On a thread that is a running example of the textual equivalent of nonstop cat videos. So here it is again.
I could understand the cables are snake-oil doubters and take them seriously- in 1980. Back then there was no internet, Stereo Review was pretty much it, and Julian Hirsch was the Oracle of all things audio. Stereo Review and Julian Hirsch said if it measures the same it sounds the same. Wire is wire, and that was that.
Even then though J. Gordon Holt had already started the movement that was to become Stereophile. JGH took the opposing view that our listening experience is what counts. Its nice if you can measure it but if you can’t that’s your problem not ours.
Stereo Review and the measurers owned the market back then. The market gave us amplifier wars, as manufacturers competed for ever more power with ever lower distortion. For years this went on, until one day "measures great sounds bad" became a thing.
Could be some here besides me lived through and remember this. If you did, and if you were reading JGH back then, I tip my hat to you, sir! I fell prey to Hirsch and his siren song that you can have it all for cheap and don’t really have to learn to listen. Talk about snake-oil! A lot of us bought into it. Sorry to say.
But anyway like I was saying it was easy to believe the lie back then because it was so prevalent and also because what wire there was that sounded better didn’t really sound a whole lot better.
Now though even budget wire sounds so much better than what comes off a reel you’d have to be deaf not to notice. Really good wires sound so good you’d notice even if you ARE deaf! No kidding. My aunt Bessie was deaf as a stone but she could FEEL the sound at a high enough volume, knew it was music. The dynamic punch of my CTS cables is so much greater than ordinary 14 ga wire I would bet my deaf from birth aunt Bessie could "hear" the difference. Certain so-called audiophiles here, I'm not so sure.
Oh and not done beating the dead horse quite yet, according to my calendar its 2020, a solid 40 years past 1980. Stereo Review is dead and buried. Stereophile lives on. A whole multi-billion dollar industry built on wire not being wire thrives. Maybe the measurement people can chalk up and quantify from that just how many years, and billions, they are out of date and in denial.
Science and belief systems progress, one funeral at a time. Or, to quote Plank fairly:
A newscientifictruth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
We are simply arguing with the old guard over something that will become conventional wisdom itself, and in turn and it time, will be tossed aside as well. 😄
Actually, back in the day, there was another mag called "Audio." No, it wasn't a Stereophile or Absolute Sound, but it gave you a fresh prospective to Stereo Review and the "if it measures the same, it sounds the same" camp.
I guess there will always be wars between those who prefer to hew to what the numbers say and those who prefer to believe what their ears say. To me, though, you're not buying stereo gear to better perform heart surgery. As worthwhile as an objective/numbers assessment might be, you're looking for emotional satisfaction from audio playback and thus it's a reviewer's subjective analysis that should rule the roost. Should a movie reviewer only talk about a film's color balance, or should they be delving into such esoterics as whether the actors convincingly flesh out their characters...and whether those characters are worth spending time with in the first place? Audio gear may be the work of scientists but it exists to exalt the work of artists.
Finally, yes, Audio was marginally more subjective in their judgments than was Stereo Review, but TAS and Stereophile were/are in an entirely 'nother league.
TAS started in 1972! The Audio Critic in 1977 along with IAR (International Audio Review). Both were run by Peters (Aczel and Moncrieff, respectively). StereOpus and Bound For Sound (Martin DeWolf) appeared around that time. A bit later was Sensible Sound. Followed by Art Dudley's Listener. And from 1956 (!) John Crabbe's HiFi News & Record Review was the best (and still is) of the British HiFi press. So from the early Seventies there was a variety of publications for English-speaking audiophiles other than Stereo Review and High Fidelity. And Audio (RIP) which straddled the line between the underground press and the mainstream.
I tried to read and collect all the "underground" mags! Thumbs down to Stereo Review and High Fidelity, who I knew were in the advertisers' pockets! All those full-page glossy ads!
Hi, i like the measurements confirmed by sound than sound confirmed by measurement approach. At least Stereophile, Hifi News & Record review, TAS, HiFi + have this attitude and I wish i could read Japanese for Stereo Sound.
As always the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The reason there are so many manufacturers of cables is quite simple. HUGE profit margin. The problem for most audiophiles is the visual component. If it looks good it must sound better. Turntables are extremely imbued with this characteristic. So are cables. To my own way of thinking you always want the shortest cable possible in all circumstances but particularly for speakers. The only way to do this is by making your own. All the very best wire and terminations are available for a fraction of the cost of the manufacture stuff. Learn to use a soldering iron and be proud of your own work and beautiful and neat wiring. Any other approach is an extreme waste of money. I would rather buy music:)
TAS started in 1972! The Audio Critic in 1977 along with IAR (International Audio Review). Both were run by Peters (Aczel and Moncrieff, respectively). StereOpus and Bound For Sound (Martin DeWolf) appeared around that time. A bit later was Sensible Sound. Followed by Art Dudley's Listener. And from 1956 (!) John Crabbe's HiFi News & Record Review was the best (and still is) of the British HiFi press. So from the early Seventies there was a variety of publications for English-speaking audiophiles other than Stereo Review and High Fidelity. And Audio (RIP) which straddled the line between the underground press and the mainstream.
