syn08 said:
Am I wrong, or do we have an agreement here?
I don't think anybody here is stuffing "scientifically certified" cables down your throat. You can use whatever pleases your ears, but make sure when telling about that it's your own selection and other may be dissapointed.
Engineers will select their cables based on scientific criteria and tell "according to my measurements and DBT testing there is/is not a difference between these two cables".
Everything is fine, until somesnake oil merchands or anti-intellectual ignorants start talking pseudo science (like - no pun intended - "under transient load, the micro-stability and level of dielectric constant in a given material will move toward zero" ) to justify $1000/ft. for cryogenically treated silver monocrystal cable. That's where my fuses are getting short.
Intellectual prowess and then creative prowess..thus 'new' can be combined to set a price point.
For example, we produced a speaker (not released) that clearly sonically bested a $5k speaker in testing. Our speaker was calculated, based on standardized industry costing, to have a retail of about $3500. After the testing one listener turned to us, one with a Masters in business, and said, 'I guess your speaker is $5000 and $1 ($5001), isn't it?
He was entirely correct in saying so.
Advantage in overall strengths means that the pie can be cut in many ways. The item can be presented with respects to being the same price but better, it can have a better price and be better..or..have much higher price and then have cost associated for being better.
As well, it is important to remember that finer techniques in the vast majority of fields, techniques to produce the finest products--tend to cost more than 'basic' techniques. Thus, better is quite often far more expensive than 'average'.
The buyer judges that value for themselves. My personal preference is for giving the buyer the better value at the lower price..for a combined 'double whammy' with respects for creating sales..but many times (this means +99% of the time!) the buyer and the industry won't understand it and the lower price ends up creating even less sales..by a significant margin. This, for many reason too tricky to get into here, with respects to full explanations.
Rest assured, this phenomena is not tied specifically to audio as a marketplace. It happens in all industries that sell to the public. Armani suits, for example. Nike shoes, etc.
It's the bigger breasts and fuller lips somehow translates to 'better sex' mental wrangling phenomena that always enters the equation when humans are involved.
Andre Visser said:
It should be possible with two mics and a computer in the middle.
Haha, no that won't do.
One of the problems we face here is that if you listen to music, and you have audible differences, how do you measure that?
One promising approach is the audio Diffmaker signal difference extraction system ( http://www.libinst.com/Audio DiffMaker.htm ) by Bill Wazlo, the designer of the Liberty measurement system most of you will know. I heard a demo at last year's AES conference. Diffmaker was able to extract clearly audible differences between audiofiles that sounded identical to most of the public. (No, not a scientific test). And Diffmaker is free...
Jan Didden
This is unfortunate. And here I am supposed to go to CES early to receive an award for preamplifier of the year, from a major audio magazine. It couldn't have been the wires in the preamp that contributed to its success, could it? I wonder what else I can eliminate or cheapen to get the price lower, and still have the audio quality? Can it be done? The challenge is yours, fellow engineers.
KBK said:
So let me summarize: create something, claim (according your own subjective evaluation criteria) the performance as "high end", add some pseudo scientific (aka techo-babble) stuff, then set the price tag as high as possible, otherwise it (Audio, Armani, etc...) won't sell.
That's precisely the scenario that drives me nuts. Nice business and engineering ethics. The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) of Engineers Canada would in particular be interested in such.
Joshua_G said:
Joshua, what is your meaning of blind? How exactly do you avoid psychological effects - in detail please?
john curl said:
John, please do not presume to know what "they" think, especuially do not presume to know what I think. Just go by what I have written please. I have not stated what the measurements required are, and difinitely not that resistance inductance and capacitance are the only measures available. Quite clearly they are not, and nor are they the limites of matching cables to the systems they need to match. I don't doubt that some differences are imagined, and that some are verifiable by measurement. I don't doubt either that some of the tests done by some contributors are not double blind.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Let me say it with a picture...
More accuracy is not necessary, more than a dB of difference over only several octaves of the spectrum is recognized by DBT to be audible. The amount of data averaged would make it statisticly virtually impossible for the two plots to be actually +-.1db from each other. I could have measured the voltage at the speaker terminals but I have been building a couple of mics anyway. If I repeated this test under strict laboratory conditions I would get the same result, and you know that. Even under water
MJL21193 said:
Getting a bit flustered?
The fact is you didn't make a valid point. You set out to demonstrate how the change in the resistance of the cable you used changed the output of the speaker. Sure, it looks that way on the plot you have shown, but how accurate is this result? Not very, because:
More accuracy is not necessary, more than a dB of difference over only several octaves of the spectrum is recognized by DBT to be audible. The amount of data averaged would make it statisticly virtually impossible for the two plots to be actually +-.1db from each other. I could have measured the voltage at the speaker terminals but I have been building a couple of mics anyway. If I repeated this test under strict laboratory conditions I would get the same result, and you know that. Even under water
Let me state here, one more time. I AM RESULTS ORIENTED! That is all that is necessary. IF you, me, or anyone out there in the world can make something that sounds great, at very low cost, good for them. I will retire. In fact, I really wish that digital satisfied me, I hate to clean and change those vinyl records. I don't particularly like ticks and pops either. However, I REALLY like the sound of vinyl.
Let us find the magic IC chip to make our work significantly easier. I have been looking for 42 years for it.
Let us find the magic IC chip to make our work significantly easier. I have been looking for 42 years for it.
Joshua_G said:
Sure it is. Take a look e.g. at http://www.peo.on.ca/ and the links on the left side.
Quotes:
and:
john curl said:
I recently captured some of my old vinyl onto PC as 24 bit 96KHz WAV files and they sound just like ---
vinly - aarrghh along with all the clicks scratches noise pops low channel seperation etc.
Then when I compare Brothers in arms vinyl to CD, I can hear all the instruments and vocals clearly from CD that were missing from the vinyl. So I bought the SACD version and it doesn't make for any noticeable improvement over the plain CD, albeit this was just a quick A-B test and not double blind.
I will keep trying to hear an improvement, but so far CD is good enough in this instance.
It would be really interesting to know what components there were in the recording and production paths in each case but I'll bet there were a good few Op Amps and a lot of copper wire.
syn08 said:
It isn't just audiophiles that fall for this one. I used to be a developer at a simulator company. This company created a new product that combined elements of microwave simulation and SPICE, allowing time-domain analysis to work up in the microwave (and higher) frequency range.
Unfortunately, many features of ordinary SPICE were omitted in the initial release, including things that freeware such as LTspice supports. When I asked my boss at the time what justified them charging $100,000 for the software, his reply was, "If we don't charge enough for it, people won't take us seriously."
andy_c said:
I agree, some of my former employers were doing occasionally the same. But it's the marketoids business to sell stuff and they don't ask me (or any other engineer) to support their pricing policy. And I while I contributed with technical data and facts to marketing campaigns, I never relied on pseudo-science to help selling any product.
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