The Audio Science Review (ASR) approach to reviewing wines.

Love the wine analogy!  I have often said that good HiFi is like good wine – you pay more for what you don’t get.  Nasty sounding distortions and nasty tastes.

The biggest differences are that wine comparison thrives on blind tasting, there is a defined point-scoring system, but there is also no objective standard (comparison with live performance).

Both ‘hobbies’ have had technological breakthroughs like SS.  Stainless steel for wine, solid state for sound.  I would argue wine also has a digital transformation, in the Stelvin cap which converted porous ‘analog’ cork stoppers into binary on-off bottle tops.

Science and technology underpin each!

Australia started with cuttings transported on the First Fleet and established its first wine college in 1897.  Where I live in Canberra there are over 140 vineyards and 40 wineries.  Many are run by scientists including Nobel prize winning physicist Brian Smidt, who now heads our leading university.  Many others are chemists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) which invented WiFi using its expertise in fast Fourier transforms from radio astronomy.

The Canberra District does not even get a mention amongst the 60 designated wine growing regions Australian wine - Wikipedia and we locals hope to keep the secret.

Australia’s top drop is around $1,000 a bottle and we get peeved when others, flaunting their affluence, mix it with coke.  When it won a prestigious French competition, it was disqualified because it was so good, it just had to be French (in the minds of the judges).  In my opinion, the least good Aussie wines come in half way up the French scale.

While audiophiles debate the effects of room shape, wine sensations are dramatically changed by the shape of the glassware!  Try it!

@devinplombier 

that's a cute story. Are you making that up?

No, not entirely!  I am not smart enough to make stories up ...

There was a brilliant DVD documentary about how the Australian wine industry got its foot into the European market.  The DVD is unfortunately titled "Chateau Chunder" see Chateau Chunder: A Wine Revolution - The Education Shop.  I leant my copy but never got it back. The story in the DVD is that a couple of Australian winemakers and a marketer organised wine tasting dinners for French wine critics.  The top drop was underrated until it was tasted in a blind comparison, when it won.

It is Penfold's Grange. I quote from the link I gave earlier "The great 1955 vintage was submitted to competitions beginning in 1962 and over the years has won more than 50 gold medals. The vintage of 1971 won first prize in Syrah/Shiraz at the Wine Olympics in Paris. The 1990 vintage was named 'Red Wine of the Year' by the Wine Spectator magazine in 1995, which later rated the 1998 vintage 99 points out of a possible 100".

I accidentally conflated with another wine from earlier days:  "At the 1873 Vienna Exhibition the French judges, tasting blind, praised some wines from Victoria, but withdrew in protest when the provenance of the wine was revealed, on the grounds that wines of that quality must clearly be French."^[15] 

@samureyex

Silver is 6% faster than copper, you think that doesn’t change the sound?

Really? Silver may have 6% lower resistance than copper, when compared by volume, but do you really think that makes the signals it conducts travel 6% faster?

Electrical signals travel at close to the speed of light. Copper is entirely capable of transmitting Giga-Hertz digital signals, for example high speed Ethernet, using thin, unshielded, twisted wire pairs.

Maybe you think that halving the resistance of a copper wire (by doubling its cross-section) doubles the speeds of the signals it carries? No, it doubles the current it can carry for the same voltage drop.

Pure copper, because of its softness or malleability, makes an excellent connector but does tarnish over time.

@samureyex

Are you telling me silver and copper sound the same? They have different electrical properties, different capacitance and inductance, so the question is, do you think they both sound the same?

No, I am just suggesting that your assertion that speed is faster in silver is wrong.

Capacitance and inductance are primarily characteristics of the cable construction.

If we narrow the debate to speaker cables (that is high current, low frequency domain), in my opinion there should be an audible difference between cables if they differ in say resistance (as copper and silver cables of the same diameter would).

The primary reason is that loudspeaker impedances vary greatly with frequency, especially in cross-over regions. The impedance of the speaker and the resistance of the wire are in series. Changing the wire resistance means relatively more or less power is delivered to the speaker over different parts of the audible spectrum, changing the tonal balance for those with golden ears.

Also pure copper is far from an "excellent connector". For the same reason you stated, its softness and malleability, the opposite of what a good connector represent.

The malleability of pure copper means that those ’uneven’ bumps present on any surface get squished into the holes, providing more contact area especially in spade configuration. The ideal connector has no discontinuities and no contamination - I am thinking of friction or pressure welds.

Of course it is no good if it breaks!

@laoman

My original comment was about Penfolds's Grange which was rejected by French critics until it was tasted blind, as related in the DVD.  I accidentally quoted about a second Australian wine because I thought it was the same occasion but sometimes history repeats and I got it wrong!

I tend to agree with you about Grange - it is not a wine I have ever bought, but it sometimes featured in our monthly blind tastings against three similar reds.  Every time, it was ranked bottom, to the chagrin of our host, by all attendees and across two bottles. 

Now I do have a couple of magnums of Henshke Hill of Grace in my basement ...

@samureyex 

I did mention that copper tarnishes.  I also pointed to a reason why speaker cables of different resistance should alter the tonal balance.

So why do you think I deny cables sound different?

I merely pointed out that it is not due to a difference in the signal speed in the cable, which is close to the speed of light for silver and copper.

The terminal connector of a cable cannot be pure copper, because copper cannot hold a shape well enough

I would not be that dogmatic!  Copper wires of high purity hold their shape well, after all.

@laoman 

Mount Mary is another wine I prefer

Oh, I thought that was an instruction ...