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I've been accused of mis-stating what Objectivists actually believe about wires i.e. interconnects, speakerwire & powercords.I'd like to limit this discussion to wires your typical or average audiophile / music lover would encounter in their system. Not some obscure example that will allow you to claim I never said ALL wires!
So for the sake of this discussion;1) Interconnects are 3-4.5 feet.
2) Speakerwire is 6-15 feet.
3) Powercords are 6-8 feet.Now if all these wires are of a suitable gauge and all components are functioning properly, do you or do you not believe audible differences can be heard, between different manufactuers/dealers?
PLEASE understand I'm not trying to imply every interconnect, speakerwire and power cord sounds differently. Afterall if two different dealers buy a cheap Belden interconnect the XYZ and both put their names on it and then sell it how could it sound different?
However, what if we compared these interconnects; Alpha-Core Inc's Triode Quartz Solid Silver, Nordost's Valhalla and Cardas' Golden Reference? Would audible differences now be heard?
Follow Ups:
Objective tests provide data about whether generic types of components can sound different.But so far no audiophile has yet demonstrated to witnesses that he can hear differences among wires (3 foot interconnects and 10 foot speaker wires) with the wires hidden and both wires playing music at the same volume.
Any conclusion that wires of these lengths sound different is merely an unproven belief.
Any belief may be wrong because it was not based on controlled listening tests ... or even DIY single-blind experiments ... that would offer reasonable proof "the believer" can really hear what he claims to hear.
"I know what I hear" is very unreliable when brand names are known and/or two components or wires play music at different volumes
I don't know of any power cord blind tests.
Since replacement power cords are not directly in the "music circuit", I would guess they have no effect and were not worth buying (until some evidence becomes available to support a different guess).
It would take many independent tests of power cords to reach a useful conclusion about them.
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Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo
RBG although we all know that this statement you continue making isn't true...1) "But so far no audiophile has yet demonstrated to witnesses that he can hear differences among wires (3 foot interconnects and 10 foot speaker wires) with the wires hidden and both wires playing music at the same volume."
2) "Any conclusion that wires of these lengths sound different is merely an unproven belief."I find it quite funny that you and Pat D ignore my invitation to come and allow me to PROVE that I, for one, can indeed demonstrate to witnesses (you & Pat D) that I can hear differences among wires (3 foot interconnects and 10 foot speaker wires) with the wires hidden and both wires playing music at the same volume!
Thus when I'm finished, the conclusion that wires of these lengths sound different will be a proven belief and fact!
You 2 keep spouting your trash opinions as if they're a fact, yet deny every opportunity presented to be shown and proven what the REAL truth is!
As Jon Risch said in his AES convention paper on subjective listening: "It must be kept in mind, that the test results, ANY subjective test results, are only valid for those participants, on that particular source system in that particular room with the particular musical selection used. It takes a series of tests, using different source systems / rooms/ music to determine if a more universal outcome will result."
nt
Every dollar saved by NOT buying wires that sound the same as the old wires is one dollar more to buy new music and that's what really makes parties good!Not thick expensive wires that people trip over, sprain their knees and sue you!
Keep up the good work -- your funny posts give me hope that some golden ears still have a sense of humor (and don't take this "I can hear it -- no you can't" debate seriously).
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Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo
...the lighting density of the lamp the shade comes from, and the number of steps in your dance!People trip over my ego more often than my cables. So stop feeding it or before long people will see it and run from the room screaming "Godzirra, Godzirra...!"
> Every dollar saved by NOT buying wires that sound the same as the old wires is one dollar more to buy new music and that's what really makes parties good! <
You think I'm obsessive over wires? Come and see my music software collection some time! My wife at one time said it was either the music or her. I missed her for the first 3 days. So perhaps every dollar spent on LP's and CD's is a dollar more I gotta earn to pay alimony.
Guess she just couldn't hear the difference...or didn't care.
The music and the audio system had a beautiful, musical, lifelike quality while the ex had a shrill, congested, sibilant quality (especially in the lower treble) that unfortunately was all too lifelike! It was a matter of simple preferences. Unlike yourself, I believe that some things should be thrown away when they outlive their usefulness! :)
rw
Listeners prove they can hear a difference using an objective blind methodology.Only then does a subjective review of a component's sound quality makes sense.
There's no need to know the brand name to describe what is heard.
I may not hear the same things, or agree with the opinion (all ears and audio preferences are different) but everyone is entitled to an opinion if they REALLY hear a difference between two components.
Pure subjectivity = component brand names are hidden and all components being compared are playing music at the same volumes -- how could ANYONE object to that?
The ultimate opinions are subjective AFTER blind tests designed to significantly reduce opinions from people who only imagine differences ... and/or hear audible differences only due to small (meaningless) SPL or channel balance differences).
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Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo
"...how could ANYONE object to that?"Not at all so long as:
1. There are no superfluous boxes or additional cables added to mix (un) scientifically assumed to have no effect
2. The listener has the ability to compare them over a period of days, not seconds.
I like that. To me the "seconds" in a DBT is the problem.Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
If after several hours you can't hear differences there is absolutely no logical reason to assume more hours of listening on other days will have completely different results. That's just another unproven audiophile belief.More time listening is on the list of lame excuses used to explain why an audiophile can't hear differences between two components.
The excuses are lame because they are used to throw mud at an objective experiment
... hoping some will stick:The stereo wasn't good enough ...
... although some people did claim to hear differences during in the sighted warm-up audition!The test made me nervous ...
... and that caused me to have hearing problems (I can always hear differences at home)I needed more time to listen ...
... two hours was not enough time to hear any difference between two components -- give me a few months and I'd be able to write a five page article about the differences.
The possibility that two components sound the same is NEVER considered by the typical big-ego high-end-stereo owner!"I know what I hear" is so easy to claim ...
... and so hard to prove
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Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo
Remember Richard uses his BSR equalizer in conjunction with his 5 band EQ on his Citation 11 for SPL matching.
And having heard the best VTV has to offer, I remain confident my main sound system will equal or outperform anyone's. There was nothing there I'd trade for...at any price.
Stu
It is SM with the it-takes-me-two-years-to-configure-my-two-EQs and the Citation 11 preamp.RBNG has a very different system and (like me on the HT) uses the EQ only on the subs.
Nice, especially the snack assistants. :)
Of course everyone agrees that the BSR equalizer is a truly state-of-the-art, highly resolving, low-loss, device! Especially when used in conjunction with yet another 5 band equalizer on the Citation 11.That couldn't possibly mask any low-level details or subtleties, could it?
Only an Objectivist like RBG would demand such strict and precise testing methods, DBT's, exact SPL matching etc. and then want to use such a rinky dink setup like that!
In 1979, Dr. Stan Lipshitz used a stock Dyna equilizer to make phono stages the same in frequency response. He said that the Dyna was virtually perfect in an ABX test of it, alone, so he re-equalized one of Walt Jung's designs to be as imperfect as his reference preamp and then: HE (one of THEM) could not hear any difference, and neither could anyone else in an ABX test. Does anyone see where this leads? ;-)
...made LPs sound like master tapes.I seem to recall that members of the Boston Audio Society did some DBTs that bore that out...
Does anyone see where this leads?
Yes, it leads to the inescapable conclusion that most of the real differences in the perceived performance of one sound system and another is due entirely to differences in frequency response. This is a conclusion which is still valid. One cavaet is that the issue of frequency response of loudspeakers in real rooms is a very complicated one, one with far more aspects to it than most loudspeaker designers understand or take into consideration in their designs. Another is that the frequency response of a sound system is often subject to real world interactions between components especially between amplifier and loudspeaker which are not revealed in normal bench tests using resistors as loads. And yet another is that if cables sound different, it is due entirely to changes they make to the frequency response of the system and that it is a very stupid and inefficient way to make such changes when far better alternatives are available.
Soundmind you couldn't have reached a more incorrect conclusion! If you are honestly using a mid-fi (at best) BSR equalizer in conjunction with yet the equalizer on the Citation 11. (which couldn't possibly mask any low-level details or subtleties, could it?) in your system.It does NOT prove "...the inescapable conclusion that most of the real differences in the perceived performance of one sound system and another is due entirely to differences in frequency response." But rather it proves you don't have the good sense to admit YOUR components are most likely masking any differences that would be easily heard if true highend components were used!
"But rather it proves you don't have the good sense to admit YOUR components are most likely masking any differences that would be easily heard if true highend components were used!"
Actually it's 100% true, at least IMHO that is. I used to own a Citation 11, which was literally embarassed by the GAS Thadrea. The BSR equipment isn't even as good as the Citation was....I now see I should have scrutinized what you listen to a long time ago. I'm sorry but it's very difficult for me to take anyone who uses that mid-fi stuff as their reference seriously when discussing what can and cannot be heard as audible differences.
He just doesn't understand the concept of direct experience. Whenever others point out that they have owned the Citation for a period of years and have DIRECTLY COMPARED IT WITH OTHER UNITS IN THEIR SYSTEM, he always falls back to the ad copy canard.Ironically, I purchased mine after the salesman contradicted the ad copy for the now infamous Crown ICK preamp. I was 17, in high school, and still enamoured over Julian Hirsch and McIntosh distortion clinics. Based upon the incredible specs, I had decided that I really wanted the ICK and the matching D-150 amp. Fortunately, I went to a dealer who sold both Crown and H-K. The salesguy (who later became a friend and part time boss) urgently convinced me to NOT buy the Crown preamp. I'm glad he was honest!
The first of many preamps I heard in my system that bettered the Eleven was an Audio Research SP-3a. Then a Levinson JC-2 (neither mine). I replaced mine first with a Van Alstine FET-5 later with an Audio Research SP-6 and currently an SP-9. He can't quite imagine since he is devoid of experience how anything could be better.
rw
And each time you bought a new one, you thought that was the end of it and you would be happy. But the holy grail eleuded you. How long before you give up on the one you've got now? Nagra has a nice little $10,000 model with all of three 6AT7s in the audio signal circuit. If you like it, you can buy it on a trial basis, get someone familiar with old time ham radio to copy the circuit for you and then return it. A hundred dollars worth of parts and a few hours of work later and you can have your own version which will perform identically...or you can let Nagra keep the $10,000 and hope the thing does't burn up in their small unventillated neat looking little box they put it in. Or you can go back to Van Alstine's version of the Dynaco PAT-5.Don't feel too badly E-Stat, thirty five years ago I thought the same way you do. Then one day it dawned on me that it's a fools game and no matter what I bought, in the end I'd be no more satisfied with it than what I already had. That's why I started solving my own problems for myself. You see, having met a lot of these guys, I realized they are no more clever about it than I am. Don't believe it? Just read the crap from the ones who post on this board.
I didn't let the appearance of any one of my components sway my judgement. The big ass black stats in their steel frames and bland, if not well constructed, electronics will not win the beauty prize or offer the gee whiz factor of a McIntosh all aglow with seductive lighting.How long before you give up on the one you've got now?
If we're still talking about preamps, the answer is likely - never. One, I've gotten to a level (way beyond the Eleven) where better would run many thousands of dollars. Also, I use the preamp only for listening to vinyl. I don't need a preamp for the CDP which is my primary source.There is no question though that I was a frequent upgrader while in high school and college (I'm 49). That was when I was enjoying a steep learning curve going from merely good stuff to hearing some of the very best through befriending some audio reviewers. Here are the time frames for my last four preamps:
H-K Citation 11: 1974-1976
Van Alstine FET-5: 1976-1981
Audio Research SP-6C: 1981-1998
Audio Research SP-9MKIII: 1998-currentThen one day it dawned on me that it's a fools game and no matter what I bought, in the end I'd be no more satisfied with it than what I already had.
You have a good point here. Happiness is fickle and is not directly proportional to the gear you own. It is how music brings joy to your life. I feel so fortunate to have met two of the Absolute Sound reviewers and had access to their many review systems over the past thirty years. I wouldn't have had a clue as to the differences among so many components without that controlled exposure. And certainly not every thing I heard was good. Now that I know what is possible with a carefully matched hyper dollar system, I no longer seek owning it. It is enough for me to merely appreciate that which is possible.
"Happiness is fickle and is not directly proportional to the gear you own."My problem was that I expected audio equipment to live up to its billing. That's the root of dissatisfaction and the reason people are constantly upgrading. Then it hit me, the equipment, at least the electronics did exactly what it said it did and what it is supposed to do. I don't expect you or anyone else here to belive it but in my view, a lot of it does. The problem lies elsewhere...in the basic notion of how the problem is viewed and solved itself. And no amount of tweaking a hopeless approach is going to work. Unless and until the problem is rethought from scratch with a blank sheet of paper and much better answers are offered up, it isn't going to get solved, at least not to my satisfaction. Those clever enough to come up with better answers aren't interested in the problem and those who work on it aren't nearly up to it. Anyway, that's when I stopped shopping, there was no longer a reason to. There were and still are no answers out there which could satisfy me. The recent VTV show only served to convince me it's as true now as it ever was.
your loftier goals of completely reproducing the vast spaciousness of a large concert venue at home have soured you to an extent as to what can be achieved at home. Seriously - I think that is a shame given your vast knowledge of music.Hopefully others will venture where you have tried as well to come up with a fundamentally better mousetrap.
rw
The most you can hope for from a conventional sound system is to reproduce the sounds of the instruments as they would be heard if they were in the same room with you. Given the sorry state of the art, even that limited goal is well beyond most so called high fidelity sound systems today regardless of cost. Again, when the only capability or interest is to build a better copy of what we already have, that goal is beyond reach.
I want to be like E-Stat! Music always sounds better when I close/cover my eyes!Truth is Soundmind many of us once thought the same way you do. I remember when I thought a Citation 11 was all I needed. Then one day it dawned on me that it's a fools game, not to believe what I heard, and I heard better!
Fortunately for me, unlike you I didn't believe no matter what I bought, in the end I'd be no more satisfied with it than what I already had. I was more satisfied with each piece I bought. I kept getting closer and closer to the wonderful music the way it was meant to heard. I've now reached the point where I don't want a newer or better amp, the Mastersound is good enough for me. It the same way with the BlueNote Stibbert and my RCA LC9As. These are all final purchases for me. Is there better, yep! Can I afford them, nope! Do I care, not in the slightest.
I'm so glad I didn't take your route and start solving my own problems for myself. I know that just because I can meet a lot of these guys and realize perhaps they are no more clever than I am. That doesn't mean I can do what they do! I also know I, like you, I would have probably convinced myself the Citation is "good enough."
Case in point: I met a computer nerd who could barely hold a conversation with me. I'm IMHO definitely a lot smarter than this man, yet when it comes to designing, building and maintaining an extremely secure network system, he leaves me in the dust!
Just because you feel you know more than John Curl and some others on specific topics doesn't mean you can design a preamp like he does. The very fact that you listn through a BSR and Citation equalizer speaks volumes about your abilities to discern what real music sounds like. You may be smart but you have a lot to learn.
And that truth is that you put your best sound system together and I can take anyone wiht normal hearing blindfolded into a room with it and someone playing an actual unamplified musical instrument and they will have no trouble picking out which is which just about every single time. No amplifier or preamplifier which John Curl or anoyone else designs will change that fact. And if a sound system which could convince someone that they were hearing actual music were built, under an identical experiment, substituting a Citation 11 preamp or inserting a BSR equalizer would not alter that result either. Both do exactly what they are supposed to do as well as it needs to be done, just like those Home Depot speaker wires and Radio Shack interconnects do."I'm so glad I didn't take your route and start solving my own problems for myself"
You ought to be. You don't have the skill or the knowledge to even make a valliant stab at it so don't bother trying. It would be a complete waste of your time bound to end in failure. Go give your money to other people to do your thinking for you....no matter how inadequate they are at it.
"Just because you feel you know more than John Curl and some others on specific topics doesn't mean you can design a preamp like he does"
I don't have to, that's the whole point. His preamp would do nothing to make a sound system perform any better by my standards compared to a Citation 11 (which BTW is in series with a Marantz 3800.) It offers me nothing I'd consider of value and it does not have the equalizer I need. Would it help if they put a fancy cabinet around it, changed the name on it, charged fifty times what they did, and it got a good writeup in some goofy magazine after they ran some expensive ads in it?
"Case in point: I met a computer nerd who could barely hold a conversation with me. I'm IMHO definitely a lot smarter than this man, yet when it comes to designing, building and maintaining an extremely secure network system, he leaves me in the dust!"
Then I hope he's a lot clever than his counterparts at the worlds once Number one telecommunications company were. At the last minute I found a secure live network node in a space they had abandoned and were about to sublease to an outside tennant....in the very same building as the people in charge of their corporate network security sat. What a bunch of assholes.
"And that truth is that you put your best sound system together and I can take anyone wiht normal hearing blindfolded into a room with it and someone playing an actual unamplified musical instrument and they will have no trouble picking out which is which just about every single time."Flat wrong, Edison proved it wrong, Acoustic Research proved it wrong, and folks still show this to be wrong assertion today.
Music making the painting, recording it the photograph
Soundmind in all honestly, I am NOT trying to hurt or insult you. In fact it's only through reading these last few posts in this thread that I truly understand why you feel what you do, and that saddens me.You're acting like a defeatist. This comment of yours is an excellent example of that attitude: "And that truth is that you put your best sound system together and I can take anyone with normal hearing blindfolded into a room with it and someone playing an actual unamplified musical instrument and they will have no trouble picking out which is which just about every single time."
First I'll readily admit that this is true. Neither I nor anyone I know has ever believed my audio system replicates music 100% the way live music sounds! However, I don't believe that fact should prevent me from trying to achieve the closest to the 100% goal that I can.
You on the otherhand became disillusioned. It appears you've decided that if I cannot have a 100% exact replication of live music in your home, I'll just stick with what I have, because why does it matter?
You even admitted "My problem was that I expected audio equipment to live up to its billing." The fact that audio equipment didn't provide you with a 100% accurate replication of live music broke your desire to try and achieve the best replication of live music audio can provide. But unfortunately it did even more than that it made you cynical.
This comment of yours "And if a sound system which could convince someone that they were hearing actual music were built, under an identical experiment, substituting a Citation 11 preamp or inserting a BSR equalizer would not alter that result either." Is just 100% WRONG, period! The Citation 11 preamp has long since been bettered and many of todays preamps are providing a larger percentage of the idea 100%, than your Citation 11 does, and that's a fact!
I told you I used to own a Citation 11 and I replaced it with a GAS Thadrea. To be honest I liked the way the Citation looked more than I did the Thadrea. But Thadrea just all around provided a larger percentage of what live music sounds like and so it replaced the Citation 11. Guess what Soundmind, the Thadrea has long since been bettered itself, by other preamps. But you remain too disillusioned to belive this plain and simple truth.
I know what I say is true. I'm basing some of my comments on how you responded to this remark I made to you. I said in so many words that John Curl could most likely design a better preamp than you could. Your response absolutely shocked me, you said : "I don't have to, that's the whole point. His preamp would do nothing to make a sound system perform any better by my standards compared to a Citation 11." I just couldn't fathom that you honestly believe that the preamps of today are no better than your Citation 11!
Soundmind today you are so cynical and disillusioned you've convinced yourself to believe what isn't true. Here's the TRUTH, the Citation 11 by todays standards of preamps is mid-fi at best!
If you honestly cannot hear that many of todays preamps offer a considerably larger percentage of the 100% ideal replication of live music, that I wouldn't recommend you to be upgrading to them either.
But PLEASE don't proclaim as fact there's no preamp made today that would make a sound system perform any better by the standards of replicating live music compared to a Citation 11. That statement is ludicrous and dishonest.
As I said before I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT'S UNTRUE! I owned a Citation 11 in the past. It was replaced immediately when I installed a GAS Thadrea I borrowed from a friend. Why? because the Thadrea provided a much larger percentage of the 100% ideal of replicating live music and the real truth is Thadrea couldn't hold a candle to many of the better preamps made today!
The Citation 11 is a dinosaur, by today's standard of audio replication is mid-fi at best. It could of course be given to Jim McShane and improved apon considerably, which would still allow you to have the equalizer you desire, but it still wouldn't be the equal of the best preamps of today.
Soundmind you are too intelligent to honestly believe audio hasn't advanced at all and your Citation 11 is the equal to today's best preamps. Just take it to a local audio salon and have them place it in one of their highend systems in place of one of todays better preamps, if you're correct you'll hear no changes between it and the preamp it replaced. If however you try that and come back and say you heard absolutely no difference, I'd suggest you go have your hearing checked!
Now if you find that insulting, than it's the truth that insults you, NOT me.
Thetubeguy1954
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a
The last audio components you'll ever need to buy....don't delay another moment.
You like most other audiophiles have fallen into a common trap and it is very understandable. You have neither the perspective of an experienced engineer nor of someone experienced with the most demanding forms of live unamplified concert music. I have both. You therefore are under the mistaken notion that if somehow the current concepts being used to record and play back music were perfected to their ultimate logical limit in the extreme, they would do what they now make only a vague pretense of doing, they would reproduce music perfectly. This is a bold and inescapable lie. Worst of all, developments have gone far past the point of diminishing returns to the point of no return as prices for the most prestigious of equipment skyrockets into a ludicrous spiral, witness the $50 3 tube preamplifier using 50 year old technology selling for $10,000.I am not a defeatist, far from it. Quite the opposite, I am absolutely confident that sound can be captured and recreated so convincingly that it will be indistinguishable to any human being from the original. But not by the people who are in this business today and not by current means. That is why for me it is a waste of time and money to buy their products which will lead to nothing but disappointment and the need to keep looking for more and better of what I already have. In fact, insofar as loudspekers are concerned, even I can produce much better ones than are on the market and I've even surprised myself at what improvements I can make to other people's best efforts. But that's besides the point.
Think about this, many audiophiles claim to be able to hear the difference between one wire and another, one tube and another, one capacitor and another. Yet they pay a fortune to buy sound systems whose obvious distortions from live music is so blatant as to be inescapable practically every single time. Yet most of them keep shopping for more of the same at ever higher prices.
This is a dead industry. There is no real talent in it, just mostly hacks who can't do other useful work. They have no imagination. There are no real innovations, just a few refinements and endless variations of what they and other people did decades ago. Their market for many reasons has all but dried up. If any real progress is to come, it won't be soon and it won't be by any of the people whose names are now familiar. You can call that cynicsim, I call it reality. BTW, the Citation 11 preamplifier performs it function as perfectly as is needed. In A/B testing with all tone controls and filters defeated, it sounds identical to the same signal bypassed. This is uncontestable proof of its adequacy just as the similar tests of wires I've described are. It's is a test of the kind people who make and sell this stuff hate because it puts the lie to the value of their far more expensive super improved models. They will use any arguement they can think of to refute its obvious logic. You and other audiophiles may buy into it. I don't. I can't. Not after a lifetime of dealing with the real world on its own terms.
