Too good a post to waste

+1 miller
+2 Boxer.

It's the Agon version of Netflix's Altered Carbon.

Altered User Name. Same Schtick.

David
I just finished watching season 2 of Altered Carbon couple nights ago.
Ready for Poe to resurrect Tak!

Uber, I need to finish season 2. Good goal for a post surgery time killer. : )

Whoops sorry... Spoiler alert... doh.

Good luck with the knee, mine is probably 95% now so no complaints here.

It’s interesting that people feel the need to totally write-off Stereo Review simply because of Julian Hirsch. Did you ever actually READ any of the music section? The magazine also provided long, and involved music articles from authors like: Lester Bangs, Noel Coppage, and Joel Vance. But, since the "audio hobby" for most people involves listening to equipment rather than music, the predilection to fixate solely on Julian Hirsch to grind the very tiny axe they've brought to the discussion is not surprising...

Strangely enough it turns out that no matter what you are listening to, the music or the equipment, you are in the end listening to it through the equipment. Try as we might, there is no such thing as music that just appears in the room without any equipment. (It only seems that way sometimes, and when yours is as good as mine you will know what I mean.) So either way it does in fact matter how the equipment sounds. Not measures. Sounds.

The subject by the way is neither Stereo Review nor Julian Hirsch. The subject is the mistaken and counterproductive belief that something doesn’t exist until we can measure it. In this particular case its cables are snake oil, the argument for which boils down to, "there can’t be any difference, because we can’t measure any difference." But this same fallacy applies to lots of things.

Stereo Review and Julian Hirsch merely happen to be the two most widely recognized exemplars of this flawed philosophy. That’s why they were used. It has nothing to do with any personal animosity. I grew up with Stereo Review. I loved those same music articles. But on this score they let us down, big time.

Like it or not, in order to enjoy music audiophiles require equipment. Until this changes we will all be a whole lot better served by the Stereophile/JGH approach than SR/JH. That is all.

More to the point, people vilify Stereo Review simply because they fixate on Julian Hirsch.  Anyone who took his writings as gospel is either easily lead or fooled (your choice).   I started reading Stereo Review in 1970, simply for the music reviews and artists' profiles, the added bonus for me, was that the magazine provided a quick way to find out what was new in audio through both articles and advertising.  

Julian Hirsch's part of the magazine was intriguing only because he was attempting to use a quantified method to evaluate equipment.   But, if you were "into" audio, it became readily apparent that, although the measurements could quantify certain aspects of performance, the measurements didn't tell you anything about how the equipment sounded.

I looked at the equipment reviews simply as a method of seeing relative performance measurements that might be applicable to a piece of equipment.   As an example, wow and flutter are certainly applicable to the sound of a tape machine.  Finding out the performance differences between a TEAC versus an Akai, Sony, or Pioneer would give a starting point in evaluating the overall sound.

However, measurements can go beyond simply quantifying chosen performance characteristics if you know what measurement are important, and more importantly, know how to apply them.  This was demonstrated in the mid-1980's by Bob Carver through the Stereophile Challenge when Bob made a solid state amplifier sound like a tube amp and the "golden ears" finally gave up trying to find a difference in sound and conceded he'd won.

One of the problems with anecdotal equipment reviews sans any type of measurements is that people's ears are as variable as their eyes.  People have "tin ears" just like some people have color perception problems.  This was proven to me nearly daily when I worked in an audio store and would demonstrate a very expensive system versus an inexpensive one and the person would say, "I can't hear the difference." 

The opposite to that are the people who think they can "hear" every change no matter how small - like the direction a fuse is installed.  That's when I question the real reason they have an audio system.  Are they interested in listening to music or do they simply want to use  the music to listen to the equipment for imagined faults that need improvement? When that happens, the pursuit of perfection seems to be the point of the equipment rather than a way to listen to the art involved in making music.

I've had the same system for nearly 20 years at this point.  When I go listen to new equipment I find it provides a different, not necessarily better sound - so, I keep what I have and enjoy the music.

