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You are missing the crucial point.

The frequencies involved with phone lines and communication are vastly higher than audio frequencies. Everything is different at those frequencies. Also, the signal strengths and cable lengths can be quite different.

I am not trying to elicit an argument from you. I am trying to elicit some proof of your claims about strand jumping causing distortion. You made the claim. It's up to you to show me it's true. You made the claim that RFI (I knew what you were talking about) affects signals in speaker cables, audio signals at their powers and low fequencies. Please refer me to some demonstrations of this effect. I's like to learn about it. If it is true, then the vast majority of speaker cable manufacturers, even very high-end ones, don't know what they are doing because nearly all speaker cables have no shielding against RFI. If the self-generated magnetic field in the wire provided the shielding, then that magnetic field must interact with the RFI and respond, which will in turn affect the signal that generated the field to begin with.

Every now and then I make a bad mistake on this subject, and I made one yesterday and am perpetrating it today. I have been teaching university courses in physics for nearly 40 years, and from time to time I reach the "i've had it" stage with what I perceive to be physically indefensible things I read posted here, things that are not consistent with the laws of physics. Normally I shake my head and forget about it. I've found that invariably here's no point in discussing the issue in these circumstances. My mistake was saying anything in response to your post. You feel I've been rude to you, and for that I apologize. I certainly meant no offense.

The underlying physics of wires have been completely understood for more than a century. They are simple. My high-energy physics colleagues down the hall actually design cables from first principles to have performance requirements far more stringent than audio ones. Then they build the cables and they work as designed. It can be a fair amount of work, as differential equations must be solved numerically at some point, but it's not hard.

Having said all of the above, I am not saying that different wires and cables cannot sound different. Of course they can and for very good reasons: they have different measureable parameters. I have found differences in sound between interconnects with high capacitance and low capacitance. So far I have never heard any differences in speaker cables except once: a highly oxidized, stranded copper wire (it was green!) rolled off the highs a bit (about a dB). I have experimented with changing both the inductance and capacitance of (DIY) speaker cables, but so far none of these changes resulted in a sound change. I am presently using DIY solid copper magnet wire for my speaker cables, as I read some superb reviews of a commercial version of these. I can't say I hear any difference between them and the stranded copper hardware store wire I used before, which disappointed me.

We've beat this to death. I will endeavor to keep my mouth shut on this and related topics from now on. I will continue to keep an open mind for learning new things, believe it or not, as my experiments with cables demonstrates. CAT-5s next!

Joe


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  • You are missing the crucial point. - jsm 13:13:29 09/14/06 (0)


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