Soundmind what an assinine statement you made; "You like most other audiophiles have fallen into a common trap and it is very understandable. You have neither the perspective of an experienced engineer nor of someone experienced with the most demanding forms of live unamplified concert music. I have both"One does NOT need to be an engineer to know what live unamplified music sounds like. I attend many live outdoor Jazz concerts as well as indoor symphonies. I also play acoustic guitar. I have a very good understanding of what real instruments sound like.
I thought I was conversing with an intelligent man, now I know I'm speaking more with the likes of a mad scientist, who's turned bitter and mean! You Soundmind are the Scrooge of audio.
Anyone who makes a statement such as this " BTW, the Citation 11 preamplifier performs it function as perfectly as is needed. In A/B testing with all tone controls and filters defeated, it sounds identical to the same signal bypassed." Shows they are TONE DEAF!
I've told you many times now I also owned the Citation 11 and if you cannot hear the difference in A/B testing with all tone controls and filters defeated of when the Citation 11 is or out of the circuit, you cannot hear period! I can not only hear the difference in A/B testing with all tone controls and filters defeated of when the Ciation 11 is or out of the circuit and can hear the difference between when the all tone controls and filters are defeated and when they aren't!
I've now lost ALL respect for you. You're bitter and either deaf "IF" you believe what you say about the Citation 11 or a liar if you don't! In either event for all your learned knowledge you cannot hear diddly-squat! And no matter how much you whine and complain diffferently that's the 100% truth....
You have NOTHING of any value to say, to me or anyone else. Stay in your own little audio world. Haven't you noticed not even the other Objectivists here agree with your opinion of Citation 11 and BSR equalizer as being as good as it gets?
Your comments are so ludicrous they jus cannot be taken seriously.
Thetubeguy1954
I piped one mediocre preamp through the tape monitor loop of another medicore preamp and could not hear any difference. Therefore, the preamp under test is sonically "perfect".Right. Like when he proclaimed that because he has gotten a number of speeding tickets with his Lincoln, such is a high performance automobile. Forget the fact you could do that with a school bus.
You have to understand his point of reference. Then fall to the ground laughing. ;)
I'm afraid that you are insane. Welcome to the asylum, and get some better equipment, will you? You brag about your fine wine selection and yet you have audio equipment equivalent to a Dodge Dart in audio reproduction, and you are insulting people who drive Porsches and BMW's audio equivalents in hi fi. You have to be nuts!
put Tommy's Dodge Dart into proper perspective!
Drag it over and we'll see whose can sound more like a piano and a violin in the same room, not someone's idea of what a stereo sound system should sound like based on what they like.I visited one audiophile's home with a group of audiophiles where he had an expensive sound system. He was afraid to turn up his subwoofer because he said he was afraid of exciting all of the room resonances. As a result, one guy there who was a speaker designer said there was nothing audible under 200 hz and I had to agree. Every musical instrument which played in the lowest two octaves was weak or completely inaudible. You have to wonder what he'd have done if he had a child who actually wanted to take lessons and play a real piano in that room. It's the audiophile's who are nuts, not me. How many real musical instruments do YOU compare your equipment to and at what intervals. Perhaps instead of investing in a $50,000 distortion analyzer, you'd be better off investing in a $50,000 Steinway. You might learn a lot more from it. From what you said, you didn't learn much from the distortion analyzer.
How can you expect me to take you seriously? Based on what you have said, you judge your designs by what you like, not by what you can measure and not by blind testing with real musical instruments. You have no objective working model of what an amplifier is supposed to do. You have likely exposed yourself repeatedly to very loud sounds for prolonged periods at live rock concerts possibly damaging your hearing and your hearing is 64 1/2 years old to begin with. Other than testimonial accolades from people I don't know whose own financial interests probably coincide to some degree with yours, what have I got to tell me your product is actually any better or different from anyone elses, your word for it? According to someone else you've surely heard of and who I have met and who has gone from someone completely unknown to me to someone I have no respect for, you are living "In Audio Hell" along with the rest of us. When given an opportunity to demonstrate his nearly half million dollar sound system even just to show it off, he was not only bored and disinterested, when I walked into his demo room, he was playing loud rock music and when I left he was playing a vinyl of 1940s Bing Crosby recordings. The one recording I heard which could actually tell me something about audio equipment which I brought with me, a recording of Marian McPartland playing a Baldwin grand was pathetic with the second and third lowest octaves sounding like she had suffered polio in her left arm. That on a recording I normally have to reduce the bass on in my own main sound system. And of course in his sound system with his $125,000 speakers in the corners to make the most of the bass they could produce, probably high Q tuned to a very low frequency, there was nothing you could do about it. A half million dollar sound reproduction system which made a Baldwin grand piano sound like a toy and you tell me I'm insane?
And that truth is that you put your best sound system together and I can take anyone wiht normal hearing blindfolded into a room with it and someone playing an actual unamplified musical instrument and they will have no trouble picking out which is which just about every single time.as you like to point out, Acoustic Research was successful in the early 60s fooling folks with their live vs recorded demos using some AR-3s driven by Dyna MKIII amps . You commented that the one you attended was "quite convincing".
Go figure.
I attended one of those as well. I think that it is a left-right brain thing. You know, you see the musicians appear to play, so you think that you are always hearing what they are playing. This type of demonstration has been made since the beginning of recorded music and has usually amazed the audience. There must be something inherently forgiving about it. It also happens when I watch TV with a big screen, yet am listening through a tiny TV speaker. It seems to work, most of the time, even with music. However, i don't like listening to most music, without a good hi fi, unless there is a visual image accompanying it on the TV screen.
so many "Subjectivists" (and I am not referring to you personally) discount the influence of visual appearence when comparing equipment, cables etc and do not accept the effect of "expectations"!
I think John Curl's JC-2, like the original Jaguar XK-E, is one the classiest looking preamps of all time. Simple. Elegant. I found it to be among the best sounding in its day. While I was in college, a friend of mine had one. I lusted after it. Later, I really didn't want a more plain jane looking Audio Research unit I heard to sound better (at least to my ears). Guess which I later purchased? Twenty five years later, however, I built a passive patterned after the JC-2 look.Similarly, I purchased VTL monoblocks despite their basic appearance. Mind you, they are well built, but have precious little sex appeal. Prior to that purchase, I heard my amp's big brother directly against the far cooler looking Edge Signature monoblocks. The pictures, BTW don't give the Edge justice. They are simply gorgeous in person with the soft red backlighting, counter sunk machined hex bolts and engraved everything. Even the cooling vents on the top cover are beveled. While the front panel of the Wotans is anodized aluminum, most of the chassis is painted steel using plain 'ol screws. The middle pic shows both of them. Which would you choose for your $30k on looks alone?
or
It was the Wotans, however, that recalibrated my perception of what an amplifier could do to convey the full emotion of the music.
The librarian beat the playmate again, dammit. As for my speakers...
Sex appeal in audio equipment is something that we have to add to satisfy a certain large percentage of customers. It is expensive to do, and I find it a pain, but necessary. I personally never design the external boxes that my circuits are used in. Sometimes, I let someone design the boxes and that person isn't up to the task. I lost a business partner over this, once. I don't know what the answer is, because when I work with and live with fine craftsmanship, it is harder to accept a 'tin box' even though it might sound just as good and would save me money. My customers tend to be relatively wealthy and have a sensitivity to the look and feel of equipment. I wish that they didn't.
Of course, as serious audiophiles listen to what is in front of them, and ignore the faceplate. It is not the SAME as watching musicians PLAY, either live or on video and being satisified with the audio accompaniment. Please do not keep asking me the same question. For example, I once made a preamp prototype, that I called the 'tin box' It was a rectangular aluminum box with a volume control sticking out the middle of one side. It was ugly, but it did sound better than my Levinson JC-2 at the time which was much more attractive. However, the 'tin box' was so ugly, that I retired as soon as I could with a similar preamp in a prettier prefab box that I was comfortable with in my living room. However, I used the 'tin box' instead of the JC-2, which is also my design, for a time.
As I stated, this wasn't addressed to you personally.
> And that truth is that you put your best sound system together and I can take anyone wiht normal hearing blindfolded into a room with it and someone playing an actual unamplified musical instrument and they will have no trouble picking out which is which just about every single time. <True... and it speaks to your point to E-Stat above about the need to "re-engineer" the home audio experience from the ground up. I do believe that incremental improvements are possible and I have not heard the extreme upper limits of the improvement scale but I also believe that it's not too far away from the best I have heard. If that's true, we're still light years away from fooling most folks with the test of yours I quoted. The fact is, at those times that I am fooled by my system, it's because I allow myself to be. I'm primed to be fooled. If you put me in a room blindfolded and said "tell me which is live and which is the system", I'd hit it most every time if not every time. So would most people.
Go back and read your ad copy and magazines, visit your showrooms and talk it over with the salesmen and other audiophiles, do whatever you like but you will never learn anything about audio equipment or music that way. Who cares? Responding to you is a complete waste of time.
He eschews superfluous gain stages like preamps where unnecessary and recognizes the value of EQ lies with correcting the first several octaves (if you are unable to do otherwise via positioning and/or room treatments). Operating on subwoofers only insulates the main speakers from the resolution robbing sins. I would also like to acquire a set of his grape peelers.SM, on the other hand pipes the signal through not one, but two preamps, and two equalizers full range on their way to the AR-9s cum skyward facing bolted on tweeters. He says he is unable to hear the effect of the Citation 11 line stage to the signal.
BTW, I used one in high school long ago. Nice preamp for 1974. Perfect?
"tsshyeah, right, and monkeys might fly out of my butt."
Wayne Campbell.
Now class, let us make a comparison of the fundamental flaw that Dr. Lipshitz entered into his listening test in 1979 (or so), and compare that to Soundmind's reference system components. ;-)
I believe!
What if another listener doesn't believe what you believe?If what you hear is based only on your beliefs (that can't be proven in objective tests), then no one else can be expected to hear what you hear ... unless they believe what you believe.
.
.
Richard BassNut Greene
My Stereo is MUCH BETTER than Your Stereo
I believe!
So what? So do these guys.
So does this guy.
And these guys.
And this guy.
*shrug*
se
Buddhism in its purest form is unconcerned with the existence of God.By the way...I believe.
Buddhism in its purest form is unconcerned with the existence of God.
Yes. But the point of my post wasn't about God per se.
By the way...I believe.In God, I mean.
"Well, isn't that special." --The Church Lady
:)
se
I believe in trusting my own ears, and those of my friends, who generally hear things much as I do. I trust that my ears would have found your cables, the ones that you made and sold, to sound good to my ears, but I guess that I will never know now, and I could not have afforded them anyway.
I believe in trusting my own ears, and those of my friends, who generally hear things much as I do.
That's fine, depending what it is you're trusting them to do. Though really you're not trusting your ears so much as your brain. If you're trusting with regard to what sounds best to you (or worst as the case may be), that's really all we have to trust in. If you're trusting with regard to actual audible differences, well, there's a pile of evidence to show that they're not so reliable.
I trust that my ears would have found your cables, the ones that you made and sold, to sound good to my ears, but I guess that I will never know now, and I could not have afforded them anyway.
Jesus, John, are you living on welfare or something?
se
Steve,Reading the posts between you and John I got lost.
John Curl is talking about wires you make that he believe's he'd like the "sound" of but, which are unfortunately quite expensive. At least when John says (jokingly I assume) "I could not have afforded them anyway." I believe they'd be expensive.
Now the reason I'm lost is, you make what appears to be expensive cables, yet you state; "If you're trusting with regard to actual audible differences, well, there's a pile of evidence to show that they're not so reliable."
So how do you justify making an expensive wire that cannot reliably be proven to have actual audible difference? I'm not looking to cause a war, but would like to know your point of view better on this matter.
Reading the posts between you and John I got lost.
Sorry 'bout that. :)
John Curl is talking about wires you make that he believe's he'd like the "sound" of but, which are unfortunately quite expensive. At least when John says (jokingly I assume) "I could not have afforded them anyway." I believe they'd be expensive.
Well, "expensive" can be quite relative. A 1 meter set of Taos sells for $450. In this industry, where cables can sell for upwards of five figures, that's downright cheap. For someone used to buying cables at Circuit City or Best Buy for $5-$10, that's rather expensive.
Now the reason I'm lost is, you make what appears to be expensive cables, yet you state; "If you're trusting with regard to actual audible differences, well, there's a pile of evidence to show that they're not so reliable."
Yes. Because there is. :)
So how do you justify making an expensive wire that cannot reliably be proven to have actual audible difference?
Because for me, at the end of the day when I'm enjoying music being reproduced on an audio system, I don't care. In that realm, I'm a holistic, hedonist subjectivist and I pursue that which gives me the most pleasure, regardless of what the reasons might be.
As for others, I cannot justify anything for them. That's their job, based on whatever criteria is most relevant to them which may well be different from my own. So to that end I simply say what they are and what they cost and leave the justifications (or lack thereof as the case may be) up to the individual.
I'm not looking to cause a war, but would like to know your point of view better on this matter.
No problem. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.
se
Steve, that's about as honest a post as I've ever read here on A.A. I also don't consider $450 for a 1 meter interconnect to be really expensive.I admire your integrity. Do you use TAOS in your personal system?
Steve, that's about as honest a post as I've ever read here on A.A.
Why thank you.
I also don't consider $450 for a 1 meter interconnect to be really expensive.
Well, unless you're on welfare of course. ;)
I admire your integrity. Do you use TAOS in your personal system?
Again, thank you. And yes. I designed them first and foremost for myself. A product can never be everything to everyone and I find trying to chase after the market too dispassionate and uninspiring (not to mention rather cynical). So I ultimately design for myself. If what gives me pleasure also happens to give pleasure to someone else, that's great. If not, well, can't have everything, can we? :)
se
Yes.
Yes.
Well, so much for all those "credentials" I guess. :)
se
How about you, SE? Doing anything lately?
How about you, SE? Doing anything lately?
Well, there's those cables you can't afford to buy.
Though I'd be happy to send you a pair for free if you'd like. I could write 'em off as a charitable donation.
Actually I was just out in the shop tonight experimenting with some paper/phenolic tubing (making RCA barrels) for what may turn into a less expensive model cable. One maybe you could afford.
I've also been doing some industrial design/initial production work for MagneQuest/Peerless (see photo). Oh, and some CAD work for another audio company.
se
I've been making preamps too.
I've been making preamps too.
Yeah? Well if you can't afford a set of Taos, you must be giving them away. Can I have one? :)
se
I don't think you can safely condense the avarage objectivist's beliefs into a pair of yes or no answers. Who would admit to being average, anyway?You could also look up Mtrycraft's posts here and on Audioholics (Jon Risch's old Asylum sparring partner).
Even so, I'll bite:
Question 1: Yes
Question 2:MaybeThese need expansion:
Question 1:Different manufacturers may have big differences in construction and RLC parameters;I'm pretty sure Monster has some coax types, but they also have twisted pair inside a shield with one side grounded.If the RLC parameters are the same and the construction and shielding type are similar, no differences will be detectable in a DBT. Obviously, gross differences in RLC parameters might be audible, although with short cables the differences should be very subtle. In a system suffering from noise pickup( ground loops, hum or RFI) the shielding type may make a difference in the noise floor.
Question 2: I didn't look it up, but I think Cardas likes the tri-braid unshielded designs, so in a noisy system I wouldn't be surprised to hear a change in the noise floor with the Cardas.In a simple, quiet system the differences would be harder to detect.
In conclusion, I think the "average " objectivist feels that cable differences are overblown, many cable prices are insane, and any differences that exist are easily explained by differences in RLC, shielding type or construction quality. The exotic properties and effects (OFC, conductor alloy type, near-superconductors,micro-diodes, 6N, long cystals,motor generator effect in speaker cables, pigment color,Essex Echo, etc.) need not be considered; those are either urban myths, or they produce effects too low in level to be detectable in a blind test.
I like Mtrycraft's tagline on his AH posts: Audiophile-someone who claims to hear the inaudible
Atexanathome allow me to commend you on writing the first Objectivists post I could honestly read and relate to. Your lack of an agenda made it a post I wanted to read.As far as #1 is concerened I am in somewhat agree with you. I'm sure that different manufactuers end up with finished products that exhibit different LCR parameters in the end. IMHO if the cables are obviously exhibiting gross differences in RLC parameters this would be definitely audible. However, I believe manufactuers should strive to keep the LCR parameters as benign as possible.
Now for #2 the examples I picked were purposely and specifically to get 3 completely separate views or ideas on how an interconnect should be designed. IMHO "IF" you are going to be able to hear differences in interconnects you'll be able to do it with these three!
I was surprised to find that we seem to agree that cable differences are (at times) overblown. I do agree that many, many cable prices are insane! Afterall in the end it's basically ONLY wire, dielectric and a jacket. So unless the manufactuer can come up with a readily understandable reason why his cable should considerably "sound" better than another piece of wire, and somehow justify why it's worth $500 or more for an 8 foot, you end up with an 8 foot section of wires that now costs you $500 or MORE!
I also agree that in most cases any differences that exist are easily explained by differences in RLC, shielding type or construction quality.
Where we disagreed is that I believe that exotic properties i.e. OFC, conductor alloy type, near-superconductors,micro-diodes, 6N, long cystals, motor generator effect in speaker cables, pigment color,Essex Echo, etc. DO need be considered. For Example: I've recently read when using a black jacket cover the added carbon used to make the color black may indeed be causing an audible effect. I personally haven't heard this for myself, but neither have I listened for an differences with black jackets.
I believe there are some unscrupulous wire dealers and manufactuers out there that charge way too much for a piece of wire, dielectric and a jacket. However I also believe there are things that cause differences in how wire's "sound" that we haven't yet discovered and I'm not ready to toss the baby out with the water.
since I also brought up the subject of pigmentation, wire LCR factors actually are relatively minor to my hearing most of the time, but solder used and the construction of the terminations often make for larger sonic differences. I'm surprised no one has brought these factors up before.Take Cardas for example. They make their ends in a silver, gold and rhodium plate: same brass barrel, just different plating. I actually bought all three types and used the same wire to make sonic comparisons: all sound different, and the difference was greater than if I switched wire, but then it would be hard to use the wire without terminations, wouldn't it?
Mouser sells Deltron ends, and one can buy them with a solid center pin silver plated or hollow pin silver plated, and you can get the same ends in a gold plate also. I went through the trouble of trying them all, just for curiosity. Oh yeah and you can try them without the trim barrels also. It makes for interesting listening.I've used and still have SN 62, 60/40, SN 95, Wonder, Cardas, AQ, and lead free formulations of solders. Lead free makes for a dramatic change in sonics.
You want to compare cable jackets? I've done that also in ordering sample power cords from Daletech. They come in a choice of sky blue or black.
What about gauge? There are differences and they are audible, at least to some. Ever try the oval wire Kimber makes (SF 23/SF 24)?
I tested these variables by wiring up the inputs of my preamp with different wire for every input. Interesting learning test.
But how many are even going to bother testing for themselves. The
amount of dollars spent was not really significant, The Deltron ends are about $2 each, although the Cardas ends were a bit more. Bet most are simply going treat this an an intellectual exercise and never try out the variables for themselves.
> However, I believe manufactuers should strive to keep the LCR parameters as benign as possible.The problem with that nice sounding idea is it depends on the meaning of the word "benign."
For example, for a turntable interconnect, what constitutes a "benign" capacitance? Typical recommended capacitances for cartridges run from about 100 pF to 500 pF and I'm sure there are cartridges with requirements outside this five-fold range.
As can be seen, "benign" does not automatically mean a "low" L,C or R.
I find it interesting that resistance, capactitance and inductance are often treated inconsistently by the ultra cable crowd. Sometimes these parameters are treated dismissively because there are more "sophisticated" issues at work - directional crystals and all that. Other times LCR's are treated as an easy-to-achieve universal constant if only people would pay attention - just make it "benign!"
There is an old saying in medicine - basically a restatement of Occam's Razor - that we should be looking for horses instead of zebras when we hear hoof beats. I would posit the same should apply to cables. Pay attention to the well established basics of cable performance in a given circuit before we worry too much about the exotic theories.
mls-stl, I previously stated "However, I believe manufactuers should strive to keep the LCR parameters as benign as possible." to which you responded "The problem with that nice sounding idea is it depends on the meaning of the word "benign."Well I see NO problem with my nice sounding idea at all! Benign, in this case would mean, as taken from Merriam-Webster 3b below "having no significant effect : HARMLESS
" Main Entry: be·nign
Pronunciation: bi-'nIn
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English benigne, from Anglo-French, from Latin benignus, from bene + gignere to beget -- more at KIN
1 : of a gentle disposition : GRACIOUS
2 a : showing kindness and gentlenessb : FAVORABLE, WHOLESOME
3 a : of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life; especially : not becoming cancerous b : having no significant effect : HARMLESSI NEVER said any one wire could or would be "the best" and obviously what would be benign for cartridges with capacitances from about 100 pF to 500 pF, would not be benign for those cartridges with requirements outside this range!
Nor did I say or imply that benign automatically means a "low" L,C or R. To be benign a wire's LCR parameters would have to be balanced for it's intended usage. However as you readily showed with tone arm wire, these intended usages can vary greatly, hence what's benign for one component, might not be benign for another. This all goes towards proving my beliefs that wires "sound" different in different systems.
These examples you supplied above only goes to strengthen that postion for me. There is NO "best" wire. Due to LCR parameters what's benign for one component, might not be benign for another! Yet having a benign wire, that is having no significant effect or HARMLESS to the signal it's being fed is precisely what we all should be seeking, and just one of what are probably meaning reasons why wires "sound" different, in different systems!
Thetubeguy1954
I'll restate it this way. "Benign" is an unachievable goal so why even state it as such?Back to our phono cable. 400 pF capacitance in a wire might be perfect for one cartridge and lousy for another. No one single wire could be "benign" for both situations.
Remember that =you= are the one who asked for a benign wire, not me. My response was to suggest that the goal of benignity (to coin a word) was not the appropriate target.
That said, I think there is a lot of sillyness spewn about in this whole field with people looking for exotic solutions when they haven't even considered well established basics.
mls-stl as your question is now restated; "Benign" is an unachievable goal so why even state it as such?" I find I am still in disagreement with your premise.Remember "benign" as I'm using it means; having no significant effect, or harmless. Of course NO audio component be it a preamp, power amp, CDP, turntable, wires etc. is completely benign. That doesn't mean the manufactuer shouldn't strive to make the component as benign as they possibly can does it?
If we use your example; "Back to our phono cable. 400 pF capacitance in a wire might be perfect for one cartridge and lousy for another. No one single wire could be "benign" for both situations."
The same can be said of ALL audio components. Whether it's a preamp, amp or CDP. One that's benign in one audio system, might not be benign in another. Does that mean the manufactuer shouldn't design it to be as benign as they can make it be for MOST possible situations? I think that's exactly what they attempt to do.
