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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics. |
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In Reply to: RE: Cable article link posted by Tony Lauck on December 7, 2013 at 12:09:52:
Hi Tony
Your right, the end to end difference test only shows the difference one end to the other or like applying it to an amplifier only lets you hear the difference between the input and output..
For an amplifier, capacitive loading was most problematic on the early SS amplifiers. Back in the 70’s when I built a lot of Electrostatic speakers and worked at an amplifier company (Grommes), it was the tube amps which were most comfortable driving that kind of load and an examination of the Safe operating area protection circuits would usually reveal an output stage which didn’t tolerate much capacitive reactance before “protecting”.
Now days, it would be unusual to find an amplifier that was parasitic due to a cable’s capacitance or normal drivers although once in a while they find one at work (where amps sometimes have a large amount, many hundreds of feet of cable) . The twin low loss coax cable that leads out to the measurement tower outside only has about 2K Ohms capacitive reactance at 20KHz and it’s 125 feet long.
For speaker cables, it is the series inductance and Rdc which are larger factors, series L especially in generic extension cord..
Your right about measurements, once the design is done, the use of engineering as a refinement tool is also over. Sadly, measurements are used to sell, to imply quality. Worse, measurements are intended to compare input to output in various ways or to a standard, to define how accurate the device is by quantifying the differences.
For the audiophile, this is a problem because subjective enjoyment is not strongly tied to signal accuracy. For example, a large level of reverberant sound can make a choir sound heavenly but at the same time, it can prevent you from understanding the spoken word or prevent you from creating a strong mono phantom image and so on.
If one wants to “hear” how faithful a device or loudspeaker is, one can make a generation loss recording of the DUT as well as the recording medium as a reality check.
It is ironic that most electronics will pass many generations before sounding significantly degraded but it is rare for a loudspeaker to go more than one or two generations before sounding very funky, they are the weakest link in the chain in several ways.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Cable article link - tomservo 07:23:39 12/21/13 (0)
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