Some Thought on Cables and Tweaks

Geoffkait, didn't mean to imply that makers were totally untrustworthy, but was responding in part to Sabai's comments:

"Some cable makers and tweak makers produce more verbiage than you can shake a stick at to describe what their products do. How many cable makers or tweak makers really understand the physics of their products well enough to describe accurately what is going on with their products? I believe they have mostly arrived where they are at not through understanding the physics of cables and tweaks but by experimenting -- with metals -- with "geometries" (whatever that word means)-- with dialectrics -- with shielding. I believe most of the theories being promulgated for most of the cables and tweaks are an afterthought. The best makers come up with products that create great sound. The rest -- well, let's be kind and say run-of-the-mill.

There are a whole lot of audiophiles chasing a whole lot of cables and tweaks based on manufacturers’ claims. But how reliable are those claims that have high end audiophiles chasing one product after another? If even a fraction of those claims were true then there would be a lot less chasing going on. I mean, how many truly great cables and tweaks are there out there? A lot less than are advertised as being great. IMO."

But, reading my post cold, Geoffkait, I think I understand how you could reach that conclusion. I didn't really make myself all that clear on it. BTW, I pretty much agree with what Sabai is saying, there is a lot of hype, although I do think that nobody understands everything there is to possibly know about wire design and that arriving at a given design through experimenting rather than simply by (esoteric) physics can end up being a good thing, if they are thorough enough. Then again, one of my sources for background on this kind of topic, Alan Maher (of Alan Maher designs) has put forward a theory that, while I'm unable to prove, seems pretty intriguing. According to him, the best way to lower resistance in a system is to manipulate things by raising inductance, which he has been able to do very effectively using his crystal-based technology, which certainly extends the audio bandwidth and hugely lowers noise (I say this I've seen it work extremely well in my own system as I'm a satisfied customer). But, the theory of his is this: that once you've done this to your system to a sufficient degree, this in effect levels the playing field for all the wiring in the system and that ultra esoteric cables, which are manipulating ohm's law in their own right, are in effect masking a problem, but that, once your whole system is taken care of with Alan's approach, then the expensive wires are simply still masking the sound in an attempt to mask the original problem, even though that problem has been fixed. That means that, if you go his route, then more coneventional (much less expensive) wiring is all that is needed to get top flight sound, according to Alan, anyway. Someone's snakeoil alarm may be going off right now, but I've heard enough in my own system to suspect he is on to something. The implications for the audiophile community are huge (no more dependence on $$$$ cables), but this is a new idea that may take a while to catch on. I DON'T want to hijack the thread here, but what would it be like if no one truly had to bother with expensive wiring? Just possible food for thought is all. Regards to all.

I know, I know, everybody has that reaction these days (including me!) :P

Geoffkait wrote:

"It's much more likely, rather than lowering resistance, crystals simply reduce vibration and/or reduce RFI in the system. I.e., wider audio bandwidth and lower noise result from better signal to noise ratio."

That is indeed how his products first started out (back in the '90's) and I used some of those too, but according to Alan he has actually since taken things to a whole 'nother level (his 2012 "Quantum" line) in order to maximize inductance (don't ask me how, he's not entirely letting the cat out of the bag) and thereby drop resistance throughout the system.

Cheers.

Goeffkait wrote:

"We should implement a don't ask don't tell policy. ;-)"

OK, then I won't ask you. ;-)

Geoff, my bad, didn't dawn on me you had included your introduction until I was away from my computer.

John Robinson
(no credentials worth mentioning ;-)

Thanks, looking forward to more.

Sabai, you’re definitely on the right track. A couple decades ago, when I was first beginning to investigate what it was that made one speaker wire or IC better than another (at around $600 a pair or less), I wondered, when it came to geometries for example, why every maker seemed to choose a different one and yet they each invariably claimed that theirs alone was THE best one for the application. I didn’t know much, but knew they couldn’t all be right. Overall, I think trying to evaluate wiring simply by relying primarily on reviews is pretty dicey. At some point you just have to break down and consider as much of the underlying physics you can unearth to get at what makers are clearly not telling us.

As far as the physics go, cables can indeed be said to be doing something and by definition that something is necessarily bad. I first learned about this when looking into the ‘system-wiring-all-by-the-same-maker-vs-the-mix-n-match-approach’ debate. The argument for using wiring all from the same manufacturer (or from the same series) goes something like this:

Every wire injects its own unique set of timing errors (electron group delay pattern signature) that can be seen in an oscilloscope with respect to the original test signal, so no wire is perfect in that regard. These errors are the sum total of the wire’s physical elements: metallurgy and gauge, geometry, insulation and connectors. If, for example, each pair of multiple IC's in a system is electrically different (different brands) from the others, then all their individual group delay patterns will be different. That means that their total impact on timing within the system will simply be the sum of the delay patterns of all the pairs. And, if all the pairs were identical, they would simply all have the same pattern and they would all effectively 'overlap' in their timing signatures (while not increasing in amplitude) as seen in a 'scope and, in that sense, therefore act more like a single pair of the IC's in question. Multiple differing timing delay patterns are understood to combine to cause an increase a system's tendency to make the music sound a bit more like it's being electronically reproduced, or more “canned”. The longer the delay and the larger the amount of it there is, the worse the sound.

It may not be quite possible for a maker to get their accompanying speaker wires to have precisely the same pattern as the analog IC's, but any of them worth their salt can get reasonably close and this is what they traditionally try to do.

But, what is all this going to matter if all the IC's in a system are built identically if they are of crap quality to begin with? Yes, all their timing delay patterns are marvelously indistinguishable from each other...they just happen to sound like $hit (the combined scope pattern is severe). As you go down the scale in QUALITY, Not necessarily price, this is what you begin to run into, so everyone has to be realistic about it. OTOH, as you go UP in quality, there begins to be at least a reasonable expectation that the vast majority of the wiring you're going to run across all tends to have rather benign delay patterns anyway, so very small, and therefore so innocuous, that individual contributions won't likely be adding up to something too objectionable sounding at the speakers. And at that point the consideration is on other characteristics of the wire being considered: their tone, speed, dynamics, etc, etc.

But, in regards to your op, Sabai, maybe my main point here is simply the model that wiring, when using an oscilloscope anyway, is not so much ‘doing something magical’ as all the makers would plainly have us all believe, but rather that the best wires can, and should, be thought of as simply satisfying Ohm’s Law the best and otherwise simply managing to do the least harm in the system. The rest may amount to little more than descriptive language…not that that’s all useless – I’m no objectivist. It’s just that I think that descriptive language should never be substituted for a more proper understanding that can be had through the basic physics involved – even if the reality is that we’re left by the makers to try to uncover all that for ourselves. Cheers.