I couldn't imagine a designer like Dan D'Agostino of Krell only using his Evolution One power amp only with his Current Tunnel preamp when determining it's capabilities. He has to know not everyone buys all Krell components. It possible it could be used with a Hovland, CTC Blowtorch, or Audio Research preamp just as well. Don't you believe he wants his Evolution One power amp to be benign in most if not all these situations?
It's the same thing with wire manufactuers. I'm sure Nordost, or Siltech doesn't try their wire on only one type or brand of audio component and then proclaim, it "sounds" good. They want their wires to be benign as in have no significant effect, or be as harmless as possible with as many audio components as possible. Of course none of these wires or components will be benign in all systems. That's just a fact of life. That's also precisely why ALL audio components, including wires, "sound" differently.
It's my firm belief that the audio component whether it be an amp, preamp, CDP, wire etc. that "sounds" the best in a given audio system is the one that's the most benign or causing the least significant effect, or harm.
So although creating any type of audio component that's completely benign is, as you stated, "an unachievable goal" That doesn't mean it shouldn't be strived for.
Think about it this way, so far replicating music that's indistinguishable from live music in our homes is "an unachievable goal" as well. Would you want manufactuers/designers to cease trying to improve apon that too? The more benign audio components become and that includes wires, the closer will get to that unachievable goal.
Thetubeguy1954
The last word is yours. Enjoy!
"So unless the manufactuer can come up with a readily understandable reason why his cable should considerably "sound" better than another piece of wire, and somehow justify why it's worth $500 or more for an 8 foot, you end up with an 8 foot section of wires that now costs you $500 or MORE! "See:
The Cost of High End Audio Cables:
http://www.AudioAsylum.com/audio/cables/messages/34038.htmlIt is somewhat surprising for a lot of folks to see what it costs to stay in bussiness.
It also helps to realize that those $19.99 Rat Shack or Target cables actually only have a dollars worth of materials in them, or less.
BTW, Belden 89259 now costs around $1.70 a foot in small quantities, and around $1.50 a foot in larger quantities. Back when I wrote the post, it was around $1 a foot for larger quantities.
So multiply all the figures in the post by 1.5X to arrive at a more modern pricing structure.
"BTW, Belden 89259 now costs around $1.70 a foot in small quantities, and around $1.50 a foot in larger quantities."If you're in the business, you can get as much of it as you want for free...if you're dumb enough to take it.
Hello Jon,I appreciate your lesson in wire economics. I hear differences in wires and have no problem with what some wires cost. At the same time I find it hard to personally see myself buying $5K - $10K speakerwires, interconnects etc.
Because I hear differences I own decent wires, my interconnect, Z-Squared Au/Au (a gold/silver/copper alloy that's 24K gold plated) lists for $1.1K, but I didn't pay that! My speakerwire, Nordost BlueHeaven lists for $800 I believe and my power cords are Stealth Audio M-21Supers @ $1K ea.
The point I was trying to make (perhaps poorly) was if a manufactuer cannot provide a reasonable explination of why his wires "sound" better and are WORTH X amount of dollars.
Then in the eyes of the consumer he's paying X amount of dollars for just a piece of wire, dielectric and a jacket. So why should he spend X, when he could just go and buy Home Depot's wire much cheaper?
I obviously believe that quality wires are worth the investment, by what I've purchased.
You wrote:
"The point I was trying to make (perhaps poorly) was if a manufactuer cannot provide a reasonable explination of why his wires "sound" better and are WORTH X amount of dollars.Then in the eyes of the consumer he's paying X amount of dollars for just a piece of wire, dielectric and a jacket. So why should he spend X, when he could just go and buy Home Depot's wire much cheaper?"
First, you need to try and understand that at least half or more of the folks who started a high end cable company were originaly just trying to make cables that sounded good to them, for themselves. Of those folks, less than half probably had formal training in physics or engineering, and used an entirely valid and time-honored method of developng the cables that they felt were the best: trial and error empirical methods.
The reason that they were able to successfully better the retail/commercial cables that were out there at the time was that for the most part, cable science as a science, did not really exist. The physicists and engineers were taught that wire is wire, and if you make it large enough to carry the current, and/or it has a tidy enough impedance to carry that RF signal, you were done.
I was taught that way, it was "just L, C and R", nothing more. Dielectric quality was not even considered (the quality of the C portion), conductor quality was not considered, other than the very basic aspect of just simple resistance, and inductance was just a portion of the characteristic Z calcs, and not to be considered separately.
To this day, cable science is not taught in the schools or universities, mainly because so many schools no longer teach the students to think or encourage the students to think, to think for themselves, or to look outside the (textbook) box for other options.
Thus, even the designer/developer of a fine sounding audio cable may not have a definitive "scientific" reason that they can point to, to explain WHY their cables sound good, they know what sounds good to them, and stuck with it.
On the other hand, some of the folks who developed good sounding cables, _were_ formally trained, and do have a prety good idea of what is going on, and may even deliberately use LCR manipulation to achieve certain end goals and results. This would likley include taking the secondary and tertiary aspects of the primary L, C and R parameters into account. Some of them have patented their technology, and attempted to try and translate the highly esoteric and involved concepts they used into language that the consumer can maybe follow.
Sometimes these watered down explanations do not work so well, other times they might even sound like a form of snake oil. However, if you know how to read between the lines, and extrapolate what is being said about what and why, then sometimes the ad copy can start to make sense and you get an idea of what the designer intended, and what they were driving at.
Bottom line, there is no tried and true factual recipe for audio cable greatness. There are too many variables, too many different system situations, too many different individual and personal tastes as to what is THE greatest sound to achieve. As to why it cost so much, if you read my post and extrapolated the costs for just one basic and not too involved aproach to a high performance audio cable, based on the Belden 89259 coaxial cable, given the current costs of the teflon material, and the costs for high purity copper, or the use of silver, and even what amounts to a fairly basic high performance cable has reached the thousands of dollars price point. Add in a twisted pair construction, a separate shield, with resonance damping filler/spacer material, a really nice looking jacket, etc., and the price climbs even higher. I don't think that very many folks can appreciate the huge amount of labor involved in construction of a complicated audio cable, and the sheer cost of that labor. We are not talking about minimum wage workers gathered off the street, you need trained and experience assembly people, ones that can make adjustsments, and check the cables for proper assembly and performance, etc., this kind of labor does not come cheap.
Does any of this justify the $10,000 speaker cables, or the $8,000 dollar 3 foot interconnect? No more and no worse than the $250,000 hand built automobile, as I talk about in my cited post.
As for buying Home Depot wire, well, you already know the answer to that one, you listened, and found the Rat Shack and HD cables wanting, and decided to try something a bit more sophisticated. And it worked for you, and you are happy. Why worry about the Lamborghini's of the cable world, when you have found happiness with a used Mercedes? (or insert your choice of car here)
You made your decision by DRIVING (listening to) the car (cable), and that was all that mattered, not what the EPA mileage rating was, or the skid pad g-force capability.
As for me, I build my own, and have shown others how to do that, and am happy with my playback system. If you have never seen my web site, or my DIY cable info, check out:
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/cables.htmspecifically
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/i1.htm
and
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/s1.htm
You are even more full of it and of yourself than ever."I was taught that way, it was "just L, C and R", nothing more. Dielectric quality was not even considered (the quality of the C portion),"
If you have a better mathematical model for wire, offer it and publish it. If you don't, stop trying to pretend the entire world of electrical engineers are a pack of mindless idiots who don't know what they are doing.
"To this day, cable science is not taught in the schools or universities, mainly because so many schools no longer teach the students to think or encourage the students to think, to think for themselves, or to look outside the (textbook) box for other options."
This is the biggest pile of crap you have ever spouted. Engineers and Scientist MUST be taught how to think because that is the nature of their job and the tools they have to bring to bear to solve problems. That's how they make their living, by thinking about problems and solving them. As for "cable science" they are taught the same truths they were always taught, how to find the equivalent lump sum network parameters from the distributed parameter model. Perhaps at the masters or PHD level, they will delve deeper into it if there is something of interest there and they are hard up to find another topic even less important to the world. As far as making a study of "cable science" most engineering and science students have many far more important things to learn about than cables. Only YOU are obsessed with cables. Most engineers rely on work already done to use the very satisfactory answers developed over many decades of research by others in the real cable industry to solve their problems. It just isn't a very interesting or important topic for people who can think.
"On the other hand, some of the folks who developed good sounding cables, _were_ formally trained, and do have a prety good idea of what is going on, and may even deliberately use LCR manipulation to achieve certain end goals and results"
This is exactly what the tinkerers do and if they are lucky, not too many of their customers blow up their amplifiers or themselves with their junk products in the process. Engineers who design amplifiers have to take special pains to protect their designs from this new and previously unexpected threat.
"Bottom line, there is no tried and true factual recipe for audio cable greatness."
I predict nobody will ever win the Nobel Prize for discovering a new audio cable design. Nobody with a functioning brain actually cares.
"The physicists and engineers were taught that wire is wire, and if you make it large enough to carry the current, and/or it has a tidy enough impedance to carry that RF signal, you were done."
An utter lie. They are taught the classical techniques of modeling and the solutions time proven over decades of theory and experience. Then they move on to more important subjects. Real issues about wire have to do with large power distribution and communications networks, not stereo systems. Funny how they seem to have no trouble solving those problems but stinking stereo cables are a major issue.
"First, you need to try and understand that at least half or more of the folks who started a high end cable company were originaly just trying to make cables that sounded good to them, for themselves."
Yes, most or all of them. They are clueless tinkerers.
"Of those folks, less than half probably had formal training in physics or engineering,"
Yes a lot less than half. Except for real engineers who get jobs in companies like Belden and its competitors, the percentage is very close to zero. That's why most of what they do and write is pure bullshit.
"As for buying Home Depot wire, well, you already know the answer to that one, you listened, and found the Rat Shack and HD cables wanting"
They perform their rational electrical functions perfectly. That's why they are so popular. John Curl proved it conclusively for RS interconnects. -120 db 7th harmonic of 5khz when the best he could find at any price was -135 and on a 7 mhz color TV signal, response so flat it is indistinguishable from the RF feed. What better performance for an audio cable would be needed than that and why?
You can knock the world of science and engineering all you want to rationalize your ego driven fantasy that you have made some great discovery but frankly, in the real world, even insects loom much larger than you baloney.
Your reply is typical; predictable, and utterly worthless other than as the opinion of someone who doesn't get high performance audio. At all.You don't have a clue, and probably never will.
It is not worth my time to respond in detail, as there are no real details to respond to. Just vitriol and villification.
As for slamming my education, that is a classic ad homeniem attack on the person, not the facts.
I laid out a very simplified outline of what goes on in the high performance cable industry, but it is clear that you don't think beyond what a commercial cable catalog has to offer.
Regarding the state of education, I run into engineers fresh out of college all the time, and most can't think their way out of a paper bag. If it wasn't in the text books or on the exams, they don't have a clue how to proceed. This is a lot worse than it used to be some years ago, where the freshly graduated engineers could at least think and apply what they had been taught, all they lacked was some real world experience.
Of course, this could be my own skewed opinion (juat as valid, if not more so, than your opinion), but if one reads the engineering newspapers and magazines, there are frequently articles on the sorry state of education today, and how college graduate engineers require more remedial training and specialized instruction than ever before.
That does provide some backup for what I stated, and you dismissed out of hand.It is pointless to continue to argue the subject with you, your mind set and your personal attacks on me are a matter of record. You will never change, or learn anything new about audio, you are convinced you already know it all.
Jon Risch
Either with or without credentials. With or without accolades from people who make their money out of the same trough. With or without impressive titles. If the day ever comes when you say something that makes sense I will agree with it. In the meanwhile I will still feel free to debunk your nonsense and criticize you for your heavy handed attitude towards those foolish enough to post a dissenting thought on your cable asylum. Why don't you go delete someone's posting or threaten someone with being banned for making an idle inadvertent reference to Double Blind Tests where only the blind, deaf, and dumb are allowed to speak freely, your realm, your little world. Insect.
Yes, that surely applies here too. Angry and arrogant is no way to enjoy life.
You know, Soundmind, you go out of your way to attack others. If YOU are happy with your midfi set-up, that's OK with us. Some people are happy with MacDonalds food as well. That's OK with me too. BUT, please don't tell us what we are about, just because we are concerned with more subtle issues in audio, just like a chef might think beyond fast food, in order to make something more enjoyable.
There are MANY people who would be uncomfortable with haute cruisine, (like some rock and roll band members) who have the money and power, but don't appreciate the food at the 'Grand Hotel' somewhere in France and want to find a MacDonalds instead. This is a matter of conditioning, and if you ever had to eat with them, it can be embarrassing.
Well, it is the same for you. You seem to think that YOU KNOW what is important in hi fi reproduction, BUT you can't seem to get any agreement about this from most others engaged in audio. You have and enjoy the equivalent of MacDonalds or maybe (Denny's) in hi fi reproduction equipment, yet you revile the people who prefer fresh fruits and vegetables, over what can be easily purchased at any Safeway store. Get over it!
I've tasted your audio "haute cuisine" just recently and it's no better than hash a the corner diner, all your pretense aside. BTW, there's $70,000 worth of classified Bordeaux in my cellar, money I could just as easily have wasted on some stupid preamp or power amp that was no closer to real audio "haute cuisine" than Chateau Mouton Cadet is to Chateau Mouton Rothschild.Sorry you don't like my comments about your partner in crime Mr. Risch but my offer still stands. All he has to do is tell me what college he received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering Degree from and I will write a letter making an excellent case to the chancellor that he should receive a full refund of his tuition money. God knows they don't seem to have earned a dime of it.
Soundmind, there is nothing technical between us to discuss. It isn't that I would dismiss your patent or anything. I have known and discussed subjects similar to what you are interested in with Michael Gerzon and Richard Heyser, when they were alive. It is just not what I need to address in making my designs.
By the way, Michael Gerzon first showed me the qualities of 78 reproduction, at Dr. Craven's place at Oxford, back in 1975. You should try it sometime, instead of criticizing Clark for mentioning it once in a while.
"Soundmind, there is nothing technical between us to discuss."Finally, a statement from you I can agree with, despite some similarities in our early training we see the world through entirely different eyes. Go back to tinkering with amplifier circuits looking for ones you like even better than what you've already found. Even if you can't figure out why you like them better, maybe you can still find others who agree with your opinions and they will continue to buy them. As for 78 RPM records, don't waste my time, despite owning hundreds of them, they don't interest me.
I am afraid, thetubeguy, that some people will only ever be interested in denying you (and many others) your experience of hearing different cables sound different. Because if they had ever heard these differences for themselves they, like you after hearing differences for yourself, would no longer be able to dismiss other people's experiences so readily. They would no longer be able to use the dismissive sentences they do.Yes, you and others are correct. You CAN hear differences between different metals used as a conductor, between different plastic insulation materials (different chemical mixes !!), between different colours of insulation materials, between different configurations and designs, and (as described below) some identical cables connected in a different direction.
Comments by John Atkinson from Hi Fi News October 1983 issue.
"I had an interesting conversation with a contributor to HFN/RR some months back. "Isn't it time", I was asked, "that we organised a test to show that this business about cables being directional is a load of rubbish, dreamed up by unscrupulous con men ?"
How could a phenomenon like directionality in conductors, therefore, have been missed by researchers all this time ? Surely it is too much to believe that it hid if an engineer bearing measuring equipment approached, but it was only too willing to be heard if carrying a music signal ? My initial reaction, therefore, to this 'new' fact, was to dismiss it as moonshine. However, a less-than-open mind is nothing to be proud of, even when confronted with statements which appear to contradict everything which appear to contradict everything one has learnt or been told........ No one has yet come up with any reason as to why two different types of cable sound different, but that is no reason to dismiss the results of listening tests. The dogmatic approach adopted by some engineers and scientists that a phenomenon can't be held to exist until it can be satisfactorily explained, is obviously unsound...." John Atkinson.John goes on to describe a experiment he and his wife were involved in. (To be brief) - Under single- blind listening tests, they both consistently identified the difference between A and B only to be told later that the only difference between A and B was the direction of the one metre length of interconnect between pre and power amps !
John concludes his article with the sentence "In the meantime, something is going on, and we don't know what it is, do we?"Then, in the November 1983 issue of Hi Fi News, John comments that Bob Stuart of Meridian had told him that care is taken in production of his new Meridian modular amp - to ensure that cable is connected the preferred way round. He (Bob) can't yet explain why it should sound better one way round than the other.
Just who are people prepared to believe ?
The John Atkinsons., the Bob Stuarts., the Julian Vereker's (who wrote in Hi Fi News 1995 that they were somewhat alarmed when some new cable with parameters they had particularly specified did not 'sound' good)., the Jean Hiragas (Editor of the French 'Revue du Son' who instigated the whole 'cable controversy' over 25 years ago by stating that he could hear differences in different wires) of this world.
OR
The engineers as just quoted by Soundmind "To the electrical engineer who is far better informed than the "average" objectivist and who is an objectivist by training and must remain an objectivist to survive and who is NOT in this industry, audiophile wires are a joke. They shake their heads at the whole thing."
OR
Such as Peter Baxandall (a very well respected UK audio guru during the mid 1990s) who said in 1985
"I do not believe that the type or quality of dielectric used in LF coupling capacitors is of any significance whatsoever."
"I do not believe that the use of expensive, special loudspeaker cable - no matter which way round they are connected - confers any sonic benefit whatever."
"I believe that all this recent business about single-crystal, high purity, oxygen-free, connecting cable is just a load of absolute hogwash."The point at which people have to start is NOT 'that it cannot happen, that if you heard changes in the sound then you must have imagined it' but that IT HAPPENS, that people CAN hear changes in the sound - and if it happens, if it changes the sound then, if you are involved in audio, if you claim to be a 'professional in audio', then you have to start at that point by saying "Something is going on. What is it?"
Regards,
May Belt.
Hi.Most interconnects (of non-coaxial design) are shielded & the proper way of shielding is to ground the shielding at the receiving end of the cable end ONLY. IMO, this is the only technical reason why shielded ICs are marked on the jacket as directional.
I can assume the ICs John Atkinson used in his single blind test were also shielded & marked as directional . On reversing the cable 'direction', the shielding will be reversely directed. This might have contributed the sonic difference as detected by discerned ears.
Technically, when the shielding is more effective when grounded at the receiving end - the reference ground of lower level where any noises due to capacitive coupling will be drained off more effectively. Reversing the 'direction' of the ICs possibly makes electrostatic shielding much less effecitive as the case of John's home set-up.
"Something is gong on. What is it?" IMO, this is what it is. This is scientifically explanable.
.
Hi.Name me one living being on this planet that can hear up to 400KHz "most audible". It is not YOU, I hope.
It's not 400khz, it's 400 mhz. Who can hear it? Well besides me, I'll bet Jon Risch for one. I'm sure Clarkjohnson can for another. Probably e-stat. It wouldn't surprise me if John Atkinson could too. And not only that, I'd bet he can hear it to a resolution of +/- 0.1 db or better.I'm not going to entertain your objectivist demand for evicence or DBT nonsense. You'll just have to take my word for it.
RF frequencies do play a role in high fidelity reproduction because their intermodulation products and effect on wideband components can clearly be found in the audible range.rw
You can try this for yourselves, just place your mobile phone beside the cable or CD player. Make a call. Can you hear it?well, there you are.
and hear the interference at far lower frequencices (like the ones amplifiers can reach).Well, there you are.
I don't have that problem. Refer to my posts on grounding (Grounding Practices in Consumer Audio) and shielding.
What amazes me is that most of you guys either don't get it or don't want to, I haven't figured out which yet.
d.b.
most producers of high RF sources such as CD players, digital cable boxes, wireless routers, etc. haven't read your posts. The problem exists. Even a battery powered Sony Walkman CDP drives a battery powered Sony boombox nuts when in close proximity.Perhaps you should devote yourself to consulting with manufacturers about these issues.
and as far as I can tell they still do not wish to recognize that this is even an issue.
Too busy fining Howard Stern and the girls who have wardrobe malfunctions? The last I heard, AM was still a radio communications band.
I think you summed it up in your post. They call it self regulation these days. In any case the bad grounding habits have been going on for a whole lot of years. If you have a moment, search on this forum for "Grounding Practices in Consumer Audio" and the check out the article on Audioholics titled Switching Amplifiers; the Technology and the Issues. If you can absorb about half of what Bruno Putzey's and myself are saying then you are doing a whole lot better than most audiophiles, and 99% of this business, and that includes all of the Audio web-zines and magazines with the exception of Audioholics.com.
d.b.
Although I normally skip over Soundmind's comments as they have been inevitably boring, with little documentation.There has been some annotation by S/S designers in particular, who have told me that the concept of subharmonics is beginning to be explored. Mind you, the premise is in its very early stages, and there is nothing officially documented or published, just some anecdotal evidence.
The idea is that RF can be picked up by your cables (true enough) and then it can enter the feedback loop of your equipment. There it can intermodulate and the subharmonics of the RF picked up can create anomalies in the lower audio bandwidth: say if you have 100mHz signal and then a 100 mHz plus 10 signal, you can end up with a 10 Hz sub harmonic.One designer, who is working on this, says he discovered this accidentally while investigating power supply current draw, and noticed it was more than what was calculated. The RF IM was creating an amplifier oscillation, a very small one to be sure, but still noticable in the sounds. He was rather reluctant to say more, so my guess is that he is still working on the various aspects of this issue.
What do you expect from someone who has as little knowledge as I do, rocket science?
I thought you knew all the answers. :)
supposta be jimmy..:-)
I'll type "jimmy" a hundred times.jimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmy...
Well you get the idea.
Shhhh, don't tell anybody. It's a secret.
It's more than this, AND as you have said, you have to ground a shielded cable on BOTH SIDES, unless you have 2 wires under the shield to create a signal ground path. This leaves out all coax cables of the normal kind. Check it out yourself with an ohm meter. Of course , you are correct that with an EXTERNAL shield over a twisted pair, that you ONLY ground one side, normally.
We can hear cable direction with just connecting wires. No shield at all.
Hi.I tried to explain technically how come ICs may sound different when hooked up with their MARKED direction reversed. All these directional cables are twisted pair for balanced signal return with an overall shielding sleeving grounded at the receiving end of the cable.
Now you raised another issue of unbalanced ICs whereby the shielding sleeve also acts as the return signal path as for most of those skinny crappy so called ICs come free from your CD or DVD players. In this unbalanced signal return situation, it got to be grounded both end to complete the return circuit.
Shielding is NOT a sonic blessing for audio. I would refrain from using any shielding as much as possible due to the wire-to-shield capacitance of EACH conductor inside the shield sleeving.
A tightly twisted pair of conductors of IDENTICAL specs can provide self noise cancelling effect. The EMI/RFI picked up in one twist can be cancelled out by the noise picked up by the next twist down the line. Good for up to 1MHz. So for audio use, it is OK even shielding is not there.
A designer-builder-owner of a brandname power amp well known of its sonic quality publicly disnounces the use of any shielding for audio wires & cables. He claims shielding can only kill the livelness of music.