Brilliant! Now were you around and reading all those at the time?
Ya, reading them listening to and selling gear in 1979 based on Dr Matti Otolla research And the brilliant Jim Thiel wired with as I recall Fulton Brown.. Vandersteen since 1977.....
before that Bozak and McIntosh... the legendary concert grands, 240 MX-110Z ( 1965 )
also had good fortune to meet Karl Neiring of Sensible Sound about that time a big Proponent of Dynaco / Hafler / ModificationS, etc..
no list of publications complete without a mention of Dick Hardesty ( of Havens and Hardesty )
mijostyn As always the answer lies somewhere in the middle. The reason there are so many manufacturers of cables is quite simple. HUGE profit margin.
>>>>>I have a feeling that statement, a favorite of the pseudo skeptic crowd, is probably not true. In reality, you can make more money selling inexpensive cables, you know like Monster Cable or say, Anti Cables. Do the math. Multiply the number of cables sold by the price per cable. Who Do you think makes more money, Ford or Ferrari? Hel-loo!
Chuck, I never liked Hirsch because I could hear sonic differences he claimed he could not show in measurements. He had no credibility with me. BTW, I recently went to a Triode Wire Labs loom and my system took a good leap forward; pretty much like a component change.
Yes, it is fairly easy to hear differences - if you actually try and hear the differences. That's the problem with people like Hirsch. They put themselves up as authoritative. Some fall for it. I did. Well I was young and a nerd into science and it seemed to make sense that all you needed from wire was that it be thick enough. It didn't help that in 1975 Puyallup, WA there really was nothing to choose from but gauge.
By the 1990's though this had changed and the first time I compared my old patch cords with entry level Wireworld the improvement was obvious, and I mean immediately. Heard it even before I made it back to the chair.
No concrete wire is only a designed abstract wire, particular audio environment exist coupled to different ears...
A wire exist only "connected" to a particular audio system for some peculiar ears...
But why so much thread about wire and nothing about the more fundamental question linked to the basic multidimensional problem :HOW to embed an audio system?
Half of the thread are about cables, and their directionality.... It is like a thread about cars speaking half the time about plugs..... :)
I apologize to millercarbon for my post.....And to all others.... My best to all....
"Who Do you think makes more money, Ford or Ferrari?"
Ferrari has much higher profit margin. As of the beginning of this year, Ford was not doing that well financially. Ferrari was fine. It might have changed since then.
One question: those who tell us that their DIY cables are just as good as megabuck cables know this why? Have they rigorously tested their’s against the engineers who created the other cables? Just asking. Anecdotes ain’t science.
Such a trajectory, and so very well recounted. Thanks for it. Circa 1978, like every other young learner, I was reading SR. Then Harry Pearson came into view and it was bye-bye SR forever. What a hoot when TAS reviewer Tony Cordesman became the go-to military strategy consultant for network TV.
I was a fan of Audio. I own a soldering pencil, the old Weller died awhile ago. Audio systems vs. cars? Your system, despite enthusiasm, won't kill or maim you or anyone else. Make you tone deaf, perhaps....at least to 'opposing opinions'. Despite glowing reviews, your wetware between the ears will always be the final opinion that rules. A lot of the SOTA offerings still strike this cynic as 'sonic jewelry'; the cost of the physical object d'art outweighs the normally unseen circuitry. (If it looks good, it must sound good as well, Right?).
I've more heretical (mho) things to 'voice', but I need to go sharpen my keyboard....
As worthwhile as an objective/numbers assessment might be, you're looking for emotional satisfaction from audio playback
Exactly. The emotional connection becomes greater with each layer of haze that is removed. I don't hallucinate like I don't imagine what I'm hearing... Although taking acid is another story...
The scales fell from my eyes when I listened to my first van den Hul hybrid cables. I was in the hobby earlier, but took a long hiatus. I came back. Now is van den Hul my favorite cable? No. But, before I got back to the chair, I thought Wow. Then all his later cables came out. Naah. Not for me. But, in all the subjective listening, I still look at R, L, and C. And phase. I have yet to hear cables that can’t go back to some conflagration of measurements. We are only talking wire here. The crap gets real moving onto what’s connected at the ends of wire. But I still think much can be explained when you look at wire as what it is. Wire is a waveguide. Mr Tesla taught us that before there was hi-fi in any form. I still believe he was right. Is that everything? Nope. But it is the irrefutable base. Let the flames begin. But, I was buried in complex waveform analysis for work before I became just another audiophool. And I are one. The truth is somewhere between anti-cables and Machina Magica Mysteriosa. At those two extremes, I wonder that people pay money for it. We continue to get closer to truth and in the meantime, I will settle for fun. If it ain’t fun, who cares how it measures; they didn’t get it right. Now, moving beyond cable - it gets truly complex.