I kept my Audio, IAR and Listener mags.  Threw out the High Fidelity and did not trust Stereo Review.   I prefer the narratives of Absolute Sound to Stereophile although I like several writers of both mags (including the recently deceased Art Dudley).  I read more on-line articles now from Positive Feedback, Enjoy the Music, The Audiobeat, Soundstage Ultra and AnalogPlanet.  I maybe reading too much audio related stuff but I listen to music 1.5 hours or more every evening and 4+ hours on weekends.  For 20 years I read Fanfare mag which is 100% music reviews.  I also read International Record&Piano Review, Opera News & Grammaphone occasionally,   I often read while listening to music as well.  

As to cabling preferences, I began that journey in the 1970s with Audiosource cables which were superior to both zip cord/RCA and Monster.  Since 2000, I've used GroverHuffman.com cables and am the beta tester (I still pay for the cables, the design/labor is 90% of the cost).  The best system(s) I've every heard used MasterBuilt cabling which is possibly the most expensive.  I'm planning to upgrade my speakers b$35,000-$50,000, not the cabling.  

The recently decreased Art Dudley. I guess that’s one way of putting it. I would have saved my old Absolute Sound issues but the pages were all stuck together.

     The profit margin of the any old wire will do crowd is minimal.  Advertisers rarely pay to tout that their product is no better than another.  Plus, apparently , no one told the wire is wire crowd that the choice of what to measure was dictated by the availability of commercial measuring equipment, not by what anyone heard.     Despite the fact that I use and like the site, I like to say, Who Snopes Snopes?
     The advertisers won.  You buy what the dealers are told they can make money by selling.

I have only recently waded into the cable swamp. I decided to try replacing my lamp wire with a set of budget cables. I purchased a set of Blue Jeans 5200UP speaker cables with locking banana ends and a pair of LC-1 RCA connector audio cables. I am running a Hegel H390 into a pair of Focal Aria 936 speakers. My source is a Cambridge Audio Azur 651 CD player. I immediately noticed more bass when I started using the new cables. Other elements are improved as well, but you can feel the bass difference.

+1 baclagg 

Its not a swamp, any more than pre-amps or speakers are a swamp. The only difference is the everyone can talk about speakers and amps without mosquitoes, snakes, and crocodiles coming after you. Its not the wire that makes the swamp but the putrid creatures lurking in wait for unsuspecting victims. You go looking for better sound with speakers no problem. You go looking for better sound with wires the swamp creatures come after you.

Starting from ordinary wire everything is a huge step up. There's even bigger steps up from there, but that's where it gets a little more of a challenge. Not because there aren't lots better, but because wire is no different than anything else. You have to pay just as much attention to listener reviews of wire as anything else. Do that and you will be amazed how much better your system can get doing nothing more than upgrading wire.

You go looking for better sound with wires the swamp creatures come after you.

The same brain primitive creatures instead of listening experiments will kill you if you speak not of wires but of some crystals or stones effects on sound quality.... :)


I use more than 20 kind of stones like an equalizer or like the changing of tubes in an amplifier and with the greatest of success, the only prerequisite was using your discriminative ears... This subject is so touchy than re-reading now my own post I judge it near trolling and provocative.... Truth is sometimes.... …..I am not a sheep and never been one....

Once built a $1200 budget system for a friend. While it was burning in I was playing around. Everyone thinks cables are such a small part. Hardly anyone understands the truth- because they have not done this: I put a $1200 interconnect in this $1200 system. It was SHOCKING how good this little budget system was with that interconnect in there! 

I am NOT saying to spend half your budget on one interconnect. What I AM saying is anyone thinks wire is only 5% has a lot to learn.

Shocking that you never considered it wasn't the $1,200 interconnect, but perhaps you, or maybe just the act of wiping dirty contacts, or the other interconnect was faulty.

Psychologists have a term for that: projection. Since you can't hear, or remember, or understand what does what, you project your inadequacy and confusion onto others. Projection. Try not to do that.

Keep doing you Miller. If something sounds markedly different when I change an interconnect, then it was always because something was wrong. Usually of course it happens just from moving it. It is not unusual to loose the ground on just one of the interconnects, and everything will still work.

If something sounds markedly different when I change an interconnect, then it was always because something was wrong.