Indeed, overall shielding will add more capacitance to the inter-conductor capacitance of the twisted pair of wires forming the IC & is proportional to the dielectric constant of the insulation dielectric & inversely proportional to the log10 of D/d. D=overall diameter of the shielding & d=diameter of the wire itself.
Generally, shielding capacitance is a few time more than inter-conductor capacitance of a twisted pair.
In fact, all audio ICs I DIY built for own use & for whoever affordable, are tightly twisted pair WIHTOUT any overall shielding. The conductors are either 4N silver & Ag plated OFHC pure copper if budget is limited. This includes ICs btween turntable to phonostage, which works fine with mine for SHORT lengths.
I would touch coaxial cable separately if my readers are interested.
c-J
Did John Atkinson use a cable that was made like you stated, or did he use a coaxial cable. I agree with you, if you know this for sure.
.
Who says? You? Please, we know, from experience, that single hookup wires can be directional, therefore coaxial cables can be directional. Your finding is significant, but not a complete explanation.
Hi.Pardon my ignorance. Technically, I just can't figure why electrons prefer to flow one way to the other given the SAME homogenous molecular structure throughout the conductor.
Perhaps you can elaborate what "single hookup wires" are they & how you built these wires into an IC. How you hook those hookup wires to your system.
Don't overlook the very important aspect of interfacing response of the cable/components being hooked up as result of the input impedance of the receiving components involved.
I am not challenging your sonic "experience" in finding single wire (assuming no shielding to make it simple) being directional. Maybe you got golden ears.
But can you put forth any technical explanation on your finding?
As I always maintain, for everything happens under the sun, there is a course. So what would it be?That said, I always burn-in my DIY ICs (in twisted pair, no shielding) in one SAME direction I deliberately marked on their jackets & then always hook them up in the same direction of signal flow per the burn-in process. I do so just for good manangement rather than for any scientific reasons which I am yet to figure out.
Please, I have no scientific proof, ONLY that my former business partner, Bob Crump, (now deceased) found this to be true when he made audio cables. You don't have to believe him, or me, for that matter. However the direction that the wire is extruded, might give a clue, or maybe how the insulation is applied. Please, do not reject something, just because there is no easy explanation for it. We will have reverted to 'Soundmind' logic, in that case. ;-)
.
"We will have reverted to 'Soundmind' logic, in that case"Don't revert to logic whatever you do, mine or anyone elses. You'd lose your credentials as a bona fide audiophile.
c
Thanks Clark. I usually only reply if I think there is chance of moving things further forward. That is if I see a glimpse of someone saying (in effect) "There is something strange going on - there are things changing the sound which should not be changing the sound. We must/should investigate further." As soon as I see sentences along the lines of "What is being described cannot possibly be happening, therefore it isn't happening, therefore we do not have to do any investigations.", then I back off.
I have described before one of my favourite quotes - by the well known scientist Michio Kaku - when he describes the difficulty in getting some people to consider new concepts. He refers to some people as Flatlanders - people living in the Land of Two Dimensions who cannot (will not ??) listen to what the people who have discovered some of the wonders of the Three Dimensional World are attempting to describe.In my latest reply to 'thetubeguy', I particular chose the quotes from John Atkinson's article in 1983 because it illustrates how certain members of the audio industry (all of them technically competent) but who, collectively, had no explanation for what they were experiencing.
I could easily have chosen quotes from your own recent article in 'positive feedback online' on applying different chemicals to CDs and experiencing changes in the sound. (i.e. "Lotions Eleven, or the Fluid Dynamics of CD"), but I realised that under the current 'postings' on cables, it was not the right place - EVEN THOUGH your article on changing sound with chemicals IS COMPLETELY RELEVANT to the differences in sound created by different cables !!!!
Quotes from your article such as "I discussed my own experience with one product, Optrix, back in 1996 and speculated on the reasons why it took an iconic audio critic almost ten years to catch up. Nor had Optrix been my first fluid, nor was it even the best; it was simply an affordable introduction to the world of CD improvement that few would fail to hear unless their minds were set against it...... Not a single other major reviewer used, or admitted to using, a CD cleaning fluid. Anyway not after the Armor All fiasco...... Neither I nor anyone else in audiodom can confidently and satisfactorily explicate this phenomenon."....... Nor are the lotions discussed here necessarily the best route to CD improvement.... Others include the degausser, the mat, the edge paint, the edge carving, the Intelligent Chip.... And God knows what else...... WHY ? Who knows, none of these make particular sense given the orthodox 'bits is bits' wisdom."Absolutely correct. It does not make sense. So, if it happens, if it changes sound, and you are in the audio business, then the fact that it has happened has to be dealt with.
Yes, some people can deal with the situation by burying their heads in the sand saying "it cannot happen, therefore it does not happen" but some of us have chosen to deal with the problem - and investigate, and investigate, and investigate !!
Regards,
May Belt.
How often does one see anything there about the "tweaks"? Rarely!Magazines are in the business of promoting product; if that product is revealed to be lacking *right out of the box*, such knowledge might put a serious dent in sales, hence in advertising.
Thanks for the extensive quotes from my article, I must admit it was a guilty pleasure to read them again -- and to see how nearly timeless they were. As, I might add, are yours.
"I could easily have chosen quotes from your own recent article in 'positive feedback online' on applying different chemicals to CDs and experiencing changes in the sound."Coming from a guy for whom the 78 RPM shellac phonograph record is the pinacle of recording technology? Now there's a ringing endorsement from a reliable and respected source if ever there was one.
""There is something strange going on - "
Not really, not strange or unusual at all. Inventing new ways to cheat people out of their money or valuables by selling them something worthless by tricking them into being convinced it is very valuable is as old as the hills. That's how Jack bought the magic beans and how Manhattan Island was bought for a handful of beads.
c
Keep up the bad work. It provides a momentary amusement for the rest of us.
Which wine goes with which food? Which cable goes with which preamp. A cable is not a control element. It is not an attenuator or an amplifier. It has one purpose only and that is to connect two points in a circuit without distorting the signal, period. Comparing cables to each other is the first way you start misleading the suckers down the path of selling to them. There is only one valid comparison for a cable and that is to a shunt. Anything else is a deliberately flawed test. If it sounds identical to a shunt, it is performing perfectly and no improvement is possible. If it doesn't, it is flawed and should be discarded NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU LIKE THE DISTORTION IT PRODUCES. As a control element, a cable stinks. It is usually barely perceptable in its effect if it has any at all. Its effect cannot be adjusted. Its effect if it has any is unpredictable, and it is expensive. And if there is even the slighest shred of truth about some of them having to be broken it because of the materials it is made out of, it is unstable as well. The only engineers who buy into the cable crap are those in the audiophile equipment manufactucturing and selling business themselves working on the premise that they'll pretend your scam is true if you pretend theirs is too. When I lived in California, I discovered that this for many of them is their philosophy of life.As for fluids used on cds, anything which leaves a haze through which the optical system cannot penetrate completely forces the cd player's built in error bit correction system to operate by interpolating to recover or disguise lost bits. There are apparantly a lot of people who like that form of distortion too.
.
And to the degree and by the nature of its attenuation, it is less than ideal. A perfect cable would not attenuate at ANY frequencies and certainly not selectively in the bandwidth of interest for the signal it is intended to connect. If audiophile cables alter sound in any way, this is how they do it, by attenuating some frequencies more than others. The good news is that the cheapo cables do not. A $1 RS interconnect will pass a 7 mhz NTSC video signal without distortion visible even on a high quality 36" tv screen. For use at audio frequencies, it functions as perfectly as anyone could want and will only introduce its own noise and distortion of down -120 db at the seventh harmonic of 5 khz. That's better than any consumer electronics product ever on the market. To the degree an audiophile interconnect sounds different from this cable, it is flawed. To the degree it is more expensive, it is overpriced.
.
You hate to think that those expensive audiophile cables you went out and shopped and shopped for and spent so much money on are not only no better than the $1 RS versions, they are actually much worse. Well that's your problem, not mine.
Hi.I never bought any ICs & power cords from any vendors once I started to DIY mine years back. Sonically just not good enough, pal. That includes those cheapies from RS stores.
FYI, since you missed it, all the ICs & power cords I custom-built for my own use & for whoever affordable, are built with minum 4N pure silver or Ag plated OFHC pure copper wires.
You sounded like the official spokesman for "$1 RS" ICs. Tell me which RS store I can get one for only $1 to try out vs my silver cords.
Likewise a boombox is good enough for you since you only read & believe everything someone claimed to measure without first confirm it by listening.
"That's your problem", but don't pass it to me.
c-J
cheap-Jack, Understand you are arguing with the man who made this statement... "And if a sound system which could convince someone that they were hearing actual music were built, under an identical experiment, substituting a Citation 11 preamp or inserting a BSR equalizer would not alter that result either. Both do exactly what they are supposed to do as well as it needs to be done, just like those Home Depot speaker wires and Radio Shack interconnects do."Soundmind honestly, yet mistakenly believes his Citation 11 preamp and BSR equalizer are as sonically accurate as the best audio components out there! If he cannot hear the difference between a Citation 11 and a GAS Thadrea (both of which I owned and the GAS embarrasses the Citation) do you honestly expect him to hear differences in wires?
Tube Guy, you remind me of a funny situation that I am now in.
I have a new business partner who has dabbled with hi fi even longer than me, but he didn't stay with it, like I did, over the decades. He had hi fi equipment 45 years ago, that would appear to be a mixture of Cheap Jack and Soundmind's components today.
You know, the Dyna MK 2 preamp, 2 Dyna Mk3 power amps, and 2 AR-3 loudspeakers.
Over the years, he sold this stuff to sail to Tahiti, instead.
When he returned, he lived on a sailboat for years, so he didn't need a hi fi.
Well, what did he do, when he finally moved into a house?
Well, first, he bought my old K-horns, and used these with some cheap solid state equipment. Then he upgraded his video system to VMPS speakers, and one of my Parasound 5 channel power amps. Third, he asked me for a better power amp for his K-horns, and I loaned him a Dyna Stereo 70, that I had sitting around. He was too cheap to replace the flat output EL34 output tubes, and the sound sounded mushy and dull on his K-horns, so I loaned him a Parasound 1200 solid state amp that he is now using.
Now, let's get to wires: He found a mail order source of cheap and pretty cables, and he thinks are good enough. He remains very skeptical of cables in general, and I just ignore his opinion.
However, because he worked with me for no money for the last 8 months to make preamps to finish an order that was previously pre-paid for, and was not finished by Bob Crump, who took his money with him, to the grave, and I was stuck with finishing the order for free, I helped him make his own CTC preamp that is equal to mine, with great care taken to the parts, circuitry, case, pots, interior wiring, etc, that would cost about $22,000 on the American market today. This will probably drive his K-horns. However, he could care less about the connecting cables at this time. When I mentioned this to Brian Walsh, who also owns a CTC preamp of the same quality, he said that without good cables, my friend was almost wasting the potential of the preamp. Overreaction? Not really, because when I mentioned this to another friend who also has a CTC preamp, he said that when HE changed his wires, the preamp imaged much better than with regular quality wires. It was a big surprise to him at the time that there would be so much difference, just with wires, but you have to have the corresponding audio equipment to go along with it, or it might be a waste of time and money.
Now where does this lead us? Well, wires can be important, if the rest of your hi fi is correspondingly good. If you use tube amps, you should be willing to replace the tubes when they go flat, as tired tubes can sound pretty bad. Third, if you have a good system, even if it came piecemeal and by accident, you should consider connecting wires as more important than you normally would, just like if you bought a sports car, you should not drive on cheap, underspec'd tires on it, just to save money. I did this once, what a mistake! Darn near killed me! Missed a year of fun, too!
A perfect cable would not attenuate at ANY frequencies and certainly not selectively in the bandwidth of interest for the signal it is intended to connect.Another is critical timing and phase response. I can dig up numerous posts by JNeutron that shoot down your "my $1 cable is perfect for audio" soapbox. The same is true of CD players. That's what jitter is all about. The timing of those digits marching through the system.
Hi.Likewise, where can we can a "perfecst" sound reproduction system?
An insulated wire or a cable is technically an attenuator, no matter
how "perfect" a cable could be.Just to quote one delay example.
Waves travels at light speed in vacuum. In air, its propagation velocity drops 5%. It drops more when the wave is guided along a wire
with insulation which somewhat 'contains' the electric field.This we call it dielectric delay. Foamed polyethylene, a common insulation material for coaxial cable for high frequency transfer, delays radio waves the least: 20% with its dielectric constant (e)being 1.55. The best next to free air.
Teflon (TFE & FEP) is next down the delay ladder: 30% (relative to vacuum) with e being 2.0. That's why Teflon has been popularly used as dielectric for audio cables.
To claim a "$1 RadioShack type Interconnect" "functions as perfectly as anyone could want" is a flat lie. Cheapie ICs as such commonly use PVC as insulaton & jacket. PVC is one of the worse delay line which drops wave propagation speed by 50% with e shot up to 4.0.
What is worse is it shows appreciable increase in dielectric constant, ie. wave speed delay, insulation leakage when operation temperatures & frequency increase. It will make such insulations not suitable for use as instrumentation cables where capacitance, characteristic impedance & leakage must be kept constant.
If you knew anything about cables, you'd know that timing or phase response is directly related to amplitude frequency response in wires and many electronic circuits."The same is true of CD players. That's what jitter is all about. The timing of those digits marching through the system."
I've debunked Jon Risch's bullshit about digital jitter in cd players and wires many times. The jist of it is that the jitter in the mechanical system rotating the disc is ALWAYS thousands of times worse than anything a cable introduces. The problem is solved by reclocking in buffer storage registers. If that weren't done, the system couldn't work because the storage registers would either become depleted or they would overfill and distort very badly. So then he argued that there is "fast jitter" and "slow jitter." What a bunch of crap he always keeps up his sleeve for when he loses an arguement.
If you knew anything about cables, you'd know that timing or phase response is directly related to amplitude frequency response in wires and many electronic circuits.You've already lost that battle with Mr. Neutrino.
I've debunked Jon Risch's bullshit about digital jitter in cd players and wires many times.
A legend in your own mind.
I'm not interested in discussing whether or not a human being can detect a change in time of arrival of sound by two microseconds. Especially when humans can't even distinguish that that they have heard two sounds and not one if they are separated by less than 40 milliseconds, 2000 times a much. Pinpoint localization of the source is the LEAST important aspect of high fidelity sound reproduction. Especially when the technology fails completely almost every single time in every aspect which really does matter.
Pinpoint localization of the source is the LEAST important aspect of high fidelity sound reproduction.To you that is. Regardless, you ignore that such differences exist. Not to mention a boatload of others. You have your favorite tree and completely ignore the forest. :)
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I'm amazed there is someone today who really thinks Dynaco amplifiers and AR speakers (no matter how many extra tweeters you bolt onto them) represent state-of-the-art. Or that a Lincoln LSC is a "performance" car. Equally ridiculous assertions.Perhaps because it is fun to poke holes in his arrogant ignorance persona. :)
Hi.I am still using the 50-year-young Dynakit ST-70 stock power amp, with its matching stock PS-2 pre-amp, donated to me by an audiophile friend a couple years back. I super-upgraded them to reserve its orginality yet without rebuilding them like many have done by changing the original design with different boards & tubes.
Now, they sound pretty nice & 'modern' considering they are half-century aged - see-through transparent, dynamic, wide-tall-deep & pitch dark soundstaging. It is a "state-of-the art" now? I don't know. But for sure, they both sounded like crap when I first got them.
AR-3A speakers? I heard enough decades ago & I was never impressed.
c-J
Cheap Jack, I know Dyna pretty well. For its time, and with a little TLC, they can still sound very good, even nearly great. I have a PAM 1, which is a mono version of your PAS2. (How is that for history?) I also have a Stereo 70, and 2 MK 4's (which I love). I used a PAS3 for 10 years, changed it to a 3X back in the late '60's, until I got my JC-2 preamp (serial #1) from Mark Levinson. Now I use a CTC, but only because I got one for my efforts in designing the electronics for it.
There is a difference with better electronics, but an Audible Illusions preamp will really give me a run for my money. Trust me, it is better than the Dyna.
What phono cartridge do you use? If you use one. This is IMPORTANT because the Dyna phono stage is very slew rate limited. I will explain later, if it is useful to you.
Hi.what is "important" to know in improving the "very limited" slew rate of my PS-2 considering I own hundreds of LPs.
Are you technical? It has to do with dV/dT=I/C . The output tube can't properly drive the RIAA network. Softens the sound with lots of extra 2'nd harmonic distortion, with high dV/dt signals. A Shure cartridge might be OK. MC is a problem.
Hi.I am a subjectivist too, but a rational one. I believe everything under the sun happens in its ratioinal course, comprehensible to us or not is a matter of time. If not now, may be later given the current science can deliver.
That's why whatver sonic effect arises, I always judge it by some simple physics or science I know of. I know there should be an explanation to validate and invalidate such sonic phenomenon. A real stuff, a tweaking joke, or some commercial snake-oils.
Like I responded to your posts re Atkinson's sonic finding on reversed cable connection. My rationale can tell that was not a wolf cry.
If one can take such rational approach to all those sonic things, the bottom line is saving tons of energy, time & money on so called sound improving gadgets offered by vendors at large. Be a skeptical
consumer.Blindly demanding on instrumentation evidence in a die-hard objectivist role may not AWAYS work in audios due to limitation
of relevant knowledge & available measuring instrument to tackle abstract & subjective perception as such.In the future for sure, but now we are not there yet.
c-J
PS: I am very skeptical about CD cleaning fluids that are claimed to improve CD sound. My rationale can't explain at all as CD is 100% non-contact laser sensing. Unlike LPs which involves 100% stylus to groove contact, a cleaning fluid can change the sound. Are the CD cleaning fluids in question pigmented or clear ?????
Maybe you should speak to someone versed in optics. (That would be, inter alia, me.) On the simplest level, have you never cleaned a mirror and seen yourself more clearly? Also we have diffusion and diffraction, the properties of which are changed by surface conditions. Finally, did you know? The CD per se is an analog disc, therefore subject to many of the same considerations as an LP.Hope that helps.
"The CD per se is an analog disc, therefore subject to many of the same considerations as an LP."So all those microscopic pits and lack of pits which correspond to ones and zeros and phototransistors switching only on and off is all a bunch of crap according to you. Why don't you actually go out and learn something for a change instead of just spouting off whatever nonsense comes into your head all the time?
s
"Under single- blind listening tests, they both consistently identified the difference between A and B only to be told later that the only difference between A and B was the direction of the one metre length of interconnect between pre and power amps !"Does wire have a metalurgical orientation? YES, having worked in a wire mill and watched wire being made, it is obvious. Why? How is wire made? It is cold drawn by being pulled through dies to reduce its diameter and work harden it (so much for monolithic crystal wires.) So which way sounds better, with the leading end connected at the preamp and and the trailing end connected to the amplifer or the other way around? Should the wire be reduced in a single pass or in multiple passes? If in multiple passes, should each pass be in the same direction or should successive passes be made in opposite directions? What percentage reduction on each pass? Should it be annealed between pulls or after being pulled or not at all? At what temperature and for how long? Should it be quenched? Passivated? With what acid and at what strength? What if the wire is made of strands, is it better to have the grain orientations all in the same direction, mixed 50/50 in opposite directions, or mixed in some other proportions? What tests do you use to determine grain orientation, electrical or electron microscope or both? What is the optimal grain size? Whose PVC insulation sounds better, Dow Corning's or Dupont's? Which formulation? Which Teflon sounds better TEF or FEP? What about Halar? Does it hold true for speaker wire and power cords as well or just for interconnects. How do you get the power company to pay attention to all of this in the feeder cables they use to power your house? What about the electrican who wired it?
In citing Mr. Atkinson, I remind you he is the man who recently said he must use a digital equalizer to master his recordings accurately to 0.1 db but would not so much as use a treble or bass control to correct wildly out of balance recordings he listens to being played. You hold such an individual's opinions in high esteem? Why?
Hi.(1) "metallurgical orientation" in common metals is mainly aimed for
improving their toughness & reducing their bittleness. So what
does orientated drawn copper strands get to do their sonic difference ?? I want to know.(2) Recording & playing are two totally different ballgames. Why
compare apple to orange?In a recording studio, the job of the engineer there is to ensure the best recording as per the music performers' requirement under the controlled acoustical conditions of the studio. Hence J. Atkinson used his digital equalizers to do his job.
In an indoor playback environment where God-knows-what acoustical property therein, the most precise equalizer won't help bring back the recording acoustics environment to home. Period.
So why bother? Who needs tone controls in home music playback nowadays anyway? I don't & my linestage only get two knobs for adjusting the volume of each channel. Do I encounter problem of acoustical feebacks blah blah blah? Just some precaution in some simple acoustical wall/ceiling treatment, none so ever for me.
How fortunate you are...that all of the recordings you listen to not only have exactly the same tonal balance but that they are a perfect match to your sound system. I on the other hand am not so fortunate. I sometimes have to tweak the FR of my sound system to compensate for the differences in my collection of recordings. That's life I guess. Some of us are just luckier than others.
Hi.I am yet to encounter unbalanced sound noticeable enough to bring in any audio frequency equalizers - a hugh sonic blocker in the signal path.
Mind you, my programes include hundred of LPs, most of them are recycles from Goodwill & Thrift stores, very very old recordings.
CDs, DVD-audio discs , tapes taped off AM broadcasts.The last thing I want to do is to add any distortion generators like tone controls let alone frequency equalizers in my audio chain. It only block up the see-through transparency of my soundstage which is my first sonic priority.
The common sense question is: which is more important: raw music or tonal balance via distortion generators?
I tested the acoustics of my basement audio den with a realtime acoutical frequency analyzer with the pick-up microphone of the analyser placed on my head at my 'sweet spot'. Thank the Almighty, I could not see any questionable peaks & dips across the 20Hz to 20KHz spectrum display. Of coure, I am pretty forgiving & I don't think my rusted ears can detect some plus/minus decimal dB accuracy.
"The last thing I want to do is to add any distortion generators like tone controls let alone frequency equalizers in my audio chain. It only block up the see-through transparency of my soundstage which is my first sonic priority."Funny, the recording engineer didn't have those concerns when he sat in front of 128 different tone controls on his mixing console tweaking them like mad to get the sound he wanted when he made your recordings.
"I tested the acoustics of my basement audio den with a realtime acoutical frequency analyzer with the pick-up microphone of the analyser placed on my head at my 'sweet spot'. Thank the Almighty, I could not see any questionable peaks & dips across the 20Hz to 20KHz spectrum display."
There is only one possible explanation for that, you equipment is broken. ALL sound systems have peaks and dips in the passband. I think it was Bassnut Rich Greene who said bass response usually varies over a range of 40 db, a factor of 10,000 to one. And then there are room resonances...ten million of them in the average room in the audio passband. You might consider having your equipment repaired...or learning how to use it.
