If cables make a big difference (and I believe they can in some cases) then the audio gear is not doing a good job to begin with. Audio gear is not supposed to highlight the interconnecting wires but the source material!!! |
Coat hangers would be very difficult to work with as they are quite rigid and lack an insulation jacket. In theory they might work electrically but are very impractical compared to ordinary wires suitable to the task.
For sure there are several dollars worth of wire in most components and a few dollars in connectors too. I don't see many manufactures putting $5000 worth of wire inside but I guess most manufacturers would never be that stupid when ordinary wire will do.
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If a system is resolving of or highly sensitive to the wires then it is designed incorrectly. I don't invest in audio gear to hear the wires - I prefer to hear the source music. |
"To believe that cables make no significant difference is wishful thinking. "
Huh? Did you make a typo? Surely the wishful thinking is on the part of any person believing that a mere piece of copper wire (even some wire costing a ridiculous $5000) is going to transform their system in a significant way?
To me a significant way should be akin to changing your TT cartridge or speakers. Changing cables should not be audible if your equipment is well designed to begin with and the new and old cable is made of wire (no electronics or passive filtering in the cables)
How often do you see famous guitarists switch guitars during a concert? How often do you see them changing the cables to all their instruments and microphones?
Get real. Cables have minimal effect and equipment is specifically designed to ensure this! |
Blind tests demonstrate that differences may be too subtle to notice easily. They don't prove there are no differences but they do show that the differences are very subtle and at a level where it may not matter to some listeners. That serves a purpose. It also shows who is a better critical listener. Just like wine tasting. Some are a lot better than others. I can guess a French red wine region from blind tasting. I am hopeless with white wine. I guess my interest is red wine so that is hardly surprising.
I agree that more than 30 secs may be necessary as I believe that a variety of tracks may actually be needed to eventually highlight a difference between components. It takes time to home in on a difference but once you find it and know what to listen for then you can find it.
To the contrary, sighted tests run the risk of being influenced by expectations. Sighted tests are of limited value when performance is very close as it is hard to remove the bias about the equipment. The old adage "looks can be deceiving" applies. |
So Doug Sax of Mastering Lab fame used ordinary wire???? This is blasphemy. |
Geoffkait,
I think frame11 was quoting the audio critic and the statement is entirely correct from an engineering design perspective. Go to any reputable University and study electrical engineering or physics and the professors and text books will only use R, L and C for calculations at audio frequencies. These are the only factors that need to be considered in these analog circuits at these frequencies because they encompass and describe the entire behaviour as far as reputable science is concerned.
Now anecdotally what people claim to hear can be an entirely different matter; unlike scientific laws and procedures in science that require repeatability of measurements by anyone and everyone to be accepted, there is no need to demonstrate or prove any of the wild claims about special wires...so audiophile dealers and audiophiles can and do make wild unsubstantiated claims all the time. These claims are quite similar to many unproven wild or crazy claims about incredible benefits of certain health foods or certain diets or any multitude of anecdotal claims that just might be influenced one encouraged by the potential profit from selling the "magical" products.
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"Cables that measure the same sound different". You state this as if it were fact but it is merely an anecdotal claim. Unfortunately your claim is not enough to cause curriculum changes globally in Universities. If you can provide verification or design an experiment to demonstrate this then you will become famous for discovering a new parameter in circuit design. |
I don’t discount Doug’s findings but the whole concept of cables or interconnects being used to affect sound is wrong. Properly designed audio should minimize extraneous effects (wires between components).
Amplifier manufacturers can design amps to high tolerances of THD and low Intermodulation distortion such that most amps are indistinguishable in ABX testing DESPITE being made from different wires and of different lengths and often slightly different topologies.
Given what amplifiers can do it is logical that ordinary bits of wire can and SHOULD do even better in being transparent to the source signal.
My conclusion is that audiophile wires are being deliberately designed and fabricated to act as an equalizer or filter!!! If they were designed to be transparent to tight tolerances like amps then they too would be indistinguishable. After all we put a man on he moon and none of this is rocket science.
So I don’t refute the result. However that audiophiles are using audio cable filters to modify sound is totally ridiculous in my view. I would recommend buying better equipment in the first place - equipment that sounds good without audio filtering - rather than trying to band aid bad sound with additional filtering. If your equipment is well chosen and well matched then it will sound great WITHOUT filtering. |
Douglas,
I don’t need to quote authority. The whole basis for design of equipment is to reproduce the source signal accurately. A filter is designed to modify the signal and runs entirely counter to the purist approach - it is a band aid best used sparingly and best avoided if at all possible (if you want to hear what is on the recording that is). If filtering is needed then there are Equalizers or tone controls dedicated to that - these are much more flexible in that they can be adjusted to suit a variety of situations or needs.
Guess what - in pro audio for live music events they use EQ and other active filters to control the sound to get the best sound for the venue. I have NEVER seen a pro audio sound engineer run around with dozens of different sounding speaker cables and interconnects and then seen the engineer change them on the fly to get the desired sound at a particular venue during the tour. It is just plain Ludicrous. Horses for courses. Cables are supposed to make connections as transparently as possible. Guitarists will use different pedals or stomp boxes and different guitars - they don’t travel with a panoply of different sounding 1/4 inch cables!