I am not sure to understand.... When i change my cheaper interconnect between my amplifier and my dac for a Morrow m3 and i immediately hear a better sound, this is because the first interconnect was wrong or something else wrong, not because the Morrow was a better interconnect? is this your saying?

  

What he's saying is he's a lousy listener. What he's saying is the only way he notices any difference is if he's broken a wire. Which he does not consider unusual. So he's also saying spaz, or using really old poorly made crap. Take your pick.

roberttdid

... It is not unusual to loose the ground on just one of the interconnects.

You must be using very poor quality connectors and/or have equipment with poor quality jacks. Connectors may be even more important that the cable itself, so it’s not a surprise if you don’t hear differences between cables.

I was talking about Miller claiming his $1,200 bargain system was magically transformed by $1,200 interconnects which is ... which the nicest I can put is questionable.   If you have left right interconnects, RCA, and the ground breaks on one of those cables (workmanship, rough use), the system will still work just fine, but perhaps not optimum. This was just one of many things (like dirty contacts), that was a far more likely reason for a big change in sound by changing interconnects.

All I can think of when someone suggests that cables that measure the same sound the same, is that they may be leaving out "color". 

Oh boy... it takes this guy using another cable to notice that his previous cable he had all along was faulty or broken!! 😂😂

Dirty contacts? Yeah, right! Geez, what other ridiculous claims will these pseudo skeptics make? It would actually make more sense to claim the cables were backwards. 

https://youtu.be/w3sLzmmejCA

Never has one person made so many posts that have so little useful information in them and so rarely contribute to the conversation. I really have to applaud the enthusiasm you apply to your inanity. I must say I do appreciate the hypocrisy of those that go gaga over contact enhancer while dismissing dirty contacts. I must be extra special going through life without ever experiencing self reflection.

Don’t have an aneurism, you’re still my favorite pseudo scientist. 💕

Never has one person made so many posts that have so little useful information in them and so rarely contribute to the conversation.

DYODD:
No system.
No degree.
No knowledge.
MachinaDynamica. 
The one person who claims to have met him at a show said he enjoys making fun of audiophiles because.... they love audio.

If you can find one constructive comment in 23k posts, please provide a link. 

millercarbon, is it true when you lie your pants really are on fire? 👖🔥 I don’t blame you for feelings of inferiority since your degree is from 4H Club. 🐄🍀 Apparently all you have to do around here is utter the word pseudo-scientist and millercarbon shows up. It’s uncanny! Maybe I really do have ESP. 😳

Notice he doesn't deny any of it.

No system.
No degree.
No knowledge.
MachinaDynamica.
The one person who claims to have met him at a show said he enjoys making fun of audiophiles because.... they love audio.

If you can find one constructive comment in 23k posts, please provide a link.

And still can't find even one constructive comment in any of his 23k posts.

Interesting.

All you need is magic pebbles!!

Wow, did someone call for a feather convention? 

"The one person who claims to have met him..."

What happened to that person?

DYODD
Operative phrase being, "Your Own".

Although there are wire differences, the result is not necessarily better.  A cable can react very differently from one system to another.  This is true with speaker cable.....balanced interconnects sound very much the same no matter who manufactures them.

Actually no, they sound the same regardless of what they're plugged into.

Either that or the wire somehow magically knows what its plugged into and is able to change accordingly.

Just one more bit of nonsense everyone believes without evidence and keeps repeating simply because someone else did.

??
So you do NOT believe in system synergy then?
Where different components and different cables WILL give different results all dependent on ones particular system configuration.

A WireWorld Platinum Starlight 8 ic will sound different in my system to yours to a.n.others.

This may be a difficult concept, but if the wire sounds the same on every system, then you are essentially saying wire doesn't matter. 

millercarbon OP5,046 posts07-02-2020 9:07pmActually no, they sound the same regardless of what they're plugged into.

Either that or the wire somehow magically knows what its plugged into and is able to change accordingly.

Just one more bit of nonsense everyone believes without evidence and keeps repeating simply because someone else did.

I lost all interest in the different types of speaker cable after reading a Stereophile magazine article (mid - 80s) comparing generic hardware store wire at (I think) 10 cents a foot with a higher quality (also generic lamp-cord) at ~39 cents and both of them with 'audiophile' cable at double-digit $s per foot (oh those days of innocence :-).