"Of coure, I am pretty forgiving & I don't think my rusted ears can detect some plus/minus decimal dB accuracy"
You're no John Atkinson. He can detect +/- 0.1 db and demands perfection from his recordings. It wouldn't surprise me if he could hear up to 400,000,000 as well. At least in his dreams...as superbatman.
So......the recording engineer didn't have those concerns when he sat in front of 128 different tone controls on his mixing console tweaking them like mad to get the sound he wanted when he made your recordings.
Besides the obvious facts that not all recording labels use copious amounts of EQ (or at all) or that there are cumulative losses with any kind of signal post processing, why if the engineer had already "tweaked them like mad to get the sound he wanted", do you feel the need to change them? Perhaps you need to join Knob Twiddlers Anonymous.
Different engineers use different speakers to monitor their final product. Their results differ for that alone if no other reason. Recording engineers use different miking techniques and different mikes. I've got two recordings from Green Hill Records, "Dixieland Jazz" and Dixieland Hymns." Same musicians, same recording studio, consecutive catalog numbers, same equipment, but different engineers and different seating arrangements. They sound radically different especially in their level of bass. And then there are the engineer's personal preferences. There are plenty of reasons why different recordings have different equalizations. Billy Taylor's Steinway can be made to sound a lot like mine...with a cut in the extreme bass and a moderate boost in the upper midrange and treble. Just a few db but it makes a lot of difference. Some of Marian McPartland's recordings need a similar tweak. George Shearing's don't. Many older recordings need a treble boost like the ones made by the Mormon Tabernacle choir. Their newer digital recordings don't. London FFRR vinyls need a treble boost. Columbia and some DG vinyls need a treble cut. You want accuracy, you have to be ready, willing, and able to adapt the sound system to the particular recording and you have to know what the instruments are supposed to sound like. That's life. Anyone who thinks all recordings are all made the same way and all you have to do is turn it on is fooling themselves but that's their problem, not mine. BTW, that's the reaon for the Citation 11 preamp. That is the purpose of its five band graphic equalizer, to compensate for different recordings. The other equalizer is adjusted to make the "average" recoring sound flat through the system when the Citation is flat. What is an average recording? Glad you asked. I use DG cds, mostly Herbert VK and the VPO or BPO. That seems to me to be right in the center of most recordings.
Different engineers use different speakers to monitor their final product. Their results differ for that alone if no other reason.I see. So they don't equalize their own speakers for flat response. Interesting.
Same musicians, same recording studio, consecutive catalog numbers, same equipment, but different engineers and different seating arrangements. They sound radically different especially in their level of bass.
Ok. So you are compensating for inept engineers who don't know what neutral bass sounds like. Especially since they don't EQ their own playback systems.
Maybe we need to take those toys out of their hands so there is less damage to correct! ;)
"I see. So they don't equalize their own speakers for flat response."Some do, some don't. Mostly it's the audiophile types who don't. In the old days, everyone did. But that didn't make them sound exactly the same. If some companies had similarities, it was in part do to widespread use of the same speaker models for monitors. A7s in the 50s and 60s, B&W 801s in the 80s.
"Ok. So you are compensating for inept engineers who don't know what neutral bass sounds like."
I didn't say that. The issues are extremely complex. There is no one easy explanation as to why different recordings have different tonal balances. On some recordings, even different insturments are equalized grossly differently. There is no satisfactory fix for that problem short of going back to the master tape. You are satisfied to live with these variations from one recording to another without even trying to correct for them or pretend that they don't exist. Fine, that's your choice but it's not good enough for me.
Mostly it's the audiophile types who don't.You're so predictable!
You are satisfied to live with these variations from one recording to another without even trying to correct for them...
Indeed. I don't share your FR fetish.
"Indeed. I don't share your FR fetish."Clearly you don't. But then having just heard millions of dollars of junk audio equipment a few months ago where the second and third octaves were almost always so weak that recordings of a Steinway grand piano sounded more like a toy piano just so these systems can give the illusion of clarity to tyros is not acceptable to me. That is NOT what high fidelity is about. Or at least not what it is supposed to be about. I recommend that you listen to real music for a change and you will get to understand just how awfully inadequate most audio reproducing systems are even when cost is no object...especially when cost is no object. And it will also become obvious to you that if you want to hear recordings of musical instruments that actually sound something like musical instruments, you have to at the very least compensate for the differences in the way the recordings are made. But if you don't, just get by on what you've been doing, it seems to make you happy enough, you're in the same boat with many other audiophiles who don't know or care to find out anything about live music either.
...where the second and third octaves were almost always so weak that recordings of a Steinway grand piano sounded more like a toy piano ... is not acceptable to me. That is NOT what high fidelity is about.First of all, audio shows are really not good places to audition gear. It's like going to a car show. You can look and touch but not really experience. They serve to narrow down the auditioning process in your home later. The environments are rarely if ever designed for good acoustics. Further, there are compromises made to accommodate either displaying other gear or more folks in the room. The speaker is not given its "choice" in the matter. All you can expect to glean is an idea of a system's potential.
This past Sunday, I spent about four hours optimizing the position of my (picky to place ) bipolars in their new room. I began with the golden triangle method and experiemented from there. The initial position resulted in a 16 db variation in one of those octaves. It sounded heavy. After twenty two trials of moving speakers, moving listening couch, bass traps, and bass contour control (yes, there is a "three band EQ" built into the transformers), I found the smoothest overall result. This was verified by using an RS SPL meter and a test CD with ten test frequencies ranging from 25-200 hz. While the room does exhibit an inherent peak at 40 hz, I was able to get no more than a 3 db variance from 60 hz to 200 hz. 4 db to 50 hz.
"I recommend that you listen to real music for a change and you will get to understand just how awfully inadequate most audio reproducing systems are even when cost is no object...especially when cost is no object." (damned HTML tag problem!)
So how many years have you been a child molester? I do listen to live music almost every day (wife's baby grand) and like you, use classical music as the reference point. The very best systems I've heard (certainly NOT limited to mine) do convey many aspects of the live experience, especially when that is an intimate venue.
"First of all, audio shows are really not good places to audition gear."Then why do the exhibitors bother to go at all if not to show off what their products can do? The room was no good. We didn't have enough time to set it up properly. We had a problem with the equipment and we couldn't make repairs out in the field. That was just a prototype, the production units are much better. You never hear them tell you, this is how it works and this is what you will get. Well surprise, it was the same problem (among many) from the $10,000 Martin Logan Summits at Harvey Radio which Costco is selling for $7500 connected to a monster Krell amplifier, an outrageously priced McIntosh preamp and McIntosh cd player. That pile of junk probably retailed for well north of $25,000. No upper bass or lower midrange. Cellos sounded like the musicians were half dead. Oh, it was the amp and preamp which were no good that time. How about those crapply little VS VR1s with an $1800 matching VS subwoofer I recently heard at someone's house which had the same problem? Was it the Chinese made Dynaco Stereo 70 clone from "Tubetech" with the upper midrange/lower treble peak or the Italian made digital solid state amp he swapped it out with which was the real problem? Or was it the setup? Funny, before the demo, the guy took a tape measure out to be absolutely certain the speakers were exactly 44" from the wall behind it, not 43 1/2" or 44 1/2". Maybe he just got that wrong too. When is it that it doesn't sound right because the equipment just plain stinks? I know, when it's mine. T.S. E-Stat, I've got real musical instruments in the same room as my equipment to compare with...and it can sound pretty damned close when the FR is carefully tweaked...sometimes.
Then why do the exhibitors bother to go at all if not to show off what their products can do?The same reason why automobile manufacturers exhibit at numerous venues every year.
Manufacturers don't honestly think that a cramped untreated hotel room can do really good components justice. I would agree that many dealers don't necessarily set up the components in the best way either.
No upper bass or lower midrange. Cellos sounded like the musicians were half dead... with the upper midrange/lower treble peak.
These are largely placement or compatibility issues. You work with what you have in those environments.
...and it can sound pretty damned close when the FR is carefully tweaked...sometimes.
From a FR perspective only, I have no doubt. As for hearing the full decay of the pedal sustain or the harmonically rich "growl" of the strings, better exists. It's all about priorities.
"It's all about priorities."Yes, hearing recordings of musical instruments which actually sound like musical instruments is my top priority. What's yours?
Each of us has their own priority list as to which one of those is most important.Having lived with your electronics (or very close cousins) before, I can tell you that I get greater separation, finer detail and inner resolution than do you. Period. Maybe that is simply a more clearly defined string squeak or articulating a vocalist's intonations better. On the other hand, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest you've tweaked the FR curve more to your liking. Is one better or two better? There is no one answer.
I recall your saying that you didn't like your speakers for the first couple of years you owned them. Only after adding the "spectral reflection compensation" (aka bolted on three additional tweeters) did you like them. And then only after yet another two years of tweaking them and your EQs. No one is saying that the very best gear is any less forgiving in the setup.
Even you in your own limited way understand that the two way and three way box speaker doesn't work. You wouldn't have gone out and bought $35,000 worth of room screens and moved them around inch by inch if you didn't. You THINK you know why they sound better than box speakers. But you are wrong. The harmonic distortion of box speakers over most of their range in no more audible than your room dividers. The real difference comes from the way they radiate sound into space. There is no comparison with a box speaker especially at high frequencies where it counts most. That's the problem spectral reflection compensation is intended to solve and it solves it more effectively than a large bipolar radiator. As for flat frequency reponse from one end of the recording/playback chain to the other, you equipment is no flatter than most other people's if for no other reason than the fact that there are such radical differences in the recordings themselves. What's the good of a sound system where you can pinpoint every instrument blindfolded to a tenth of a degree if none of them sound anything like actual musical instruments?
Thanks.The real difference comes from the way they radiate sound into space.
And their absolute top to bottom coherency which is key to fooling my senses of the live event. You don't hear The Bass, The Midrange, and The Treble.
What's the good of a sound system where you can pinpoint every instrument blindfolded to a tenth of a degree if none of them sound anything like actual musical instruments?
I agree entirely. I've heard Double Advents sound more balanced and natural that a couple of higher priced spread box speakers. That allegation does not apply, however, to the Sound Labs.
Most speakers radiatate ALL of their high frequency energy directly at the listener. The higher the freqeuncy the worse it gets. Want proof? Just look at a Madisound catalogue. They have performance curves for many dozens of tweeters from many many manufacturers. And they all have the same fatal flaw, they all have incresingly narrow dispersion as frequency gets higher. By the time you reach 15 khz, most are down 7 to 12 db just 30 degrees off axis. Small wonder when reproducing full range sound such as from a cd player they are shrill. The best dispersion of any tweeter I saw was the AR 3/4" dome. It was only down 5db 60 degrees off axis. Why? for at least 2 reasons. First it was only 3/4" not one inch or an inch and a quarter, smaller being better at dispersion. Second, it did not have the semi horn loading all other manufacturer's dome tweeters have. Look at any of them carefully and you will see a small groove between the dome and the frame. This improves efficiency but reduces dispersion. Still this was not good enough even for AR. The LST which was cloned by Cello had 4 such tweeters aimed in 3 directions. In fact AR built that speaker for Cello for a while. Too bad they didn't incorporate this idea in AR9. Your speakers radiate 50% of their sound including high frequency sound away from you. That is much much better. But it's not nearly good enough. My speakers radiate well over 90% of their high frequency energy away from me just the way most real musical instruments do. That is why even when they reproduce music containing a great deal of high frequency energy, they are never shrill like conventional box speakers are. That energy arrives from many different dirctions. There are other advantages too. More tweeters means little or no tendency to dynamic compression due to voice coil heating. And full extension of the treble allows the bass to be fully extended as well if the speaker is cabable of it without sounding bottom heavy. As for imaging...well you know from your own experience that radiating high frequency energy over a wider angle doesn't degrade it, in fact it improves it making the stereo image audible even when you are not between the speakers. $35,000 is a lot of money for loudspeakers. Maybe it's the best you can do...if you have to buy someone elses answer to a problem.
The LST which was cloned by Cello had 4 such tweeters aimed in 3 directions. In fact AR built that speaker for Cello for a while. Too bad they didn't incorporate this idea in AR9.I remember the LST. Hearing them for the first time was quite a letdown after the gushing review by Hirsch. Even the dealer called them a "toad". While they may have radiated peachy keen, they were dull and bland. That and the 10" woofer variation didn't last long.
Your speakers radiate 50% of their sound including high frequency sound away from you.
More than that. Unlike flat paneled flavors, the U-1s radiate uniformly across a 90 degree arc. First reflection point damping is critical!
My speakers radiate well over 90% of their high frequency energy away from me just the way most real musical instruments do.
Yes and no. If you choose a distant listening perspective where the indirect sound dominates the field, then yes. That is certainly not the case when one is much closer. Like listening to my wife play the piano in the living room. Like the last time I heard the Carmina Burana where I was in Row C. I assure you the first violins were up close and personal. Or to a lesser degree in Row G where Harry Pearson likes. As opposed to another mentor, Dr. Cooledge (a 30 year baritone in the ASO Chorus and former TAS reviewer) who has always bought season tickets in the Loge. There is no one answer.
More tweeters means little or no tendency to dynamic compression due to voice coil heating.
Agreed. The most impressive HF reproduction I've heard was from the ribbon array in HP's Nola Reference system. With an incredibly pure front end and seemingly unlimited quantities of power (a pair of VTL Wotans delivering 1200 watts triode), there was simultaneously a sense of delicacy, power and utter ease. The sound field was enormous. (I'd like to hear those amps driving my stats). There is nothing like that completely unstrained sense of "authority" like one experiences live.
$35,000 is a lot of money for loudspeakers.
I bought mine used for about two thirds of that. They did, however, have new cores (panels), and completely upgraded electronics shipped directly from the factory. The frames were slightly scratched though. A little touch up paint did the trick. :)
"Yes and no. If you choose a distant listening perspective where the indirect sound dominates the field, then yes"You misunderstood what I said. I said "radiated" into space, not the percentage of reflected sound reaching your ears. Most of the sound from a musical instrument whether low or high frequencies is not radiated directly at you. How much of the indirect radiation reaches you and at what frequencies depends on besides the spatial radiating characteristics of the source, the acoustics of the room, the location and orientation of the source, and your realtive location to the source. In an anechoic chamber a live source and a speaker with flat on axis response like AR3a will sound identical. In a real room they won't be even close because of the differences in sound radiating indirectly and reaching you as reflections. And this can be much, even most of the sound. The musical instrument radiates most all all of its sound uniformly as a function of frequency in whatever directions it radiates. That is if it radiates 50% of its middle frequencies at the back wall, it will radiate about 50% of its high frequencies at the back wall too. This is becasue it comes from the same vibrating source like a vibrating string and the box. But a speaker can be nearly omnidirectional at middle and low frequencies and highly directional at high frequencies. This is why they sound so shrill and different. The sound energy as a function of direction and time from each note reaching your ears is entirely different. My experience is that short of correcting this problem, there is no way to make the speaker sound like the instrument.
BTW, insofar as direct versus reflected sound you hear reaching you at a live concert, according to Dr. Bose's measurements at Boston Symphony Hall, the sound is 11% direct and 89% reflected when you get to 19 feet from the performing stage and his curves show that as you go further back in the audience, the percentage of reflected to direct sound gets even greater. Why this justified a speaker which radiated 89% of its sound indirectly is unclear....in fact it is entirely irrelavent.
You misunderstood what I said. I said "radiated" into space, not the percentage of reflected sound reaching your ears. Most of the sound from a musical instrument whether low or high frequencies is not radiated directly at you.Agreed.
But a speaker can be nearly omnidirectional at middle and low frequencies and highly directional at high frequencies. This is why they sound so shrill and different.
Perhaps that's why I favor full range designs where the radiation is uniform, regardless of frequency.
Why this justified a speaker which radiated 89% of its sound indirectly is unclear....in fact it is entirely irrelavent.
True. All rooms contribute indirect sound without employing that gross solution. 901s can be fun at times though, if not accurate. Carefully controlling the backwave of bipolars so they do not confuse the image is critical.
Nice jousting with you today, sir. Now, I've got to figger out why the stupid HT system is humming.
Which is more important? Absolute tight frequency control via an EQ which in my experience diminishes the soundstage and resolution or getting close via careful speaker and listener placement, use of contour controls built in to the speaker (many do) and use of multiple room treatment strategies. Take your pick.I vote for the latter. In time I may find the value in spending the considerable sum to get a good digital EQ. The garden variety (like the Behringer I already use with the subs on my HT) don't cut it.
Hi.I agree any active components or devices inserted in the signal path
will affect the sound, regardless how little. Hence what you find with an EQ, a can of worms.
...that all of the recordings you listen to not only have exactly the same tonal balanceI trust the engineers to have achieved their goals. After all, they all use equalizers and can achieve whatever balance they choose. Wait... Some of those engineers must be idiots, right?
I've thrown away all the marginal recordings in my collection. Why bother with such crap when there are thousands of very good alternatives?
"Wait... Some of those engineers must be idiots, right?"No, they just couldn't hear to 400,000,000 hz or they didn't have access to a 62 band digital equalizer with a resolution of +/+ 0.1 db like John Atkinson does. They had to make do with what they had.
"I've thrown away all the marginal recordings in my collection. Why bother with such crap when there are thousands of very good alternatives?"
I never throw anything away. Not since I discovered what a mistake it was to trash all those baseball cards and comic books back when I thought I outgrew them.
...they didn't have access to a 62 band digital equalizer with a resolution of +/+ 0.1 db like John Atkinson does. They had to make do with what they had.It took you two years to tune your ten band units? Apparently even that isn't enough since you seem to require fiddling with the adjustments on a per recording basis. I spent about four hours yesterday tuning my speakers in their new abode. I varied distance to back wall, bass trap placement, distance to listening couch, and even the bass level control on the Sound Lab backplates. Using my trusty RS SPL meter and a Stereophile test CD, I made twenty two trials of analyzing ten frequencies from 25 to 200 hz for each one. I was able to reduce a 16 db octave to octave difference down to 2 db.
I never throw anything away.
Try moving. It is then when you fully appreciate the (non) value of all the crap one tends to accumulate. :)
.
It has an orange cover. Bands 20-30. The first band is a reference tone at 1 khz to get a baseline.Highly recommended.
You hold such an individual's opinions in high esteem? Why?
"You hold such an individual's opinions in high esteem? Why?""Because he listens."
Apparantly not critically enough to turn down the treble control on those shrill audiophile speakers he hears so often. He proably doesn't even have a treble control. Just a 62 band digital equalizer for tweaking recordings to 0.1 db per band. I wonder if he can hear to 400,000,000 hz too.
I'd like to limit this discussion to VGA cables your typical or average audiophile / music lover would encounter on their computer system. Not some obscure example that will allow you to claim I never said ALL cables!
(Nor will I discuss DVI, which produces some of the most sterile, lifeless images I've ever seen).So for the sake of this discussion;
1) VGA cables are 3-4.5 feet.
2) Monitor Powercords are 6-8 feet.Now if all these VGA cables spec the same and are of a suitable gauge and all components are functioning properly, do you or do you not believe visible differences can be seen, between different manufactuers/dealers? How can this be, when my Videophilia Silver VGA cables simply look so much better?!
I have SEVERAL friends who have also witnessed how much better my monitors picture looks in MY house on MY system.
I invite anyone to come to MY house to prove that this is not so.
I will not participate in public tests outside my house. They create too much pressure, precluding me from seeing what I can easily see at home. Plus they are too short in duration. It often takes me weeks of viewing to start to see the improvements in picture quality.PLEASE understand I'm not trying to imply every VGA cable and power cord looks differently. Afterall, if two different dealers buy a cheap Belden VGA cable, the XYZ and both put their names on it and then sell it, how could it look different?
However, what if we compared these cables; Alpha-Core Inc's Triode Quartz Solid Silver VGA, Nordost's VGA Valhalla and Cardas' Golden Reference VGA? Would visible differences now be seen (other than visual sticker shock)?
cheers,
AJ
BTW, What Is The Average Subjectivists Beliefs On Automotive Braking Systems? Commercial Aircraft design? Skyscraper Elevators?
The Computer Circuits they are typing on? Would these be better off based on purely Subjective Engineering also? I don't mean ergonomic design either. Ground up engineering. I wonder?
You’re being a bit naive about the VGA cable comparison – of course 400Mhz signals can be easily affected by a 5ft cable. It’s actually very difficult to make a decent VGA cable. The bandwidth requirement is 20,000 times greater than that of audio!Those same cable parameters have no proven perceptual effects for audio signals (typical impedances, lengths, etc.)
You're not quite catching the sarcasm are you? Try reading my entire post immediately after reading Tubeguys original LOL.cheers,
NT
Well seeing as you're being so sarcastic. I live in FLA also. I'm willing to PROVE I can hear differences in cables, care to come by and see the truth for yourself? Of would you prefer to just remain sarcastic and ridicule others?Had you followed the many posts of wires here you'd have understood why I needed to be so specific about the wires. Otherwise people like PAT D will deny he believes all wires "sound" the same and then cite some real obscure example as his proof that wires can "sound" different, while never believing anyone else's claims that wires "sound" different.
Funny thing about people who behave like you do AJ. They seldom list what components are in their systems.
You misunderstand. I have no doubt that you can hear differences with your wacko wire, "high end" electronics and/or poorly designed loudspeakers. That's precisely what is supposed to happen when you intentionally distort/eq the signal. Differences. Sure. Better?
If you consider a distorted/eq'd signal outside of the recording/loudspeaker/room interface to be ideal or desirable, then yes, I suppose "better".BTW, what would my equipment list have to do with your superior hearing abilities? You know, the one that falters outside of your abode, due to pressurized, faulty tests.
cheers,
AJ
p.s. Who am I to tell someone what they imagined they heard anyway?
My equipment has no wooden knobs, so hopefully that helps to tell you what kind of crap I have.
AJinFLA I can see it will be impossible to have an adult, intelligent converstation with you, but from the tone of your previous posts that hardly surprises me.I'm curious as to how you've determined my Z-Squared Au/Au interconnects, Nordost BlueHeaven speakerwire or Stealth Audio M-21 Super are "wacko" wire. Have you ever personally used any of those products? Have you ever personally heard any of those wires? What specifically made them "wacko" wires?
What makes you feel Aliante Pinafarina One's are poorly designed? Have you ever heard that speaker? Have you ever even seen one? What was poor about the design?
As for what knowing your equipment list would have to do with me, wll obviously it has nothing to do with my hearing abilities! What knowing your equipment list does is give me an idea of what credibility I can give your opinions on audio. For all I know you could be the proud owner of a solidstate all-in-one Emerson rack system.
But, if that's true I wouldn't give your opinions as much weight as I would someone who ownes a Creek/Linn/Spendor setup. Do you get it now or is that a little to advanced thinking for you?