As it happens with most things, JH was only half right when he said if it measures the same, it should sound the same. We all know the story of Bob Carver making one of his amps sound like an ARC amp by measuring what he calls the “transfer function” of the ARC amp and replicating it on his amp. It was verified legit by the folks from Stereophile magazine no less. The problem with measuring is you have to know what to measure and by all measures we are not there yet and probably will never be. Considering that we are comparing two ears and a brain with crude measuring devices, we are not even close. I would go with two ears and a brain any day and twice on Sundays.
I had subscriptions to IAR and db Magazine. Knew of the measurement/SQ arguments. Didn't care then, don't now. When it is resolved I will care. Never. I'd rather look ahead than behind.
Interesting thread, thanks to all. I pay attention to measurements, just like all information. But I trust my ears—because of this, I value double-blind testing. Also, I agree with the logic that everything matters but because this means I need to trim my ear hair before listening, I usually compromise.
Sorry but it was either that or Beavis and Butthead chortling, "He said double blind testing. Huh. Huh. Huh." Which would be cool, and more the level of respect it merits. But they never said it. Sigh.
HI, Talking about DIY cables, manufacturers that offer a finished product also, cook this from different materials compared to the ones offered for DIY, even if specs and plugs are the same. Learned it myself when trying to replicate a couple of Furutechs.
geoffkait, as I re read my post I did not differentiate between cheap or expensive cables. The comment included ALL cables. Helloo, comments like your are usually made by people who have no idea how to use a soldering iron so they have to belittle the ones that do. You can not possibly have the best cables for your system unless you make them for yourself. Even if you are using the best cable made they are still longer than they have to be because you are stuck with stock sizes. Those of us who can make our own cables and power cords have a distinct advantage over those who can not.
petg60, totally false. 99% of the difference is marketing BS the other 1% is the color. I also have a much nicer soldering iron than the ones used in China.
cdorval, I have one of those Panasonic nasal hair trimmer gadgets. Works great in your ears. There is no reason to do double blind testing in audio comparisons. You don't even need to single blind as long as you are honest to yourself. Your not applying your "study" to other people in say a situation where you are effecting their health. You just want to know which of two items sounds better for yourself. You just need to be able to arrange it so that you can switch back and forth quickly between the items in question. I compare digital files to vinyl playback all the time by Q ing one format about 15 seconds ahead of the other then I can just switch back and forth. As always, those who think their audio memory for fine detail lasts more than 5 seconds are deluding themselves but they are free to do so in America at least for the time being.
For all the hype of the expensive AC cables, it’s amazing what they do NOT list in the properties of the copper they use. OFC is the popular boast, but they don’t mention Ohno Continuous Cast or annealed forging to eliminate grain and the boundaries present in "cold" drawn wire which add noise and distortion. The brand I use to make AC cables offers cable made from these processes. I know I am using better copper than what is used in more expensive, completed cables. If they had grain-free copper in their cables, they would talk about it. Please tell me who does, and at what cost. Use good plugs and Total Contact, which no big company uses, and you have a world-class AC cable for < $1K.
I was fortunate enough to jump off the ever increasing spiral of cable “upgrades” a while back and miss the designer cables not one jot.
All my power cords are home made from cable most people here could only dream about. Speaker cables are also home brewed from not quite so exotic materials, simple Western Electric copper cabling obtained on eBay. Interconnects are even simpler cable but still not of a form available commonly on the street. All in the rca and xlr connectors cost more than the actual cable. Nice looking braided outer cover also on the cheap on eBay.
My old Weller is working very nicely thank you.
Some advantages of being industrial installation electrician working alongside Siemens and similar ilk.......
I looked at the Transparent, Kimber Kable and Nordost AC lines of cables, and none of these companies say anything except OFC and 99.99999% pure for the .00001% who can easily afford it. Some have silver plating. There's fancy geometry. These are all $2k-5K and more per meter. You'll usually need two meters.
Uber, can you say what you made your power cords out of?
Jafreeman Basically it is an industrial spec cable that might possibly be used between inverter drives and three phase motors. And obviously as everywhere there is industrial cabling and then there is INDUSTRIAL cabling, if you get my meaning. I did experiment with servo drive cabling too but preferred the sq of the ac motor cabling. Not particularly cheap but anything worth having usually is not anyway. However cost even with connectors and a bit of fancy outer braid is still a lot less than some designer cords. All I will say is that my price was..... well , gratis. Leftovers from various installation projects. Just something I started toying with a couple years back tbh.
Just so you guys know, the whole thing of OFC, five nine's purity, connectors, braids, and all that jazz, is nothing more than a variation on wire is wire. The original claim was all that matters is the gauge. Now instead of gauge you're saying its OFC. Connectors. Braid. Or whatever. All you're doing is putting lipstick on a pig. OFC instead of gauge. You can fool yourselves if you want. But it is in fact just lipstick.
I don’t believe I got around to mentioning actual gauge but I might have gone overboard on a couple...lol. An Anaconda would be easier to wrestle into place behind my rack than a couple of the 2 foot cords I made. Connectors are a necessity, bit of colored braid just makes it look purty. Lipstick on an Anaconda if you like. 😎😎
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