Jim - LOL you are correct, of course. My neighbor is a shrink, however, and has expressed opinions to the contrary :-) |
Bob - Have you noticed that no one, including you, has provided even the tiniest amount of verifiable evidence that the speaker wire phenomenon is anything but psychological. |
sean - Thank you for your post. I have a story to tell you. I once had a well know audio engineering friend that was designing an RIAA stage for his new preamp. The man is a very smart designer and dedicated audiophile. He is also skeptical of all that cannot be measured.
The quality of an RIAA stage requires that the response cruve be very exact. One's ear is highly sensitive to frequency response because of the large amount of energy involved. So my friend cloistered himself in his lab with test gear and favorite records for a few days.
He added resistors, added capacitor, removed resistors, removed capacitor and so on for many hours. With each change, which is instantaneously available for evaluation, he decided good, better, worse and so on. Finally, he arrived at the perfect sound. He took what was now a geodetic structure and gave it to a tech to boil down to the essential circuit.
Much to the tech's surprise somewhere early in the testing, the growing pile of parts had become disconnect from the primary circuit. The hours of evaluation were entirely imaginary. All those many many times that he was sure that this or that change had made the sound better or worse were all fantasy.
There is nothing wrong with this designer. It is just that he is human. It is human nature that if we think we may hear a change we will. |
Jostler - I keep asking for science. If you know of some physical laws that say cables of the same size should sound different, apply the laws and show some numbers. I am all ears. |
trelja - I would love to see your article. It must be very difficult these days to design HiFi amps and preamps when the very wire you use in them screws up the sound. Just think of all that wire in the voice coils and crossovers, its a wonder any recognizable sounds make it into the room.
It must be especially discouraging to realize that after spending hundreds of dollars on 8 feet of really cool line cord that it is connected on one end to hundreds of feet of ordinary wire that goes round and round the transformer core and on the other end to hundreds of miles of ordinary copper wire that goes eventually to the power source. |
Jostler - Come on, I started out giving people here credit for understanding that it is not fair to compare differnt size wires. Then I realised I couldn't do that and included that the wire had to be the same size for a fair comparision. I will grant that large exotic wire will be better than small cheap wire. And there is science to back it up. Small wire reduces the amps damping factor which results in changes in frequency response. This, as I'm sure you know, is because speaker impedance varies. |
No Money - I know no one writing here is going to pay any attention to what I say. And I have said my piece - your right, not much point in saying it over and over again. I just thought there might be a few readers out there who have not accepted the religion yet and that I could save them a few bucks. |
Thanks for your post folks, its been fun. |
Thanks Tireguy, I will get and check it out. |
tireguy - What gauge wire were they using, how long was it and what roughly was the db variation in frquency response? Was it mostly in the high frequencies or in the mid and lows as well? Thanks. |
tireguy - I ordered the article, however, they are saying 3 to 4 weeks, ugh. I am, of course, naturally suspicious. I have never heard the term "dynamic suppression".
I am gathering test gear for a speaker project I have in mind and I realized something this morning. With just an amp, a scope and an audio generator I can do a very accurate measurement of wire. I will go down to Radio Shack and get some of the wire everyone hates and I always use - their cheapest 14 guage speaker wire. Using 10ft of this vile stuff, I will connect it to a speaker placed on the test bench. The audio generator will drive the amp, of course. The scope is a dual trace and I will display the voltage at the amp on one trace and the voltage at the speaker on the other trace. The traces can the be position directly over each other on the scope. The beauty of this simple setup is that it is not dependent on the frequency response of the generator or the amplifier. All I have to do is to find a difference. I can even test the scope by switching leads. If I do find a difference, well, I have my wife's 38 revolver here so I can do the honorable thing. What do you think? |
Trelja - See my post to tireguy. I am waiting on the delivery of the signal generator. |
Redkiwi - You seem to be saying that you and others prefer things that have demonstrably higher distortion. Maybe higher distortion lends a more "musical" quality for some listners. It's not all that farfetched. |
Elizabeth - I have been trying to explain AC to someone. AC for god's sake. So they can understand why the arrows on their cables are ridiculous. Does anyone jump in to help out? No. Why do you think this is? |
Would it mean anything to anyone here if I test speaker wire and see what happens? The test is simple. I have a dual trace scope on order. I will monitor the amp output on one trace and the speaker input on the other. I can display the difference. I will test with sinewaves and with music. I'm not sure yet just how small a deviation I will be able to resolve.
I don't mind if people claim that their asperations are such that science is too narrow minded and limiting. It makes me twitch a little when the asparations are sought with what is basically scientific apparatus.
It might be helpful to remmember how sciences works. Science accepts as probably true only things which can be verified by others. Science is only interested in theories that are falsifiable - that is, that there is some test the theory can be put to that it has a chance of failing. The types of claims made here are not falsifiable. So what, I guess, who cares, but let's not call opinions about how something sounded to someone science. |
70242 - It's a pleasure to have you here. When I started posting comments about some of the absurd claims made for different types of cable, I was contacted by a cable manufacturer. I will send you their E-mail. It attempts to describe why wires sound different. It's good for a laugh.
I don't know if manufactures just have a low opinion of audiophile's intelligence or if they really don't know any better themselves. |
Jostler - At the risk of tarnishing your reputation here, I was thinking that I wish I had written your last post. |
70242 - My engineering friends agree that the only possible way to detect a subtle difference is with A/B testing. Our audio memory is very short. Thanks for the post. |
Paulwp - I am astounded at the level of ignorance I have found here. People pontificating on the differences between this and that who don't even know what AC is. People without the slightest idea of how their gear works confidently ridiculing the engineers that design it.
Audiogon seems to be the gathering place for those who are both arrogant and ignorant. |
Garfish - If you trust only your ears and not your brain, you wind up with many hundreds of dollars wasted on exotic line cords, speaker wire, IC's with arrows on them, distribution boxes that the manufacturers brag about not having anything in them, conditioners that exercise electrons, audio bricks to put on your preamp .......... just how goofy do things have to get before you begin to wonder. |
Detlof - I think I remember you posting something about copper wire that can have asymetrical conduction properties. Something about crystals in the wire. It was related to why cables have arrows on them.
Hook your cables up backwards and see how they sound. I bet they will sound terrible to you. |