As to how you determined my hearing abilities falters outside of my abode, only in weird AJinFLA world does that childish comment make any sense.
What I've said in the past was I would like to prove I can hear differences in wires in MY home on MY system. The reason isn't due to the assinine assumption you came up with, i.e. due to my hearing abilities, faltering outside of my abode. Rather the reason is I am intimately familiar with the sound of MY system in MY room, period! I could do the very same thing on other systems as well once I became intimately familiar with the sound of THAT system in THAT room. Unfortunately it me takes about 3 months to become intimately familiar with ANY system in ANY room, so doing it at my home would be a whole heck of a lot easier and faster.
AJinFLA you make assinine assumptions about things of which you have no idea what the my actual reasons are. Instead you guess what the reasons are and pretend they're facts!
However FYI many ABX tests are IMHO pressurized, faulty tests! So at least you got that correct. When you develope the guts to list your components so we'll all have some idea the quality of what you hear on a daily basis, your opinions will have more credibility than they do now. As it stands your posts come off like a child whining because your opinions aren't accepted as facts.
Thetubeguy1954
nt
AJinFLA I can see it will be impossible to have an adult, intelligent converstation with you, but from the tone of your previous posts that hardly surprises me.I'm curious as to how you've determined my Z-Squared Au/Au interconnects, Nordost BlueHeaven speakerwire or Stealth Audio M-21 Super are "wacko" wire. Have you ever personally used any of those products? Have you ever personally heard any of those wires? What specifically made them "wacko" wires?
What makes you feel Aliante Pinafarina One's are poorly designed? Have you ever heard that speaker? Have you ever even seen one? What was poor about the design?
As for what knowing your equipment list would have to do with me, wll obviously it has nothing to do with my hearing abilities! What knowing your equipment list does is give me an idea of what credibility I can give your opinions on audio. For all I know you could be the proud owner of a solidstate all-in-one Emerson rack system.
But, if that's true I wouldn't give your opinions as much weight as I would someone who ownes a Creek/Linn/Spendor setup. Do you get it now or is that a little to advanced thinking for you?
As to how you determined my hearing abilities falters outside of my abode, only in weird AJinFLA world does that childish comment make any sense.
What I've said in the past was I would like to prove I can hear differences in wires in MY home on MY system. The reason isn't due to the assinine assumption you came up with, i.e. due to my hearing abilities, faltering outside of my abode. Rather the reason is I am intimately familiar with the sound of MY system in MY room, period! I could do the very same thing on other systems as well once I became intimately familiar with the sound of THAT system in THAT room. Unfortunately it me takes about 3 months to become intimately familiar with ANY system in ANY room, so doing it at my home would be a whole heck of a lot easier and faster.
AJinFLA you make assinine assumptions about things of which you have no idea what the my actual reasons are. Instead you guess what the reasons are and pretend they're facts!
However FYI many ABX tests are IMHO pressurized, faulty tests! So at least you got that correct. When you develope the guts to list your components so we'll all have some idea the quality of what you hear on a daily basis, your opinions will have more credibility than they do now. As it stands your posts come off like a child whining because your opinions aren't accepted as facts.
Thetubeguy1954
TG54 - For all I know you could be the proud owner of a solidstate all-in-one Emerson rack system.You nailed it! I guess your acute hearing is accompanied by astute powers of deduction.
Thing is, the Emerson speakers that came with the rack sounded excellent, but they just didn't fit my decor, so I hooked the all-in-one to these, proudly, with Radio Shacks finest wire of course!
Nothing with the resolving power of a floppy poly lossy 6" passive 2 way box sound with wildly varying directivity and.....
Oh well, I'm unable to or not trying to imagine hearing differences between wires, so I don't need anything that good anyhow.
Been fun, gotta run :-).cheers,
Well AJinFLA as you started your post with this incredibly original comeback "TG54 - For all I know you could be the proud owner of a solidstate all-in-one Emerson rack system." I'd like to inform you, that all you had to do was look in Inmates Systems to see what my system consists of. This was something I couldn't do with your system.I'm a minimalist at heart and try to keep components/wires as simple as I can. So my system consists of a BlueNote Stibbert CDP as a source. This is connected via Z-Squared Au/Au interconnects to a Mastersound Reference 845 integrated amp. The amp is then connected to Aliante Pinafarina One speakers via Nordost BlueHeaven speakerwire and both components receive their power through Stealth Audio M-21 Super powercords.
As I am looking for efficiency that's higher than the Aliantes and at the same time desiring more bass, I'm refinishing the RCA LC9A's in the photo you see. I was lucky enough to find and purchase one of only 100-300 of these ever made!
I always value honesty (even in the middle of a disagreement) so I have to admit I've heard good things about about the DIY Orion speakers. I even considered making a pair but the 6 channels of amplification turned me off. IMHO too many wires and other components! However it's equally as valid an approach as the one I've taken. It's just not the one I'd take.
AJinFLA it's ok to disagree, what's NOT OK if for people like yourself to spout your audio ideas as if they're set in stone facts and anyone who disagree with them must be using "wacko" wire or poorly designed components.
Why can't you just admit the other person has an equally valid approach to replicating music, but it's just not for you? It appears you'd rather act like many Objectivists do, i.e. insult the choices & disparaging the components of those who disagree with your choices & beliefs!
I think Steve Eddy explained how I feel objectivists should act when he responded to this question I asked him....
Q) So how do you justify making an expensive wire that cannot reliably be proven to have actual audible difference?
A) Because for me, at the end of the day when I'm enjoying music being reproduced on an audio system, I don't care. In that realm, I'm a holistic, hedonist subjectivist and I pursue that which gives me the most pleasure, regardless of what the reasons might be.THAT'S what audio is about enjoying music. We can disagree, that's ok as well. I just don't understand why so many here need to insult the choices & disparage the components of those who disagree with their choices.
Thetubeguy1954
Well AJinFLA as you started your post with this incredibly original comeback "TG54 - For all I know you could be the proud owner of a solidstate all-in-one Emerson rack system." I'd like to inform you, that all you had to do was look in Inmates Systems to see what my system consists of. This was something I couldn't do with your system.That was me quoting you from your post, not suggesting that you had any such thing.
As in TG54 said "For all...."
cheers,AJ
ps Sony SACD> DCX> 8ch HK/internal amps for M/T> QSC 3500 for dipole woofers. Rythmik ServoSubs below 40hz.
AJinFLA I noticed you avoided ALL my questions. So please answer these questions and defend your calling my wire "wacko" and/or speakers poorly designed.I'm curious as to how you've determined my Z-Squared Au/Au interconnects, Nordost BlueHeaven speakerwire or Stealth Audio M-21 Super are "wacko" wire.
1) Have you ever personally used any of those products?
2) Have you ever personally heard any of those wires?
3) What specifically made them "wacko" wires?
4) What makes you feel Aliante Pinafarina One's are poorly designed?
5) Have you ever heard that speaker?
6) Have you ever even seen one?
7) What was poor about the design?Like a typical Objectivist you spout your opinions as facts, why not answer my questions? Or do you magically know without listening?
Your arrogance shines through though. Even after I tried to offer an olive branch... "I have to admit I've heard good things about about the DIY Orion speakers. I even considered making a pair but the 6 channels of amplification turned me off. IMHO too many wires and other components! However it's equally as valid an approach as the one I've taken. It's just not the one I'd take." You have NOTHING good to say. However from the tone of your previous posts that's hardly surprising!
Now if you honestly believe Harman/Kardon & QSC are really "highend" audio amps and NOT just mid-fi, I can honestly understand why you cannot hear differences in wires. I'd be hard-pressed myself, if that was quality of amp I had to use to describe the differences I heard.
Thetubeguy1954
I'm at work, so my response time is limited. Just tried to clarify the TG54 thing.
Ok, another time limited reply.1) No. I'm not religious either. If I wanted to intentionally introduce euphonic colorations, I'd find cheaper ways to do it.
2) See above.
3) They appeal to the weak minded, just like snake oil has throughout history. I find that wacky.
4) Didn't say they were, just mentioned the possibility.
5) No, I never heard a 2way poly cone box speaker. Not even at Best Buy.
6) Why? Oh yeah, I forgot how much visual refences influence your decisions on sound.
7) The price. For such mediocrity.HK & QSC are designed by engineers, not voodoo priests, so yes, they are definately mid-fi. Visually and price wise, they both have a poor influence on the sound. No religous appeal I suppose.
cheers,
AJinFLA your responses are becoming more & more moronic as you continue on. I asked you how you've determined my Z-Squared Au/Au interconnects, Nordost BlueHeaven speakerwire or Stealth Audio M-21 Super are "wacko" wire. Then I asked these specific questions:1) Have you ever personally used any of those products?
2) Have you ever personally heard any of those wires?AJ's answer to those 2 questions were, No. I'm not religious either. If I wanted to intentionally introduce euphonic colorations, I'd find cheaper ways to do it.
So AJ without ever using or listening to them you've determined they introduce euphonic colorations? I can see your a true Objectivist! Even the other Objectivists I don't agree with here aren't so arrogant as to make judgements without listening. To automatically ASSume the wires are intentionally introducing euphonic colorations with hearing or examining them is idiotic. Only a fool would make such assumptions.
3) What specifically made them "wacko" wires?
AJ's answer: They appeal to the weak minded, just like snake oil has throughout history. I find that wacky. The ONLY wacky thing here is that you'd believe you can discern the characteristics of these wires without using or listening to the product. Weak-minded is people like you who ASSume, they know the truth while denying it!
4) What makes you feel Aliante Pinafarina One's are poorly designed?
AJ's response: Didn't say they were, just mentioned the possibility. AJ I'd say there's a better chance your DIY speakers were poorly designed than ones by an established, highly respected manufactuer.
5) Have you ever heard that speaker?
AJ's response; No, I never heard a 2way poly cone box speaker. Not even at Best Buy. You've led a very sheltered life AJ if you've never heard a speaker that uses polypropylene or pentapolymer before!
6) Have you ever even seen one?
AJ's responses becomes even more moronic; Why? Oh yeah, I forgot how much visual refences influence your decisions on sound. AJ the reason I asked you was I was wondering how an intelligent person could come up with so many moronic statements about products he's never seen or heard. But your responses show me you don't discuss intelligently. You're one of those smug ponces who believes he knows the truth and then proceeds to insult anyone who thinks differently.
7) What was poor about the design?
AJ's response; The price. For such mediocrity. Talk about an unrelated response. I asked you about the design NOT the price, AJ! Well thank GOD that's only your opinion.
I've also owned HK products in the past when I first started off some 30-odd years back. Now that's what mediocrity really is. As for the QSC amp, maybe on a subwoofer, if nothing better was available.
I'm sure that your HK & QSC were designed by the same engineers who assured us CD would provide Perfect Sound Forever! So yes, you're correct AJ they are definately mid-fi. Visually and price wise. Unfortunately they have a very detrimental influence on the sound (the HK less so than the QSC) So I'd think they actually do have a religous appeal.
The day will come when you'll hear a real highend amp on your system and you cry out, Oh GOD how did I live with that crap for so long and think I was hearing a realistic replication of the music?
I see I cannot hold an intelligent conversation with you. You head is stuck so far up the cheeks of your beliefs you wouldn't know good sound even if you did hear it.
Talking with you is like listening to music through your QSC amp, not worth the effort. See Ya.....
I'm sure that your HK & QSC were designed by the same engineers who assured us CD would provide Perfect Sound Forever!
^the above is a quote by TB54^How's that? Do you understand when I'm quoting you now?
OK.
No, not the "Marketing" engineers who came up with such slogans.
But rather Objectivists, like those at HK, QSC, BMW or HP. "The same engineers" that weak minded, hypocritical subjectivists like yourself depend on when they press the brake pedal of their car.
"The same engineers" that weak minded hypocrites trust when they step on an airplane. The same objectivists that weak minded, hypocritical subjectivists rely on when you use your cell phone or your computer. THOSE "same engineers".
The shysters and con men who sell you your "high end" have a symbiotic relationship with the weak minded. One couldn't exist without the other. Just like places of worship. You should know LOL.
You deserve to be fleeced when you actually enjoy it.cheers,
Ok AJinFLA, I can see you are permanently stuck in idiot-mode, but that fiqures! I've noticed this often happens when one "tries," I say tries as it is almost impossible, to hold an intelligent conversation with an Objectivist like yourself, which gratefully aren't all Objectivists! Thank GOD for Objectivists like Tom Danley & Jneutron to name a couple whom I respect.Objectivists like you are so ignorant that you forget that every car from a cheap Yugo to a McLaren M6 GT were made by objectivist engineers! Your also seem to forget that same thing applies to audio components as well.
You're so blinded by your I'm an Objectivist self-righteousness, that you cannot see your HK & QSC are the Yugo's of the audio world, wherein my Mastersound is like a McLaren M6 GT! I thank GOD for rational Objectivist engineers. It's Objectivists like you that leaves such a rotten taste in my mouth I want to vomit.
You sound just like your fellow Objectivist here Soundmind. He believes his Citation 11 preamp with it's 5-band equalizer and his cheap BSR equalizer are as good as it gets as far as audio components are concerned. I'm sure your speakers would sound wonderful in THAT system. I suggest you 2 get together and stun the world with the incredible sound of THAT all Objectivist designed and chosen system.
So go ahead and convince yourself you're right. Your fellow Objectivist Soundmind will agree with you. You can connect your Orion speakers to his Citation 11 preamp which BTW is in series with a Marantz 3800, followed by his BSR equalizer. I'm sure THAT combinantion will sound wonderful to you two guys....
Meanwhile I'll just smile, turn on the Mastersound and listen to the most realistic replication of live music I've ever heard.
It's just too bad that feeble minds don't fly on airplanes with subjective tweaker avionics or drive cars with subjective tweaker brakes systems. Then you would just be feeble minded, not such hypocrites.
Maybe one day you will hear an Orion or a Summa. Powered by the amps and wires used by folks who don't see images of the virgin mary in peanut butter sandwiches. Hear what real engineering sounds like. Instead of that shyster/con man leaking oil Fiat garbage that you were swindled into.
Then again, you may not like them, favoring the eq'd distortion of tubes/snake oil wires - through floppy cones.
Plus you wouldn't have the satisfaction of being fleeced. Part of the shiny toy junk allure I suppose. Enjoy!cheers,
How do the Summa and the Orion compare soundwise? They're quite different designs and people here who have heard either one say they're excellent.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
Pat why do you care when your Paradigm S2's have as you say smooth accurate response, excellent stereo imaging, deep bass response to below 20 Hz and more than adequate volume levels.If the Paradigm S2's are the best speakers you have had and as good as anything you have ever heard, why look at the Summa and the Orion?
If not, why do you comment? Is something bothering you?TOM
"Pat why do you care when your Paradigm S2's have as you say smooth accurate response, excellent stereo imaging, deep bass response to below 20 Hz and more than adequate volume levels."That's one of the silliest remarks you have made so far! I have to chuckle. It's quite obvious you are NOT familiar with my speakers, though in other threads you have had the gall to comment on them.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
Waaaaaaa, I'm AJinFLA. Waaaaaaa if I cannot get a subjectivist like thetubeguy1954 to believe my HK & QSC equipment is better than his equipment is I'm going to insult him!Waaaaaaaa maybe I can hurt his feelings, Waaaaaaa maybe I can insult him into believing my HK & QSC mid-fi crap was made by better engineers than his Mastersound was.
Waaaaaa, I know what I'll do, I'll talk about airplanes and car brakes, THAT will prove the audio objectivists are right! WAAAAAAAA, thetubeguy1954 still doesn't believe me, Waaaaaaaaaaaaaa I know what to do now, I'll hook up my DIY Orions with Soundmind's Citation 11 preamp and BSR equalizer THAT will prove I'm right!
Waaaaaaa how come no one believes me? Waaaaaa I'm AJinFLA and I know wires don't sound different! Waaaaaaa I'm AJinFLA and tubes suck. Waaaaaaaaa I'm AJinFLA and now I know I'm right, I've heard Soundmind's BSR equalizer on my DIY Orion speakers and like all I can say is like WOW man! Solidstate rules! Waaaaaa I'm AJinFLA, Waaaaaaaaaaaaa, I have to go change my diapers the sound of the BSR/QSC/Orion was soooooooooo good I messed my pants, Waaaaaaaaaa.
You're ok tubeguy. At least you just made me laugh. BTW, I never said cables don't sound different. They *can* be made to sound less than neutral, which combined with a less than neutral tube amp, may euphonically color the sound to you or someone elses liking.
More power to you if you like the result. As long as we both realize that you are purposefully coloring the signal to meet some end, then we're both on the same page.
I would not use something as crude as a graphic eq, BSR or otherwise.
The DCX takes the digital signal from the CD and manipulates it in ways that a graphic analog eq or your passive XO cannot begin to do.
It can adapt a speaker system specifically to the ROOM, something that has a FAR greater effect on the sound you hear, than some silly cable or (non-clipping) amplifier.
You really shouldn't cry so much. It's quite unbecoming for a 52 yr old. Enjoy your euponic coloration system. It's your ears it has to please, not mine.
Of note, even the wacko magazine "subjectivist" reviewers that review the type of coloring equipment that you use, will grudgingly admit that speakers like the Orion and Summa are among the worlds finest - if they have heard them. You should take a look at what both Linkwitz and Geddes have to say about that sort of silliness - tubes/wires.
How about this, you enjoy music on your system and I'll enjoy music on mine. That way we're both happy.
If there is a DIY event in FLA later this year, I'll do my best to bring a pair of my (active)creations and hopefully you can attend. There is always someone there with tubes so that you can compare.
I doubt very much you would bring your amp/wire/speaker combo to be judged by a jury of your peers, but who knows? Maybe it only sounds good in your room? Only one way to find out.
My speakers won't have such problems, solid state amp, rat shack wires and all.cheers,
AJ
BTW, have you replaced your speakers internal wire, tinsel leads and voic coil with that "high end" magic wire of yours?
Have you replaced all the wiring in your house out to the main grid with that magic power cord material, or does the magic only begin at the outlet you're plugged into? Strange how that works huh?
AJinFLA, I'm glad I made you laugh, I was hoping you'd see the direction our "debate" had taken was quite foolish. Unlike what most Objectivists believe about me, I have no problem with you or others travelling other paths to audio nirvana.You stated "Of note, even the wacko magazine "subjectivist" reviewers that review the type of coloring equipment that you use, will grudgingly admit that speakers like the Orion and Summa are among the worlds finest - if they have heard them."
I have no doubt these speakers can be made to sound quite nice with the right components. In fact I even said in a previous post to you; "I always value honesty (even in the middle of a disagreement) so I have to admit I've heard good things about about the DIY Orion speakers. I even considered making a pair but the 6 channels of amplification turned me off. IMHO too many wires and other components! However it's equally as valid an approach as the one I've taken. It's just not the one I'd take."
I've learned to trust me ears after 37 years of being in this hobby. I've owned some quite nice solid state gear, Mark Levinson, Belles, OCM, GAS, MELOS and Audio Analogue to name a few. I've just found that tubes and SET's in particular add a rightness to the music I've never heard with solid state components.
If you want to believe that this is due to "euponic colorations" so be it, I just happen to disagree. I've never heard music replicated this realistically before, but as they say that's just IMHO.
Also if you wish to believe my "wacko wires" are deviating from neutral and once again adding "euponic colorations" again I say, so be it!
However consider this before you pat yourself on the back too much. NO audio component or wire is 100% neutral. So perhaps (and this is ONLY an example for purpose of illustration of a point) if you had an amp that was down 6dB's at 10Hz-100Hz and at 10Khz-30Khz, choosing a wire that's up 6dB's at 10Hz-100Hz and at 10Khz-30Khz (which as you say is "euponic colorations") using THAT wire, in THIS example, would actually make the final output closer to neutral than if you had chosen another wire whose "euponic colorations" were elsewere, or was even closer to the ideal 100% neutral!
AJinFLA like I said before; "Why can't you just admit that other persons have an equally valid approach to replicating music, but it's just not for you?" That's all I'm saying about you and your equipment.
Just because we don't agree on the path doesn't mean you need to insult the choices & disparaging the components of those who disagree with your choices & beliefs! That's one thing that Objectivists for all their supposed knowledge just cannot seem to learn.
AJinFLA you said "I doubt very much you would bring your amp/wire/speaker combo to be judged by a jury of your peers, but who knows?" I cannot move it! The amp weighs 135LBS and I'm disabled, but perhaps sometime in the future you can come over and listen to it for yourself?
Let me end this by stating this. The problem with Objectivists as I see it is they rely too much on numbers & measurements and not enough on what's actually percieved!
Suppose a scientist made a new weapon that bends light and "cloaks" individuals in invisability! Suppose all the numbers & measurements prove this device works 100% as expected. Yet when the new weapon is actually used some people insist they can still see the soldier. he's right there and points at him. Should the scientists insist these people are wrong because numbers & measurements prove the weapon works and the soldier cannot be seen? Or should the fact that the people still perceive the soldier over ride what the the numbers & measurements prove?
That's what's happening in audio, we keep telling the Objectivists that the wires are making the system sound more realistic because we HEAR it. We keep telling the Objectivists the tube amps are making the system sound more realistic because we HEAR it. Yet they insist we are wrong because the numbers & measurements prove the regular wires and solidstate equipments works correctly and thus we cannot hear an improvement!
What I want to know is WHY different cables can sound different. Sure, a coathanger made into a connecting cable MIGHT sound different, but it doesn't MEASURE as bad as you might think, especially IF you believe that you MUST have high measured levels of distortion OF ANY KIND in order that it be audible. Why doesn't someone here give me real examples of typical or exotic wire that changes the sound, to everyone's agreement, yet has a measurement that corresponds with the change in sound. I dare anyone here to do this! I'm serious!
Their hearing puts bats to shame.
It’s still unclear how they can actually hear their claimed differences. Until the new BATCD’s come out, there are no musical recordings with signal components that high. Nor do their equipment even come close to the required bandwidth.
Nevertheless....they can hear it. And the fact that it's not there to begin with makes it all the more remarkable.
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The average objectivists look for credible independent evidence that a product they are contemplating buying actually performs its function better than less expensive alternatives and that the improvement is worth paying for. The cottage industry which manufactures and sells this class of product hasn't been able to do that, most likely because it can't. Therefore, there are only a few ways to make money out of it. Get consumer hobbyist magazines which seem independent to endorse them. Of course the cable manufacturers being advertisers in many of these magazines means that their credibility as independent unbiased reviewers is open to serious question. Advertise the hell out of them being very careful not to make any actual claims of superior performance which could put them in flagrant violation of FTC rules about fair advertising. If you read the ad copy carefully, you will see just how cleverly words can be twisted to imply facts without actually stating them and lead readers to unfounded and misleading conclusions. There's the vehicle of manufacturer friendly internet boards like this one. And of course there is the point of sale where the kid who was hashing hamburgers at McDonalds last week is the expert who knows more than the customer and can therefore intimidate him into buying something he doesn't know much about being fearful he won't get the full benefit of the expensive stereo equipment he just bought.To the electrical engineer who is far better informed than the "average" objectivist and who is an objectivist by training and must remain an objectivist to survive and who is NOT in this industry, audiophile wires are a joke. They shake their heads at the whole thing amazed on the one hand that so many people could fall for such and obvious fraud and amazed on the other that so many other people could get away with it for so long without being prosecuted.
