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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

No reason to care unless you buy things

Unless they learned about hifi electronics from an audio magazine, I don’t think you could find an actual “engineering type” who would deny there wire has measurable effects depending on length, construction and especially frequency.

The higher you go in frequency, the larger most of the detrimental effects and complications become and at GHz frequencies these concerns govern the design.

What is missing is the apparent point of departure between exotic audio cables and the electronic engineering theory that has permitted the design of loudspeaker drivers and crossovers or even radio, TV computers and cell phones.

What is missing is a connection between changes of the magnitudes measured at audio frequencies and what some often say they hear from the same changes, changes which would appear (relative to changes in the speaker) to be tiny or insignificant.

At least in the testing I have been involved in, the huge changes people said they heard from the various cables they brought, then disappeared into insignificance when they didn’t know which cable they were hearing in the same system.
When the only thing that changed is prior knowledge, then what they heard had nothing to do with the cables and everything to do with what they know.

The problem is the lack of connection between subjective impressions and what the measurements suggest. Since the electronic measurements can be taken accurately and repeated but no one is measuring hearing or looking at that end scientifically, that would appear to be where the gap exists.

Unlike a hearing test(or test of your senses or knowledge), you have no clues when the test will run, when the tone will be present or how loud it is, while proven effective in every other field in interest, the same scientific method, testing without prior knowledge has gotten the broad black brush in hifi.

The idea of testing without prior knowledge is shunned in hifi instead with the marketing agents (magazines) generally clinging to the “sweet mysteries of life” approach instead of a serious look at what you can hear.
I wonder which approach is more appealing to the unscientific, which sells more cables and which approach lets you build a radio or even crossover or build loudspeaker drivers?.. I wonder which approach poses a threat to the aftermarket hifi business?

Interestingly one of the articles did touch on something else I have run across, that some hifi gear is marginally stable and having an “antenna” attached to the amp output, or having parallel capacitance, may make provoke that instability. While this isn’t the same as wires altering the sound, it can explain how cables could push marginal design over the edge into instability (something no amp designer wants to see or allow).

The bottom line might be if you’re going to use technical measurements to explain or prove something, a real proof would also involve testing to see if people are actually hearing a difference when they don’t know which is which. A person could also claim and believe they hear a 50KHz, 500KHz or 500MHz super tweeter or anything else, but a simple blind test would reveal that if actually true or just a belief.




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