Why Do Cables Matter?

+1 rbstehno Following on from the previous post, it's amusing that the people who claim cables don't matter are generally using cheap cables.

In further follow up to the robbydouglas2 post, I also love these kinds of declamatory statements like: "My system sounds amazing. Most people that have listened to it have never heard anything better." Statements like this are utterly pointless since we don't know what the listeners to this purportedly amazing system have also listened to by comparison. It could be sound down a string and a tin can for all we know. But if it was, I'm sure it was nicely coloured string.:))

@donavabdear. At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the point is that one is aiming to retrieve the information which is already there and not to add information which is not present in the recording.

Thanks for re-presenting your propositions. There is no connection of any kind between statement numbers one and two. They are just two different statements and so no conclusion can be drawn from them.

Your concluding "try arguing" statement is a prime example of a straw man distraction fallacy.

@hilde45, being involved in the hi fi industry business as well as the recording,

The term High Fidelity from my perspective means being faithful to the original recording i.e. being able to reproduce it as accurately as possible. I have to say that in the thousands of recordings in my collection there are actually very few that sound "bad". By bad I mean nasty peaky treble or obvious distortion. However, if that is what on the recording, so be it. I also have to say that in my experience of listening to quite a few audio systems, very high quality systems make less good recordings more listenable than vice versa because they present more of the music and make it easier to listen through poor recording quality.

The question of people using equalisation etc as presented in your post is complex as there could be subtractive or additive elements involved. For example if an amplifier with high levels of harmonic distortion was used, it will add harmonics to the final signal that are not present (or certainly not to the same degree) in the recording. On the other hand if someone uses a tone control to dial down a peak in the frequency range they are removing part of the signal. Or they could be using a loudness control to boost low frequencies. In that case they are not adding information, but they are making part of the signal more prominent than it is on the actual recording.

Finally, an important factor that bears mentioning is that, at the risk of stating the obvious, people's perceptions differ. Some people aren't that sensitive to frequency response errors for example and other's aren't that sensitive to timing errors. And sometimes, people's sonic values are just plain different, which is why there is such diversity in hi fi equipment.

+1 Nonoise.

@donavabdear. I agree with a lot of what you say about Al Schmitt’s recordings - which are superb. However, I disagree with your "bottleneck" comment. You miss the point that the engineer doesn’t just listen to what’s being recorded via monitors. They listen to the actual sound of the instruments themselves. In addition, good engineers know exactly what every piece of equipment in the recording chain does in terms of the sound which is finally committed to the recording medium. Furthermore, in multitrack recording, the engineer has the opportunity to listen to each track solo and, actually, has access to a lot more information than anyone who only hears the final two track mix.

To conclude, as nonoise says arguments about any piece of equipment in the recording chain setting a limit on what can be used for reproduction are just red herrings.

That’s the end of my contribution on this topic.

@ieales. I am a recording engineer.

A few observations on intellectual property.

1. Having protectable IP is important to inventors who may wish to licence their IP and not use it themselves.

2. It can be vital when looking to raise external capital.

3. Just because something is patented doesn't necessarily mean it is has utility - or at least not commercial utility.

4. People who work in public service don't do it to maximise their earnings. It doesn't necessarily imply that their abilities or work is of lesser quality.

5. Natually, patent examiners are not infallible - that's why people end up in litigation. That said, patent examinership looks like an area that's ripe for the application of AI.

@donavabdear,

To echo thyname's post and to reference your recent post, we are attempting to retrieve the original "7" not 7.5.

Do you accept that recovering all of the information contained in the original recording is a legitimate aim of hi fi reproduction?

@donavabdear 

Thanks for that lengthy exposition but could you just please give a direct answer to the question that I asked. A simple yes or no will suffice.

Thank you.

@donavabdear 

Thank you for answering my question - I appreciate it.

Even the best recordings are a long way from the sound of live music, so anything we can do to get back what;s on the recording itself helps.

But we have a long way to go!

@donavabdear 

There's a lot packed into that post. So...

I don't think there is any relation between a recording setup and playback. There is a relationship between recording monitoring and playback. In both cases, you want a room that doesn't colour the sound and accurate monitors.

Regarding recording itself, recording engineering is like all engineering - it's trying to find the least bad compromise within the limitations of the available technology. There's a place for simple one or two mic recording techniques, just as there is for multi mic'd and multitracked recording and all points in between. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, there are massive differences in the quality of recordings made with all those techniques.

As far as high fidelity playback is concerned, the system is indifferent to the kind of recording it's fed. I want the playback system to recover as much information as possible regardless of how that information came to be on the recording in the first place.

@donavabdear "I've been trying to understand why so many people are willing to spend so much money on cables, when no studio does, easy question really, 0 answers but plenty of attacking me and not the arguments."

To provide at least part of the answer to your question. There are two overriding reasons why specialist hi fi cables are not more widely used in recording studios: cost and logistics.

Recording studios are businesses - usually businesses struggling to make money these days. When they publish a gear list they want product that will attract customers and generate a return for them. So to make a comparison, if the studio spends six grand on microphone cable versus the same amount on a Neumann U67 microphone, it's a slam dunk as to which will generate the better return.

Secondly logistics - and I'm using the term widely. A lot of hi fi cables are too unwieldy to use in long runs. In addition, studio mic cables are effectively consumables. And, back to cost, consumables need to be cheap.

Finally, it is not to say that hi fi cables are not used in the recording industry. Van den Hull makes quite a range of microphone cables.  For example, Channel Classics' Jared Sacks uses them. Bob Ludwig's Gateway mastering is cabled with Transparent Audio cables.

PS Could you clarify your various references to the second law of thermodynamics as I'm unclear as to what you are driving at there?

@donavabdear 

I'm still interested in hearing your more detailed view on entropy.

Personally, I tend to experience it when my microphone cables get tangled.

Actually, that's on of the plus points of hi fi cables - they are entropy resistant in that they are usually too stiff to tangle :))

@donavabdear Thanks for your response about the second law of thermodynamics. With all due respect, what's in the post does not relate to the law.

Regarding your comments on digital audio, you refer only to sample rate, which relates to frequency response. Bit depth which relates to amplitude is equally important. Most DAWs operate internally using 32 bit floating point internal processing.

Your bottleneck argument is not accurate. It frequently happens that a multitrack recording where the overall project file is 24/96 might include some material which was originally recorded in 16/44. The DAW will upsample that to 24/96 to make it compatible with the overall session. There won't be any more information in that track but the rest of the tracks recorded at 24/96 will benefit from the wider frequency response and greater headroom that the increased sample rate and bit depth allows.

@donavabdear 

Thanks for your response to my post.

The time code to digital sound synching is a digression, but an interesting one!

It's not strictly correct to say that the analogue waveform of a recordings at different sample rates will be the same. If the recording has sufficiently high frequency information then that will show up in the analogue waveform converted from the higher sample rate recording.

Given the range of human hearing and the frequency range of musical instruments, some debate whether higher sample rates are needed but others will argue that frequencies above 20 Khz can be perceived even if they cannot be "heard".

But that's whole other debate.