Would that be found in print? Or from listening comparisons?"If you read the ad copy carefully, you will see just how cleverly words can be twisted to imply facts without actually stating them"
Please provide some examples. You accused me of reading ad copy, but I have never quoted any such thing. Just curious which manufacturers you have read that are misleading. I'm not saying they aren't out there, just wondering which ones you have come across.Here is a classic example:
"A typical room/system will yield quite a number of "ideal locations" for all sizes of Brilliant Pebbles. Brilliant Pebbles is capable of dramatically lowering audio noise and distortion - perhaps especially in systems where great pains have been taken to ensure the highest possible performance."
"Would that be found in print? Or from listening comparisons?"When someone comes up with a genuine claim for a superior product, design, or idea, it is published in professional technical journals like the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society or the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The idea can be published giving theoretical physical and mathematical descriptions and explanations. Products are described in detail with laboratory data and if superior performance is claimed, are Double Blind Tested with careful attention to details to allow others to duplicate the tests and arrive at the same results and conclusions. This is what all scientific advances are about. Nobody who makes cables does that. Everyone who makes drugs has to. Before that, the drug industry was just a medicine show with carnival like claims and testimonials just the way the cable manufacturers operate.
""If you read the ad copy carefully, you will see just how cleverly words can be twisted to imply facts without actually stating them"
Please provide some examples."Off the top of my head, one I can think of is a guy who claims his wires are a "monolithic crystal" with no grain boundaries. First of all, that is highly unlikely. Secondly, even if it were true, it has no bearing on the conductivity of electricity let alone how it would perform as audio cables. And as anyone who has studied metalurgy even cursorily knows, each and every time it is bent, it will create new grain boundaries so it would never stay that way. But the uninformed audiophile is lead to believe that somehow this product will improve audio performance. Another is the use of silver instead of copper wire. Silver is a better conductor than copper so its resistance per foot for a given gage is lower than copper's...but it is also much more expensive and offers no usable advantages in a sound system. Every single manufacturer has his own peculiar wrinkle he touts but you will notice few if any of them come out and state specifically that your sound system will perform better if you use their product instead of someone elses. Re-read them and see how clever they are. It's not because they wouldn't like to make these claims, it's because they can't.
I do not read the above-mentioned mags, but I have yet to see any refereneces to such publications in an aftermarket cable manufacturer's advertising. Not that I look at them much.The grain boundary, or creation thereof, would probably depend upon the bend radius. IF it were a single crystal, would it not remain a single crystal as long as the bend radius was kept to a maximum? It's been over 20 years since the couple of metallurgy classes I attended in college. I admittedly was captivated by such a claim when I stumbled upon this hobby 6 years ago, but never purchased a product with that claim in their advertising.
My belief in aftermarket IC's comes from my experience with Cardas Quadlink between preamp and amp. They replaced some Monster IC's I purchased at Best Buy. The difference was nothing short of astonishing, in the system I had assembled at the time. The mids were much more lush and the mid-bass was improved (speakers were only rated down to 40 cycles, and I don't think I was getting that low in my 16x22 room from a 6" paper cone driver). And the highs weren't quite as ear-piercing (again, the speakers had issues).
"Silver...offers no usable advantages in a sound system" I had a brief encounter with some well-known DIY silver IC's, but they were eliminated long ago if that tells anyone anything. But I would not agree with nor deny your statement. I'd say it's system dependent.
BS64, I have had experiences with wire, like yours. When I brought back my first exotic, all silver 1M connecting cable as a souvenir of my trip to Tokyo in 1978, I thought that I might hear something different, then maybe not. Unfortunately, I DIDN'T like what I heard when using the silver wire. Puzzled, sent it over to a hi end audio store for evaluation. They heard the same thing. It was bright sounding! I avoided silver wire for years, until I started working with Bob Crump. He had found that the best wires were indeed silver, BUT you had to break the wire in first, before it was useful.
Did Bob know something that I didn't know or understand? Yes. We knew each other for about 15 years, until his unfortunate demise. I kept hearing good sound quality at his presentations at CES even before we did anything together. Bob attributed a lot of the sound quality at CES to the cables that he made and broke in, before the show, along with quality audio components connected to it. This included power cords.
Well, over the last 7-8 years that we actually worked together, Bob always supplied the cables for the CES show, and every year we had a run at 'best sound of show' We did not always get that honor, but we usually came very close. Certainly the attention to detail, including cables, gave us a shot at this.
The cables that I use at home are from a mixed group of manufacturers, but generally they are very good cable companies. I have no connecting cables from Bob Crump. Why, because he did not give any to me, but I do have a number of cables from other quality manufacturers that appear to outperform the Radio Shack, etc cables that I used initially.
Hang in there, BS64, your opinions are certainly real to me. I think that this is a left-right brain thing, where SOME people just don't listen in the same way. For THESE people, we seem to hear what they can't, and this disturbs them. DB blind tests seem to turn US into THESE people while we are being tested, then WE revert to our normal mode of hearing differences again in open listening. THESE other people don't seem to revert to our normal mode of hearing, because of how THEY listen today. This is not necessarily a natural state, but can be developed through intense academic training that takes the 'right side' of brain out of the loop, so to speak.
For example, let's say that I listened to something with Dr. Stanley Lipshitz. For example, it might be a tantalum cap vs a polypropylene cap of the same value, let's say 10uF.
Stanley would politely listen, and but he would never commit himself to hearing a real difference. It might appear obvious to me. He would still insist on a formal ABX listening test to test for the difference. Well, what would be the results? Of course, a NULL test.
This actually happened, and Stanley reported back that he could not hear the worst tantalum caps that Walt Jung could find in an ABX listening test.
Oh well, I guess that I should go back to using tantalum coupling caps, like I did, over 30 years ago. :-)
> DB blind tests seem to turn US into THESE people while we are being tested,
> then WE revert to our normal mode of hearing differences again in open listening.Actually, that is one fine argument that simple awareness of the product being tested influences what one believes they are hearing. It wasn't the sound that changed, but the emotional impact of non-audio factors sways perception.
I'm perfectly OK with that personally. I recognize that an emotional investment in my equipment and associated parts is part of the equation. However, I also know if I can't tell the difference between two products when presented in a truly blind manner then I need to be honest enough with myself to admit there is no difference in sound, but any perceived differences are due to packaging, appearance, aura, pride, exclusivity or any of a zillion other non-audio factors.
So, we all become creatures from the Deaf Lagoon.And that's the best explanation of the situation I've ever come across.
"So, we all become creatures from the Deaf Lagoon."To those who hold 78 RPM shellac records as their reference standard...you're already there.
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It's clear it's no handicap to becoming a professional equipment reviewer...or designer for that matter. Is tone deafness congenital or constitutional? Are you born with it? Can you overcome it? Does exposure to scratchy 78s make it worse or irreversible? Based on the reviews I've read, It would seem it't no drawback at all. I suppose knowing someone in the business who could get you a job or hire you himself would help a lot too.
Please Soundmind: Clark is calling you a liar, and wants to know whether it is congenital, or constitutional? This is not how you hear, but you are obviously one of THEM. This is a learned condition from too much left brained application, and a reduction or atrophy of the right brained response to the listening experience.
"This is a learned condition from too much left brained application, and a reduction or atrophy of the right brained response to the listening experience."I don't think so. To me it is obviously the result of spending too much time listening to recordings played back on solid state amplifiers. Perhaps I'd have been better off taking up an addiction to crack cocaine. Too late now, live and learn.
What a DUMB response! You don't know what I am talking about, do you?
If you think I'm going to let you or that fool bait me into a name calling contest, you are very mistaken. Sticks and stones Mr. Curl.
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That's what happens when you give someone the benefit of the doubt.
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Someone said said Clark Johnson doesn't know shit and I said if there's anyone who knows shit, it's Clark Johnson. Now that's gratitude for you.
Someone said said Clark Johnson doesn't know shit and I said if there's anyone who knows shit, it's Clark Johnson.
Bah! That's not saying much. Everybody knows shit. Now, a man who really knows his Shinola, that's a man to be reckoned with. :)
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Ever hear of the half deaf conductor who didn't know his brass from his oboe?
I would add that any comparative listening has to be done in one's own room on their own system. It's the only true reference point available.Yes, audio gear should replicate a live event. But to hear differences in ic's or cables must be done on the system you are used to listening to. And it's not just about highs, mids and lows. It's about soundstaging, imaging, and resolution.
Some ic's or cables can push the center vocal to the back wall. Other's can flesh it out and leave it hanging in the air within the speaker plane or slightly out in front of it. Does that make it a good or bad ic/cable? That's for the listener to decide.
IOW, there is a lot more to comparative listening than simple freq response.
I have dabbled with homebrew PC's using different shielded cables I have acquired from work. As a result, I cannot justify spending money on pc's as I hear no difference between the one's I have constructed. These were: CAT5, 2-cond 16ga stranded tinned copper with foil and braid shield, 6-cond 18ga stranded tinned copper with foil and braid shield. And these have been compared to cheap-o molded pc's. I just don't hear anything worth talking to fellow enthusiasts about or spending money on.
> It's about soundstaging, imaging, and resolution.Some ic's or cables can push the center vocal to the back wall. Other's can flesh it out and leave it hanging in the air within the speaker plane or slightly out in front of it. Does that make it a good or bad ic/cable? That's for the listener to decide. <
As I've said before, there is no argument as far as I'm concerned as to whether different cables can sound different. My question is WHY do they sound different? Which cable (if either) above is the neutral cable? If it's true that common zipcord "passes the signal in its entirety", then it must also be true that some audiophile cables must pass something in addition to the entire signal. Or is it the cables interaction with certain ancillary gear that causes these changes?
Your example is one of the differences I've perceived in different cables. I have to say that I've never heard a cable function as a frequency boost or cut, at least not in any case that turned out to be anything but faulty perception that didn't hold up under single blind auditions.
Silver tarnishes easily. Everyone who owns real silverware knows that. It oxidizes and combines with sulfates in the air. While you "think" you are breaking them in, the surface is tarnishing. Since the higher the frequency, the more conductivity tends to be a surface phenomenon, the more they tarnish, the more resistance at HF they develop. Strip them back, dip them in Tarnex, and in about 5 seconds, they will be unbroken in again. Then add the right size filter choke and they will be broken in again. Stop playing all of us for idiots.
["While you "think" you are breaking them in, the surface is tarnishing."]I'm trying to separate facts from your beliefs. It seems you presume "breaking them in" to be a factor of time rather than passage of a signal. If passing a signal tarnishes silver, perhaps you mean both.
Do you have knowledge of the progression of tarnish affecting perceptions incrementally?
Silver oxidizes? Can you give me a reference for this?
Check a standard chemisty text. The normal oxidation state of silver is +1.The blackish substance that tarnishes silver is silver sulfide. It is a reaction with with sulfer compounds present in the atmosphere. Silver can also form silver oxide.
One advantage silver has is it's oxides don't interfer with electrical conductivity as much as the oxides of other metals and as such is often used in high voltage relays since it doesn't arc as much.
Arcing has nothing to do with the material, is caused by voltage being high enough to ionize air molecules by stripping them of electrons causing a conductive path. This will invariably happen in circuits where the load is inductive when they are opened because current in an inductor cannot be changed instantaneously (L di/dt cannot become infinity.) Silver, gold, even platinum are used on relay contacts because their tendency to oxidize is lower. But once oxidation of silver or any non conductive deposit on the contacts does occur to any significant degree, it will cause resistive heating accelerating ultimate contact failure. This is why the plating is usually so heavy and why normal maintenance requires them to be cleaned with an abrasive material removing the deposits.
Oxidation is most generally defined as loss of electrons. As silver loses electrons to form nitrates, sulfates, chlorides, anything which causes it to form a salt, it has been oxidized.From Dictionary.com;
Oxidation;
"A reaction in which the atoms in an element lose electrons and the valence of the element is correspondingly increased."This is why silver tarnishes, it is oxidized usually by small amounts of NO2 disolved in water forming HNO3, sulfur dioxide forming sulfurous acid or sulfur trioxide forming sulfuric acid all acting as Lewis acids.
From Wikipedia
"Silver is a very ductile and malleable (slightly harder than gold) univalent coinage metal with a brilliant white metallic luster that can take a high degree of polish. It has the highest electrical conductivity of all metals, even higher than copper, but its greater cost and tarnishability has prevented it from being widely used in place of copper for electrical purposes."
"In chemistry, a Lewis acid can accept a pair of electrons and form a coordinate covalent bond, named after the American chemist Gilbert Lewis. The Lewis acid and Lewis base theory is one of several acid-base reaction theories, therefore the term acid is ambiguous; it should always be clarified as being a Lewis acid or a Brønsted-Lowry acid."
You remove the tarnish with a reducing agent. Baking soda reportedly works well.
That's it, no more free chemistry lessons for you, the next one will require up front tuition.
You want to reduce the grain boundaries in metal, anneal it. You want to elimiinate them all together, you have to grow an ingot from a single crystal. The crystal pulling machine costs $2 million dollars. They use them for making silicon ingots and slicing them into wafers to produce ICs on. They also use them for making nickel, gallium aluminium, arsenide LED lasers for high speed communications systems. Wire manufacturers don't have them becuse they don't need them." The mids were much more lush and the mid-bass was improved (speakers were only rated down to 40 cycles, and I don't think I was getting that low in my 16x22 room from a 6" paper cone driver). And the highs weren't quite as ear-piercing (again, the speakers had issues)."
Scrape the oxide off you old wires. Then compare. It's a well known trick to compare something brand new with something old and need of repair. The people who sell energy savings programs to industry by replacing their tired out old light fixtures with yellowed and dirty acrylic lenses, dirty and worn out lamps, and ballasts at the end of their lives with new ones having metal reflectors and half the number of lamps but just as bright do it ALL THE TIME. And they prove it with a light meter. And the managers who buy into it fall for this sucker game again and again and again. Why should they be any more savvy when they walk into a store to buy stereo equipment?
and perhaps too much in another field>The 6N metals are produced by a much simpler and more inexpensive technique. Place a refined ingot in a vacuum chamber and the employ a strip heater to heat up a section at the end of the ingot to a point just below melting. Slowly move the ingot through the heater, at a very slow rate: say a few millimeters per hour. Impurities will tend to remain in the semi molten section so as the ingot reaches the end, simply cut off the last inch or so and pass the ingot through the process again. After several passes you have a 6N ingot. AJ van Den Hull and Nippon Mining (Acrotec) employ this process to achieve their 6N ingots. Equipment is still expensive, but not quite as high tech as you make it out to be. The development of the process is an outcome from the superconductor race. There, wire makes no difference also (8^).....).
Annealing is nothing new: Wire companies have been offering this for ages: they simply pass the finished wire before insulating through a neutral oxy-acetylene flame.
Electric zone furnaces for highly purifying metals using this technique are nothing new. But that's only the starting point to making a crystal. to make an ingot which is also a single monolithic crystal, you have to start with a small single crystal as a seed and very slowly draw it through the furnace under extremely controlled conditions. This is not the cheap simple process you make it out to be. Nobody makes wire in any quantity this way and certainly not for audio systems. And there is no reason to. BTW, to be considered wire at least as it was explained to me in the wiremaking facility I was in, the material must be cold drawn. Otherwise it is rod. Once it is cold drawn, it will no longer be a single crystal no matter what it started out as."The development of the process is an outcome from the superconductor race. There, wire makes no difference"
Of course not, single crystal or not, once temperature drops below the critical superconducting temperature for the material specified, electrical resistance becomes zero.
Please:If you read, I distinctly said ingot, not wire. And secondly, I did not say it was cheap: I said it was not as technically difficult. The formation of metal versus silicon crystal construction is quite different, IIRC, and also the ductility of metal is, ah, considerably higher than silicon. We do not cold draw silicon to make chips. Your parallel of silicon to metal was inappropriate, in my view.
" I distinctly said ingot, not wire. And secondly, I did not say it was cheap: I said it was not as technically difficult"As a single monolithic crystal with no grain boundaries? Is that what you are saying? I just want to be sure I understood what you mean. Why would growing such a crystal from a metal like silver or copper be any different or easier than from a semiconductor like silicon? The crystal puller we had at one facility I worked in cost $2 million. That was over 20 years ago. BTW, how do you define "cheap?" As I recall, there are only 14 different geometric crystal configurations possible not counting the variable of atom to atom distances.
BTW, why are we having this discussion? I just brought up the subject because someone wanted an example of a wire myth. At least one manufacturer claims his wire is a single monolithic crystal with no grain boundaries.
Last time I looked a periodic table, Copper was still clearly a metal and Si one of the non metals ay towards the right side, just before the gasses. Crystalline boundaries are where in most metals, the impurities collect, and in crystal propagation generally there are fewer impurities within the crystal latticework. However since most silicon is doped (impurities added for their electrical properties) and the doping needs to disytributed fairly accurately and evenly, and most electrolytic metals are preferred in their most elemental pure forms, there are differences in their purification processes. Metallic copper can be considered a crystalline structure in its pure state and one means is to simply purify the metal. The silicon needs special temperature and,IIRC, pressure controls to create the specially doped crystals.But of course you are familiar with all of this.
"But of course you are familiar with all of this."Even though it's been 40 years since I studied it and a few decades since I worked in related industries...yes I am.
Silicon is considered a "semiconductor" which is a transition element between metals and non metals. It's in the same group as carbon and germanium. It has a higher melting point than most metals. Not all non metals are gases at normal temperature and pressure. Among them are Arsenic and Phosphorous which are commonly used as N type dopants as well as sulfur which isn't.
It is ususally possible to purify elements to a very high degree. That has nothing to do with their crystaline structure...if they can have such a structure. Some like carbon can have more than one such as diamond and graphite as well as an amorphous structure. Just because a material including metals are pure and can exist in crystaline structures, that doesn't mean they form monolithic large monolithic sturctures all or most of the time. That is usually possible only under very special conditions. Many, even most don't. Most crystals are of limited size with grain boundaries between them. This is easily studied at a beginner's level in a bubble chamber, a dish of soap bubbles demonstrating jogs and other discontinuities between grain boundaries. Just because a material forms a high purity ingot doesn't mean it is necessarily or even likely a monlithic crystal. I suggest you vist a steel plant if you can find one and watch iron and steel ingots being stripped out of their molds. They are high purity having just come from a blast furnace, an open hearth, or basic oxygen furnace but are never monolithic crystals, in fact far from it. Silicon is first purified and is only then grown into single crystal ingots. The dopant impurities are not introduced until much later after they are sliced into wafers, repeatedly spin coated with photoresist, and exposed to ultraviolet light in a mask aligner to expose areas which will receive the subsequent dopant. Only then are they ready for impurity dopants to be driven into the crystal lattices, usually at high temperatures. I've worked in both the steelmaking and semiconductor industries.
That's your free lesson in material science from me. If you want more, you'll have to stand in line to register behind John Curl and as with him, tuition will be required to be paid in full in advance.
As you seem to be agreeing with me. I said Silicon is in the class just BEFORE the gasses.I was wrong in choosing the word purification, as I should have said manufacturing process. While the purification for copper is the end of the process, the purification of silicon in preparation for the doping is simply the base for the manufacture which, by it's nature, requires very small amounts of 'impurities' to be introduced to the silicon base. You do need, as you point out, special processes to control the introduction of those doping materials to penetrate the silicon base.
I believe the highest purity one can achieve from a blast furnace is about 4N if the ingots are specially cast in a vacuum. In open air, 3N MAY be capable. And you are very correct: at those purity ranges, the chances of large crystal formation is virtually impossible, even if temperature controlled cool down processes are employed.
The purity range necessary for transistor construction is not even close to the purity ranges one sees from a blast furnace. IIRC, the purity needed is much higher than 6N so commonly (and incorrectly advertised) in cable ads.Still the use of the strip heaters can bump up the purity of the ingots considerably and the lengthy and slow progress of the ingot through the molten range will create significantly larger crystal formation. Crystal boundaries are, as you point out, are generally defined by impurities, whether it be molecular air or other solids.
Mind you, I never made that claim of monocrystal formation: you are projecting your thoughts onto mine. A simple bending or impact of the finished product can break the crystalline structure. That the crystalline structure is much larger is a known fact when higher purities can be achieved, however.
The simple drawing of an ingot into wire introduces potential contamination from the dies and the lubricants and the simple exposure to air. I would very much agree with a statement one wire manufacturer told me: claiming 6N copper is akin to MacDonalds saying 1/4 pound before cooking. I have said this before on the cable forum. There are many factors to be considered when taking high purity wire into consideration, and manufacturers' claims should patently be ignored since most wire is made by subcontractors.
This also leads to problems with testing procedures as wire would need to assayed or spectrographically analyzed in order to verify claims. But then this is not what you originally atated either, is it?
I really don't know why we are having this discussion. The subject of monolithic crystals came up because someone wanted an example of a cable myth and one I cited was a manufacturer who claimed his wires were monolithic crystals and that this improved their electrical performance as wires. Purity is besides the point, it was not the topic of discussion.BTW, Silicon, element 14 in group IV-A is just to the left of phosphorous which is element 15 in group V-A, the next most electronegative element in that row, row 3. It is a solid at normal temperatures and pressures. The next one is sulfur element 16 in group VI-A which is also solid. It isn't until you get to element 17 chlorine in group VII-A on row 3, the halogens that you come to a gas.
the posts are drifting. But earlier you stated that annealing was the cure for eliminating crystalline formation, and that the only way for monocrystal formation was to grow them from a seed.
The fact is no one can have a monocrystal wire as long as they are drawn. Had you said that there would have been instant agreement on my part.
I did not say you could make a monolithic crystal by annealing. I said you could reduce the number of grain boundaries up to a point. The three common metalurgical processes are annealing, quenching, and work hardening. Nobody creates crystals by annealing or in a zone furnace intended for purification. Crystals have te be grown literally atoms at a time. I said the crystal puller at one lab I worked at was a 2 million dollar machine....20 years ago...not counting the cost of installing it....or operating it. It was 2 stories high and was only for growing small laser crystals, not huge ingots. BTW, when it was decomissioned, I asked the scientist to run me off a few diamonds just for old time sake. He refused. Well I hope this ends this discussion. It's been pointless AFAIAC
I thought that tuition was FREE around here. ;-)
Do you think that he cares, 52 ? ;-) I would doubt it.
