impedance at high frequencies, such as many dynamic speakers, will be relatively insensitive to the inductive reactance he described. While other speakers, such as many electrostatics, will be very sensitive to it. That has no particular relation, by the way, to the sound quality or musical resolution of the speakers; it just relates to their sensitivity to cable differences.
2)If an interconnect having relatively high capacitance is compared with one having relatively low capacitance, and if everything else is equal, the higher capacitance cable will produce a duller and more sluggish response in the upper treble region if used as a line-level interconnect (especially if it is driven by a component having high output impedance), due to the interaction of cable capacitance and component output impedance; while the exact opposite result will occur if those same two cables are compared in a phono cable application and driven by a moving magnet cartridge, due to the interaction of cable capacitance and cartridge inductance.
3) It is easily possible for digital cable "A" to outperform digital cable "B" in a given system when both cables are of a certain length, and for cable "B" to outperform cable "A" even in that same system if both cables are of some other length. That may result from differences in the arrival time of signal reflections which occur at the RF frequency components that are present in digital audio signals as a result of less than perfect impedance matches, and cable-related differences in ground loop-related noise that may be riding on the signal, both of which can contribute to timing jitter at the point of D/A conversion. The happenstance of the relationships between cable length, signal risetimes and falltimes, cable propagation velocity, component susceptibility to ground loop-related noise, the happenstance of how closely the impedances of both components and the cable match, and the jitter rejection capability of the DAC, all figure into that.
Ok, let’s do this! I’ve owned more than a considerable cross section of various cables and gear over the past 4 decades. In my experience, the only cabling that could consistently reproduce the full measure of my musical repertoire, have had networks on them. Without the “boxes”, the noise floor was higher, low level details were buried, dynamics were constricted, natural body and weight of instruments were reduced and tone, texture and timbre were less faithfully reproduced. Harmonic complexity and the acoustic envelope around the recording space was also glossed over without those “silly boxes” attached! Personally, I’ve never cared for following anyone’s personal audio-religion...I simply layed down my cash and listened. For me, the snake oil is in the non-network cable manufacturers offerings...different combinations of exotic metals, cryogenically treated connectors, geometries etc.. These differences do change what you hear, but they do not address the damage that is being done to the signal along the way. Like I said, if you truly love great performances of well recorded music and you wish to experience as much of the ethereal magic as is contained in your musical recordings, then what you actually do need is “snake oil”! Everything else is just wire
Only the R (resistance) matters at audio frequencies (20 hz - 20 kHz). Thinner wire has more R - thicker wire has less R. The L (inductance) and C (capacitance) of typical speaker wire are of too low a value to affect a music signal. Physics 101!
Physics 101? Inductive reactance of 10ft (20ft both ways) gauge 14 cable at 20kHz is about 1 ohm. Resistance of this cable is 0.05 ohm.
OP. I will try to be neutral about this. Maybe, just maybe, you would have had half a chance if you, um, left off the last sentence. I don't know if you are new here, but if you are, welcome to this forum. You just got thrown to the lions......
Watson, come here! I have just discovered a way to reduce PHLOGISTON in wires for a breakthrough in sound quality! Amazing, Sherlock! The Nobel Committee will be interested!
Only the R (resistance) matters at audio frequencies (20 hz - 20 kHz). Thinner wire has more R - thicker wire has less R. The L (inductance) and C (capacitance) of typical speaker wire are of too low a value to affect a music signal. Physics 101! The "golden ears" crowd will claim otherwise. Yet no one has been able to identity and prove the existence of Factor X . Which would account for the claimed difference in sound Q of wire A compared to wire B. All claimed differences are strictly ANECDOTAL!
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