If folks here can't understand or refuse to understand what is plain and simple best practices in the industry then just accept you like expensive cable filtering tweaking for fun and recognize it is a not a better or more reliable approach to the highest quality sound - just the most awkward and expensive way to modify the sound. |
I have noticed that when people have no logical or persuasive point to make in support of their position then they just attack the others. I still have not seen a good argument as to why buying equipment that is highly sensitive to wire connections or using wires as EQ filters makes any sense?
Shouldn't high end designs strive for maximum sensitivity to the source and a highly consistent reliable sound that has minimum sensitivity to variables like the bit of wire being used?
or
Should high end designs strive for highly inconsistent sound that is sensitive to almost any change at all in wire and no doubt many other factors too (this extreme kind of sensitivity or instability is not likely to be exclusive to just wires)? |
Douglas,
You keep attacking the others. Why not provide all this evidence that you speak of?
If a Boulder amp at a cost of 99K needs a special power cord in order to function then surely the power cord is included in the box with the amp?
Seriously why would anyone sell a 99K amplifier and skimp so much on the design that the power cord it comes with is totally inadequate and it requires the user to buy a special power cord to function correctly?
I dont doubt that these ridiculous issues actually exist, as your experience and Fremer’s have confirmed it.
However, my questions still stands - why buy extremely expensive equipment so poorly made that it is inadequate out of the box? Where is the sense in this? Isn’t an amplifier supposed to maximize source reproduction and minimize everything else that is extraneous - isn’t that what a great amplifier design ought to do?
(I do understand that it is possible to design something that is highly sensitive to power cords and speaker wires and interconnects but WHY would a designer build a 99K amp based on such a terrible design)
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@crazyeddy.
I think it is more likely that the best amplifier designers know that there are limits to technology and also human hearing. At some point extra costly aesthetics and marketing become much more important than measurable improvements in sound.
From a marketing perspective, it would be foolish for an amplifier manufacturer to criticize the highly lucrative business of high end cable accessories that their dealers and retailers enjoy. Margins on cables/cords are in the thousands of percent and picking a fight over the usefulness or not of cable jewellery would bite the hand that feeds of the retailers...
That said, Bryston has been quite honest about the benefits of power cords. As a well established pro highish end brand they don’t seem to endorse the idea that you need special power cords for their amps. |
You are free to believe whatever you like. I don’t think lawsuits are ever likely because all the cables work and are generally not harmful. Since when did someone successfully sue a vendor for selling a $50 product for $5000 or $4950 profit .... sorry but it is not illegal to make a profit and you don’t have to prove your input costs to customers....
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If you need 99.9999 pure copper versus regular copper then you have serious problems with your components. We are talking infinitesimally small differences in performance. Components should be properly designed to handle infinitesimally small differences without any affect on performance. It is easy to design the output stage or the input impedance stage of an amp to handle a useful range of loads (all commonly used types of cable) with aplomb.
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Todd,
I would actually say our hearing is pretty unreliable when it comes to infinitessimally small differences and more often than not we think we hear something because we are expecting to!
This is why designers rely on instrumentation to test and fine tune products for QC and not ears. Otherwise everything would be handbuilt by craftspeople hand selecting what they felt sounded the best. Generally everything in audio manufacturing is prescribed right down to each capacitor - manufacturers don’t have a box of capacitors and another box of audio cables in the factory and start the day by saying "mmmm, let me see if this sounds nice" - everything is built to specifications using components that have a range of tolerances.
Anyone who frets about 99.9999 pure copper in their cables ought to worry about about the typical tolerances on capacitors, which is 20%!!!!! Worse - most capacitors vary performance with voltage as well as temperature!!!! Maybe those fretful special quality cable folks ought to be worried about controlling room temperatures to within 0.01 degrees or at least placing their components in a tightly temperature and humidity controlled cabinet. |
Sorry to hear so many suffer from poor quality equipment that they end up trying half a dozen cables to try to fix it. In my experience, a band aid is always a band aid even if you give it a fancy name after a snake or a Lab or a University in Boston. |
@stfoth
LOL. Yes the marketing hyperbole is often excessive and totally unjustified. This hyperbole is not unique to audio tweaks but I suspect audio tweaks (especially wires) may be right up there as the most imaginative and pseudoscientific.
Guiness beer used to be advertised as good for you. No doubt in moderate quantities it most certainly is good for you - Drs once recommended Guiness to breast feeding women to help with milk production. The advertising police (probably with backing from pharmaceuticals) have killed that advertising meme even though it is true (now a Dr can prescribe a more costly solution - hormones to aid in milk production) . The Guiness logic probably stems from the pervasive false modern belief that if something in very large quantities is bad for you then small amounts of it must necessarily be bad too...
So ironic. Truths are crushed and make believe runs rampant. We don’t have witch hunts but we have so many laughable fears that not much has changed in 200 years. Anyway I need to stop now and take my vitamin supplements...can't afford to miss that! |
@fsmithjack
No disrespect but not everyone wants a system like yours. I am interested in accurately producing the source music without having to dust the room to get the system to work properly. I don't want to have to be concerned about the coloration of cables. I also like realistic sound - so the speakers need to be more linear in performance than a typical car audio whizzer cone.
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@rja
i quite agree - if only people would stop posting then it would stop this outa control thread
/ooops I just noticed I made the thread even longer and more pointless.
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