...with the ingots. I am an equipment maintenance technician in a 200mm DRAM wafer fab. Plasma etch chambers by AMAT are my specialty. Lots of gas, RF, MW, pressure xducers, mass flow controllers, turbo pumps, robots, the whole nine yards. 80% of my daily activities is mechanical, 15% process and 5% electrical troubleshooting. But no time for component-level troubleshooting. Replace the board or module and keep running. Can't let a $3 million dollar machine sit idle for long.And there was nothing to scrape off. 1) Because the Monster IC's were only a few months old. 2) The only area to scrape would be the solder joint. No access to the conductor.
"The only area to scrape would be the solder joint. No access to the conductor."The wire slowly oxidizes on the surface inside the plastic insulating jacket. You can't stop it and short of encapsulating it there's nothing you can do to even slow it down. The insulation is probably pourous and will also probably continue to slowly outgas indefinitely. Even after many years, the oxide buildup on the surface is probably so thin it is invisible to the naked eye. The only place it is noticable is at the ends where it is exposed to air.
"I am an equipment maintenance technician in a 200mm DRAM wafer fab."
I built wafer fabs at Signetics in Sunnyvale and Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountainview 25 years ago. They are extraordinarily dangerous places. The standard in those days was about 4 inch diameter wafers.
Oh come on! Tens of Thousands of amps in electrical service, silane/chlorine/arsenic/NF3/HBr gasses, diffusion furnaces at 1000 deg C, 80 psi house cooling water, and mechanical hazards that could crush your head in a few seconds, all under one roof. Where's the potential for disaster in that scenario?On a more serious note, I have been in the industry for 17 years. Worst accident I witnessed was a slight crushing of a co-worker's hand. His hand is fine, but it would have been much worse had he not wedged a large wrench into the mechanism. The motion was started by an inexperienced tech who was only asked to stand by and wait for the command to be given.
Safety has come a long way, but it's up to each individual to assess the situation that he or she may be putting him/her self into. If you get hurt, it will more than likely be an act that you could have prevented.
"Safety has come a long way, but it's up to each individual to assess the situation that he or she may be putting him/her self into. If you get hurt, it will more than likely be an act that you could have prevented."Tell it to the illegal aliens they hired to work in the wafer fabs who barely spoke English. When they got hurt, they just chucked them out the back door with the rest of the trash and brought new ones in through the front door to replace them with. Then one day, a bunch of them sued Signetics for being used as "canaries." They had become so sensitized to organic solvents, they would get violently ill just walking down the laundry detergent aisle of a supermarket or using soap with perfume in it. They sat in the cafeteria all day until someone thought there was a spill or leak somewhere. Then they'd be brought in to see if they reacted. When they sued, they were fired.
Look up the Sunnyvale Scribe's back issues around 1979. They listed around 350 serious continuous code violations and endless warnings by local code officials that their facilities were going to be shut down. Were they serious? Some were very serious like tanks of anyhdrous amonia and hydrocholoric acid being stored in the same gas cabinets. When I mentioned this to my supervisor who was the facilities manager, he said the artical was inaccurate...his own list was over 750 and even that was incomplete.
My favorite in the short time I was there was the defective Mexican manufactured bag filters they bought and were about to install in the arsenic trioxide filters on the roof of one wafer fab. Had they failed in use, they'd have spread arsenic around Sunnyvale like it was baking flour in the wind. A lot of people might have died but gardens all over the valley would have bloomed in all their glory that year and for many years to come. BTW, have they cleaned up the aquifers yet? They found thousands of burried rusted out waste tanks leeching solvents including TCA into the ground water. How was this first discovered? By a support group of women who had experienced an unusually large number of miscarriages in the San Jose area. They ran Fairchild right out of town forcing them to shut down their Bernal Road facility. Who were the industrial culprits? They were all guilty of the same thing, HP, IBM, Intel, all of them. No surprise there, the same engineers rotated from one company to another making the same mistakes in every last one of them.
I entered the industry in '89. While the fab WAS antiquated, there were some decent safety standards in place. But I would not be surprised if there were blatant violations of environmental and physical safety regulations.The facility I now work in is top-notch as far as safety, efficiency, throughput, etc., is concerned.
I did a couple of years as a "pool boy" before getting into semiconductors. I drove a compact pick-up carrying fifteen 2.5 gallon jugs of 10% sodium hypochlorite (clorox is 3%) along with eight 1 gallon jugs of muriatic acid, and nothing separating them but the milk crate holding the acid jugs. To this day, I do not believe there are any regulations for these trucks and the way they store their chemicals. If you find yourself behind a pool cleaner's truck in traffic, give him a few car lengths...
Well, that certainly seems to explain a lot. ~ heheh
No that's a cause to work for! Why do you bother with audio?
Audio is just a hobby for me.I don't work for causes. My credo in life, neither a leader nor a follower be. There are some people who want to change the world and others who simply try to understand it, adapt to it, and make the best of whatever possibilities life offers them. I've chosen to be in the second group. Having observed many people in both camps close up for a long time, I've noticed that on the whole, people in that group are generally a lot happier and more successful in life. As for people with causes, I usually run as quickly as I can in the opposite direction from them. They always want me to donate my time, my money, or something or other. Their hair brained do-gooder obsessions are the most important thing to them in the world. Religions, charities, political parties. They are usually dupes for someone else's ambitions anyway. Most of them are parasites to be avoided at all costs. As for the Peninsula, I think I'd gotten my fill of it for a lifetime...just like I did with Europe. For me California is not the real world anyway. One big Disneyland.
Romy, is that you? ;-) But seriously, what do you complain, yet don't want to help?
I'm not complaining about the dangers I saw in California. Since there was nothing I could do about it anyway, I just decided it was prudent to put three thousand miles between me and it. I didn't know at the time, some lunatic would be crazy enough to fly an airplane into a skyscraper. See what I mean about causes? All of them eventually boil down to people being persuaded to do insane things for the ambitions of others. I wonder just how many virgins they each got in their Valhala.
"To the electrical engineer who is far better informed than the "average" objectivist and who is an objectivist by training and must remain an objectivist to survive and who is NOT in this industry, audiophile wires are a joke. They shake their heads at the whole thing amazed on the one hand that so many people could fall for such and obvious fraud and amazed on the other that so many other people could get away with it for so long without being prosecuted. "Just where is the FTC when you need them? I suspect the same as the FCC; looking for more wardrobe malfunctions.
d.b.
"Just where is the FTC when you need them?"They probably have much bigger fish to fry. Or maybe they just feel that anyone with so much more money than brains as to fall for such an obvious scam deserves whatever they get...even if they may be the victims of crimes. If I knew back then what I know now about how easy it is to steal people's money and get away with it, maybe I'd have gone into it myself. But you have to get in on the ground floor to really clean up...like Monster did. That's when they are ripest for the picking, before anyone else gets there. Once the feeding frenzy really gets going, you may only come away with crumbs.
Yes, SE found that out. He most probably makes a very good connecting cable.
Interconnects with different measureable characteristics may,and often do sound different. How audible the difference will be is going to depend on the systems susceptibility to the differences in these measureable characteristics. Some systems will be more effected than others and some listeners may hear the differences more readily than other listeners. What sounds preferrable is a matter of taste. If two cables measure identical at the same lengths and a claim is made that they sound different there's only two possiblities, first there's a problem with the measurements (either they are erroneous or improperly spec'd) or the listener making the claim is in error.It is not a measure of subjectivism or objectivism for one to deny these undisputable facts - it's a measure of ignorance.
that the measurements aren't complete.What makes you certain that the right things are being mr=easured, or that we've even defined the things that ought to be measured?
As the great progressive social satirist and commentator Walt Kelly may have said, "It's not what really happens, it's what we write about it that matters." We can never underestimate the importance of the proper parsing of words, and creating narrative definitions for the masses; Creationists, Objectionists, Subversionists, and the occasional Rational Anarchist. Simply put, the problem with Audiophillia is the fallacy that it has been achieved.Paul B [Grinnin' Duckin' an' Hidin']
"Those who hear not the music think the dancers mad."
- Angela Monet
I think you are mixing apples and oranges by "suggesting" that a typical objectivist believes there is no difference in wires. A lawyer would probably look at your inquiry as a "leading question."I would suggest that a hard core objectivist would not really have an opinion on this subject in advance of making tests. If there was a difference detected, that objectivist would probably want it to be verified in a consistently repeatable way with a strong effort made to account for or eliminate bias or other variables. That objectivist would then probably look for technical reasons that explained the difference.
I do not consider myself a hard core objectivist, though I'd admit to a degree of sympathy. Unfortunately there is so much snake oil being sold in our industry that it sometimes makes it difficult to treat legitmate subjective claims as seriously as they should be taken.
...are the ones who post here "Below Average"?
An average objectivist is, well, average. And that person is also an objectivist. So, we can expect an average objectivist to perform on an average level and have an average opinion of objects and/or objectives. In other words, they only get COLA pay increases.
I was trying to avoid disparaging remarks. Average could just as well be interpeted as typical or majority in this case.Not trying to start a flame wire, trying to learn what they honestly believe in a clear & precise manner.
(nt)
I'm trying to understand their POV and why they believe it. When I attempt to debate Objectivists I'm usually told I don't understand their POV, this is MY attempt at understanding it!Plain & Simple...
...many objectivists believe cables all sound the same (and other components like amplifiers and CD players as well, but that's another story) because amateur audio DBTs comparing cables come up with null results.So they say there is no 'proof' cables sound different.
It has been shown, at least once (i.e. Floyd Toole), that bias influences the results of listening tests. Therefore I for one do not consider sighted listening test as having the capability to provide any evidence whatsoever. Sighted listening simply cannot proove anything because of listeners' bias. And since there is nothing but sighted listening to "prove" differences between cables etc., there is, as a matter of fact, no genuine proof that these differences really exist.Therefore I, as an objectivist and music lover, spent only about 0.8 % of my total system costs on (good quality) wire.
You underestimate the capacity of human beings to completely fuck up just about anything, even something as simple as a wire which has been proven so many countless times to perform its function so perfectly that electrical engineers don't bother to give it a second thought. And you also underestimate the stupidity of large numbers of people with far more money than brains who are willing to pay for it.
Darn, I thought that you were going to attack Klaus too! ;-)
I did....for taking fools seriously. I've made the same mistake myself. Right on this very board in fact.
is that I need them cables to make my stereo work.After about 8 years of AA participation and countless audio reviews I'm still amazed by what people are willing to buy, both in terms of technobabble and hardware so yes, maybe I'm understimating those folks.
Just think, for the price of a pair of stupid useless audiophile cables, I may be about to pick up another pair of AR9s...in near mint condition.
I once read of a Siltech wire that retailed at 29k! For that money you get a complete system of excellent quality and loads of CDs. Plus a small new car and 2 weeks of vacation. To each his own!
Klaus, I blew holes in your "sighted-bias" theory many years ago.At one time about 20 years ago I didn't believe wires sounded differently from each other. So please explain why that bias didn't prevent me from hearing differences in wires when I saw them installed in the system?
Afterall if Floyd Toole proved that bias influences the results of listening tests. Shouldn't my bias of "believing all wires sound the same" have influenced me into NOT hearing differences in the 2 different sets of wires installed? Yet much to my amazement differences are exactly what I heard!
There are cases where cables do make a difference, like high capacity ones causing power amp oscillation (according to Nelson Pass) or like these cables having some kind of RLC-network included. Just recently JA measured a cable and found the reason for that cable's sonic behaviour.In Toole's tests the knowledge of the identity of the component changed the rating/ranking of that component within the group of components tested.
If you hear differences between wires in a system run the test under blind conditions just to be sure that the differences are not influenced by parameters other than sonic. If the differences can still be heard, look for a technical explanation. Amp oscillation is such an explanation but you wouldn't want your amps to oscillate, do you?
A friend of mine once built silver interconnects, when we compared them to copper IC the silver ones were a bit louder. That's a clear audible difference. That's why level in listening tests has to be carefully controlled.
Anyway, in you initial post you were asking for what objectivists believe about wires. I think I've answered that question. The wire I'm using is good quality microphone cable for the analog connections (balanced and unbalanced) and good quality digital wire (same brand) for the digital connections, no speaker cable. In total I spent maybe $250 on wire.
Klaus the very fact that you spent even $250 on wire PROVES that you hear differences in wires and are willing to pay, up to a point ($250 apparently) for the sonic advantages one type wire has over another!That's all I've ever said... There are differences in how wires "sound" in audio systems. At what point ($50-$100-$250-$500-$1000-$5000 etc) one ceases to hear an improvement that justifies the cost is up to each individual to make.
Klaus "IF" you honestly believed... When interconnects are kept to 3FT & speaker wire is kept to 10FT, provided the wires are of a suitable gauge and all components are functioning properly, the differences are inaudible. You wouldn't have needed to spend even $250 on wire.
The fact that you spent $250 on using good quality microphone cable for the analog connections (balanced and unbalanced) and good quality digital wire (same brand) for the digital connections, instead of using Rat Shack interconnects & digital wire proves my point for me perfectly.
Thanks, Thetubeguy1954
Every system needs wire in order to work, and I prefer good quality to bad quality.When I ordered my speakers I also ordered interconnects for them, without specifying anything but length (2x20 ft) and connectors (Neutrik). They simply sent me what they usually use, good quality microphone cable. The wire looked ok, so I stayed with that brand when I needed new ones. Why did I need new ones, because the old ones were too short! The shortest run now is 10 ft. All connectors are Neutrik, one of the digital cables is RCA to BNC. In total there's about 160 ft, which makes it $1.60/ft. The longest run is 60 ft, 3 mm mic cable. Would you get that one at Rat Shack? Or the digital RCA/BNC? With Neutrik connectors? At $1.60/ft?
I'm afraid that you will have to look for someone else to prove your point
"IF" you really believd that ALL wires sound the same, you'd have bought any wire available as cheaply as possible and a near to your home as possible, when you discovered your wires were to short!The fact that you said "I prefer good quality to bad quality." in reference to wires PROVES my point.
Thanks Once Again....
The fact of having 250 bucks of wire in a 28k system is powerful evidence against me! You're absolutey right, I must admit that I believe in cable sound. This discussion reminds me btw. that all power cords and the phonocable are still stock, I will have to rush and replace them by some nice good quality aftermarket stuff, not the cheapest, I promise. Do you recommend anything particular?Also that fact that phonostage, CD player and preamp are not the cheapest on the market clearly demonstrates that I believe in differences between phonostages, CD players and preamps. It still amazes me that I was able to buy such superior sounding gear without any prior auditioning, based on specs only. Am I the proverbial lucky coin?
I even put Glisdome footers (reviewed and recommended by TNT-audio: "help to deliver a sound which is vivid, lively and punchy") under my TT and speakers, that's another piece of circumstantial evidence. I plead guilty on all charges, you be the judge, what is my sentence?
Irony may be lost on thetubeguy1954 . . .
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"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
"Klaus the very fact that you spent even $250 on wire PROVES that you hear differences in wires and are willing to pay, up to a point ($250 apparently) for the sonic advantages one type wire has over another!"Let's follow your reasoning: "My friend Erda" bought a Gucci watch because it keeps better time than Timex ...... oops! The reasoning doesn't work for watches or cars, so it's not valid for audio wires, either.
Here's a link to Eyespy's description of his system, and he explicitly states cheap wires don't sound any different from expensive Nordost ones, etc.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
KlausR
"Just recently JA measured a cable and found the reason for that cable's sonic behaviour."I hadn't been aware of that one. I presume it's the one linked below. Actually measuring the cables is an improvement, although JA's reasoning does not offer much hope this will happen generally.
JA
"Stereophile doesn't routinely publish cable measurements. However, because the Harmonic Technology CyberLight Wave and P2A cables include active voltage/light and light/voltage transducers, it cannot be taken for granted that they will behave in the expected linear manner."Since this implies most cables (interconnects, in this case) behave in a linear manner, one would presume that the DBTs would be in order to verify whether, in fact, the reviewers can actually tell them apart by the sound alone. I would have preferred they had verified the audible differences from other cables or shunt (per Soundmind) with DBTs.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
In unpublished letters no. 1 following that review "I think he (Fremer) owes us a more skeptical exploration of his observations..."That pretty much nails it down. There's not enough skepticism and critical thinking around in reviewers' circles. DBTs are not easy to perform. There is one German reviewer who records, mixes and masters recordings on the very same system he is using for his reviews. He knows these recordings by heart so whenever a component under review causes a sonic change, he will know. That could be a way to improve reviewing quality.
If you don't trust your sighted listening (or anyone's), your approach to choosing equipment makes sense. You can just go totally on specs. But you are going to end up doing sighted listening, and you could be biased by the specs, regardless of whether it's wire, amps, cd players, or speakers.
He's Back!
Floyd Toole? Give me a break! He is one of many, with a strong opinion. Have you ever talked to him, yourself? I certainly have. I mean no disrespect here, just that Floyd is not the answer in my audio world. We shall see: If Floyd's 'approved' products are actually accepted by the serious audio public in masse, then I will amend my opinion.
He does the same thing you do, he caters to the preferences of a market. The only difference I can see is that you produce what you like and expect the market will agree with you while he actually goes out and tests the market's preferences. Neither of you actually engages in tests of recordings versus live music to see if your preferred equipment can duplictate it convincingly to blindfolded listeners whether critical listeners or otherwise. You seem to concentrate on amplifiers and preamplifiers, he concentrates on speakers. He works for a $2 billion a year publically owned company run by an egomaniac, I don't have a clue who you work for, and don't care."He is one of many, with a strong opinion."
"Floyd is not the answer in my audio world."Now you know how I see you. Two peas in a pod. When you look at him, as far as I am concerned, you are looking in a mirror.
"If Floyd's 'approved' products are actually accepted by the serious audio public in masse, then I will amend my opinion."
I could hardly ask for a more revealing statement of your perspective than that Mr. Curl because for both of you, this is about inventing better ways to make money, not about better ways to reproduce music. In this relativistic assessment of someone else's work, it's the bottom line on the financial report which is all that really counts.
That's quite true. Dr. Toole's research both at the NRC and at Harman has chiefly been about what characteristics people prefer in speakers.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
Have you ever conducted such an experiment with your IC's from the dollar store? No, you only compare them to a shunt, in your room, in your system...
I've attended two very carefully conducted tests and they were quite convincing even if they were clearly contrived. I also compare the sound of my own audio systems to live musical instruments in my own home frequently although the comparisons are far less formal and rigorous than actual blind and double blind tests. This is what high fidelity sound reproduction is really about or at least is supposed to be about. BTW, as I have stated, I have never found those $1 interconnect cables to sound different from a shut provided by a tape/source monitor switch. That is about the most convincing test I can think of to prove that they do their job perfectly. They are easy for anyone who cares to to conduct for themselves either casually or formally. But in a world where people are so passive that even what ought to be energetic and curious youngsters whose counterparts in my youth were out playing baseball, riding their bikes, playing with ham radio and electronics, tinkering with and tearing down old car engines and rebuilding them today sit in front of their PCs playing video games or listening to their IPODs getting fat on McDonalds and Pizza. We had all that junk food when I was a kid too but we burned it up very quickly. Why not actually get up and try something yourself and tell us about it instead of just asking about someone else it? Surely you've got some cheap cables laying around even if it's from an old VCR you don't use anymore. Or maybe you just don't want to really find out for yourself what the truth is.
...a very simplistic system. A Cary 303/300 cdp with variable outputs, connected directly to a Mcintosh MC7200 amp via XLR ic's. No tape monitor, no tuner, no tone controls.I have, in the past couple of days, switched out my Cardas Cross xlr ic's with a pair of Tara Labs Quantum Reference xlr ic's, and did not hear a difference. The Tara Labs are still in place, and I enjoy the presentation just as much as I did last week.
But could this not be attributable to the fact that it is balanced circuitry? Could it be that balanced components are immune to cable strandings/geometries due to their noise cancellation and gain increase? My system sounds incredible - I cannot envision myself ever going back to single-ended components.
I have Cardas Golden Cross speaker cables (purchased for less than half of retail on Audiogon - but still way more than you would ever consider spending). I also have about 300' of CAT5 cable in the garage. One of these days, I am going to make some cables and do some serious comparisons. But my wife, 4-yr old and 15-mo old keep me busy on my days off. I hear what you and Dan are saying, and I agree that there are some outlandish price tags for products that cannot support any sort of superiority claims.
And you are correct, the only way to convince myself any further is to conduct my own comparison. I hope I like the CAT5's when I get around to it. I could use the dough from the CGC cables.
And I am proud to say that there are no PS2's or X-Box's in our household, and no computer games in the spare bedroom. That is one language I am proud to say I cannot speak...
For my main system I use Home Depot speaker wire sold under the RCA brand. 16 gage twin lead. Other systems I have use that or 16 gage zip cord identical to what's used for electrical extension cords. It should cost 10 cents a foot but for the Home Depot wire I've paid as much as 20 cents a foot.Be very cautious with knitting Cat 5 wire into speaker cable. Be certain you have no short circuits. You can also create a fairly sizable capacitor out of it. Someone here some years back blew his amplifier up with just such a cable. Fortunately for you, McIntosh amplifiers are fairly stable with capacitive loads and well protected against shorts. Some marginally stable amplifiers can go into spontaneous ultrasonic oscillation with highly capacitive loads and self destruct. Don't be surprised if you get some high end rolloff from that capacitor, it's what you'd expect. BTW, I used some extra Cat 5 wire I had hanging around for a small porject I had. IMO, it sucks for general use. It was brittle, breaks easily on bending, and it's difficult to work with unless you are using a punchdown tool on a punchdown block. Bad bad choice, I'll never use it again for anything except wiring up phone jacks.
The general understanding is that capacitance is not an issue with speaker cable. Only inductance. Any guess as to what the capacitance value of the braided cat5 would be as compared to two 16ga wires running parallel to each other? I assume that 2 wires running parallel for a few feet would make a more efficient cap than twisted pairs braided together.
I really don't know. You could look it up in a book which would specify the capacitance per unit length. CAT5 cable is designed to have very low inherent capacitance. It's purpose is to transmit high speed data signals over moderate distances (a couple of hundred feet) without a repeater to reform the leading edge of each switching pulse. That's what capacitance does, it attenuates high frequencies rounding the leading edge of step functions and slowing the rise time of pulses. The capacitance adds together based on the number of pairs you use and the length. The inductance will add based on how loosely knit they are, how long and how many. A large diameter cable made from many strands loosely knit CAT5 could have both high capacitance and high inductance forming a perfect tank circuit to act as an oscillator. To get actual data, I'm sure you could get this from a wire manfuacturer's web site such as Belden's. There are also technical organizations which set standards. I'm sure there must be and American Wire Manufacturer's Association or something like it.
his listening tests as described in his "hearing is believing" paper? If he did, point them out. Or is the mere fact of doing blind testing a mistake already?
I wonder just what products "are actually accepted by the serious audio public in masse." It seems to me that there is a great variety of equipment preferred by inmates here, for example.
____________________________________________________________
"Nature loves to hide."
---Heraclitus of Ephesus (trans. Wheelwright)
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