Each had its pluses and minuses, and the golden-eared reviewer called them out . To me, the fact that there was even a comparison showed that the audiophile product was silly. If you can cable your speakers for a few hundred bucks, you expect it to be unequivocally better than if you spent $9.99;; if you need to analyze it, you wasted your money.

Today, I just buy heavy gauge wire and use it for speaker cable...

G

This may be a difficult concept, but if the wire sounds the same on every system, then you are essentially saying wire doesn't matter.  

The number of logical fallacies in just this one statement is simply amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IawIjqOJBU8

A cable forms part of an electronic circuit, together with the output stage of the component providing the signal, the input stage of the component receiving the signal, and potentially with a lot of other circuitry in those components as a result of the cable’s effects on the ground connection.

As with any electronic part within a component the sonic effects of the cable depend not only on its intrinsic characteristics, but on the interaction of those characteristics with the surrounding circuitry.

Here are some examples of how a sonic comparison between two cables can yield exactly opposite (or at least very different) results depending on the specific application:

1) 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 while being driven by a component having high output impedance, due to the interaction of cable capacitance and component output impedance. That interaction essentially resulting in a low pass filter, with rolloff and phase shifts potentially occurring at audible frequencies depending on the specific capacitance and the specific output impedance. While the **exact opposite sonic result will occur** if those same two cables are compared in a phono cable application while being driven by a moving magnet cartridge, due to the interaction of cable capacitance and cartridge inductance. The result in that case being a frequency response **peak** in the upper treble region.

2) Since the impedance presented by an inductance is proportional to frequency a speaker having high impedance at high frequencies, such as many and probably most dynamic speakers, will be relatively insensitive to the inductance of a speaker cable. While speakers having low impedance at high frequencies, such as most electrostatics, will be far more likely to be 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.

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 at the receiving component 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, as well as 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.

A great many anecdotal reports that have been provided here and elsewhere over the years, in which digital cable performance has been reported as having been found to be length-sensitive, support that conclusion.

Regards,
-- Al

As I’ve oft opined, all things being equal - I.e., for the 🔜 exact same cable 🔙 - the one with the WHITE jacket will sound better than the one with a BLACK jacket. Anyone who believes cables all sound the same or that L, R and C and even length are the only parameters that count, that determine SQ, has only skimmed the surface or has not advanced past Base Camp ⛺️ It’s not all black and white. 🐄 Suspending the cables, using contact enhancers, exotic cable wraps, colored cable ties, etc., all the tricks of the trade, you know, the ones advanced audiophiles keep secret from the average Joe Blow. It’s very hush hush, we keep in close to the vest. It’s a weird trip if you can handle it. 🤗

And thanks to Almarg for putting into words so eloquently what a lot of us KNOW by ear and experience.
The same cable in two different systems with differing components WILL sound different, sometimes shockingly so!

Reviews of cable can be usefull but until you try them in your own system you are just never going to know.
So companies like The Cable Co with their lending program are very usefull in this situation.

Good luck to all, stay safe and Happy 4th of July if that is possible in these uncertain times.

I agree, it sounds good. Real good. Of course, it probably helps to have a legal background. 😬 Almarg can be very convincing. He came this close to convincing me that fuse directionality is actually explained by imperfections in the fuse holder, not by the fuse itself. 🤗

Whoever would like to argue about his statements, could you please keep it on the same level of writing skill?

almarg:

Here are some examples of how a sonic comparison between two cables can yield exactly opposite (or at least very different) results depending on the specific application:

The statement is "here are some examples of how a sonic comparison between two cables CAN yield exactly opposite (or at least very different) results"...

"Can" means might, may, could. "Can" does not mean "does".  Thus everything that follows is at best probability and imagination.

This is meant as an argument to refute my argument which is, in a word, "does". You simply cannot refute "does" with might. The refutation of "does" is "does not". 

It is highly ironic that such illogic immediately follows a post on the 10 logical fallacies. It is fully accepted no one has bothered to watch the video- or if they have, to have not learned a single one of its lessons. 

For proof I offer the preceding posts.

There ya go gluppo, and brevity is the soul of wit. Read it and weep.