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

numbers numbers, we don need no steenking numbers

Hi Tony

Boy, you said a mouthful and made a very important point.
One thing you see in audio marketing using science is that they often describe things which are real electronic / physical effects and occasionally described with some degree of accuracy as well.

What is lacking nearly always is anything which might put that effect in perspective. For example, reading a cable brochure about skin effect, one would conclude it is a major consideration in all cable or wiring.

Yet, if one were dealing with AC power distribution or were looking at the effect skin effect has at 20KHz when a typical speaker cable connects a speaker to an amplifier, one would conclude it is usually a non-issue, superseded by much larger effects like series L and R which are more configuration and cross section & conductivity related.

The reason for the two sides of this and other issues is something like that in fishing I think.
The fisherman describes a fish he is proud of, describes how it felt to fight him into the boat over what seemed like an eternity, how it made the rod bend in half, how you struggled to net him and so on. He describes an even in the physical world from the perspective of the fisherman, based on what his eyes see plus what he knows feels and expects. If you were selling things to a fisherman, it would be best to pitch the product in those same terms as the fisherman relates to, to acknowledge fishing as something like a religious experience.

If you were designing the internal workings like the gears of that reel or other part of that product your best off knowing what you’re dealing with in objective engineering terms.

Re-examining the event;
Measured reality is how long the fish is, it’s cubic volume, it’s weight, measured reality is the record of force on the line over time, it is a plot of the acceleration, velocity and vector of the fish over the 293 seconds the event lasted. Engineering requires all the data related to the physics of the operation and awareness of the ideal goals.

So we have hifi which runs the entire spectrum from the real to the imaginary, where each person draws the line is governed by what you believe to be true, what you believe to be true are things which you have seen, heard of or been demonstrated.

Curiously, or not surprisingly depending how you view it, a faction in hifi is also conditioned to be paranoid / hostile about even trying to see if you can hear the difference between A and B without knowing which was which. Funny stuff, not many places left where inquiry is frowned on and for sure, it's not where significant progress is likely.

Fwiw, our earliest solid state semiconductors (diodes) were the oxidized electrical contact between two materials. A crude radio could be built using a razor blade and graphite pencil lead and tank coil, with the contact between the oxidized razor blade and graphite rectifying the radio signals and then fed to very sensitive earphones.. The old finned selenium rectifiers being the end of that oxidized boundary approach, switching to bulk conductors in solid materials like germanium and then silicon which lead to the IC and modern solid state.
In RF, many cables have silver plated connectors, silver oxidizes but it is not a semi conductor and has low resistance which is easily displaced.
Best,
Tom


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  • numbers numbers, we don need no steenking numbers - tomservo 09:21:26 10/31/10 (0)

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