To my experience, only certain quartz crystals are good; I prefer the chiral crystals from Tibet, tridymite from Caldoveiro Peak in Spain is also good, but you may need slightly more to be as effective.
Don’t forget to place a Shakti Electromagnetic Stabilizer on top of you signal source (I tried under, and the effect was not so good). Music reproduction is clearer, with more liquidity, dynamics and focus. The improved inter-transient silence allows the listener to hear ambient cue information essential for accurate perception of stage depth, width and unwavering imaging.
You can’t beat the combination of Shakti Stones with Brilliant Pebbles.
Without trying Waly's recommendation, it would be hard to judge what sound improvement really is.
There is a VERY long thread on the PS Audio forum about BELDEN Iconclast cables. Iconoclast ThreadThese were designed by Galen Gareis, who was Senior Product Project Engineer for Belden Wire and Cable. He recently left Belden after 35 years ans 30 patents ( the most in Belden's history)
He designed the cables to have measurable differences that can be verified.
Here is a link to a paper he wrote about the change to an XLR cable Iconclast 4X4 XLR
I feel it took a company like Belden to spend the money to allow an Engineer to design AND take down a line that makes miles of cable to make 3000 feet of an audio cable in it's place.
Here is a link towards the end of the thread after Galen left Belden to try to start up a company to sell the end product. He also discusses the difference in wire used to make the cables. Galen Speaks
Belden is still the only company that can make the cable. They are just not set up to sell to retail.
He designed the cables to have measurable differences that can be verified.
Here is a link to a paper he wrote about the change to an XLR cable Iconclast 4X4 XLR
I feel it took a company like Belden to spend the money to allow an Engineer to design AND take down a line that makes miles of cable to make 3000 feet of an audio cable in it's place.
Here is a link towards the end of the thread after Galen left Belden to try to start up a company to sell the end product. He also discusses the difference in wire used to make the cables. Galen Speaks
Belden is still the only company that can make the cable. They are just not set up to sell to retail.
As EM is such an important part of EE it needs to be taught in a way and at a speed which enables genuine learning. This does not always happen. It is made worse in the UK because here there seem to be a belief that real engineering does not require much skill in maths, so some EE students are ill-prepared for what they face at university.jneutron said:
I have a foot in both camps: physics undergraduate (and postgrad - but that is another story), then years later EE masters and PhD. I have met scientists who might struggle to wire a mains plug, and engineers who struggle to understand orthogonal coding because they have never been introduced to inner product spaces and orthogonality in general.
Blind or sighted? If blind (i.e. not told it is a cable test), there would probably be no difference in perception as everyone can be fooled some of the time. If sighted, I hope the scientist and engineer would know that there is an overwhelming likelihood that there will be no difference.Galu said:
Ask me to compare two interconnects and I will be consciously biased. Hence the only way to test me on interconnects would be to tell me the test is about something else. However, if I then heard a genuine difference I would say so and then look for an explanation; I would not blame test stress for my surprising result.
If sighted i hope, the scientist and engineer would know that they are most likely _biased_ due to the _belief_ that there is overwhelming likelihood that there will be no difference.
Are you sure about that? You wouldn´t first check and double-check the experimental setup and then doing replications?
And wouldn´t you first of all ask if there were financial interests involved?
Flaws in the setup would come under my heading of "explanation". Replication would only be necessary if there were insufficient test runs - but in that case we would not yet have reached the point where I knew I had reliably heard a difference so there would be nothing to explain.Jakob2 said:
Interesting that I admit bias, yet I am still attacked. I am puzzled: why do some people seem to want to ensure that almost everything in audio electronics is, in their view, still undecided due to lack of reliable tests? Given that, how can we design anything? If circuit theory is wrong, or if we don't know nearly enough about psychoacoustics, are we just condemned to stay in the 'alchemy' phase of audio for ever?
Isn't that the aim of those with financial snake oil interests and their willing victims?
I found/find it a bit inconsistent to mark pointing to "stress" (not to detect, or not to consider it, is a flaw in the experiment/setup) as "excuse" - although we know due to experimental evidence that it is a strong confounder - while searching for other flaws is accepted as search for "explanations" , isn´t it?
So far you didn´t tell us what number of runs would be sufficient.
Really, you think my questions were an attack?
I hope pointing me to the above inconsistency helps a bit against your impression. Further in the other thread you posted that "it helps when no fincancial interests....", so it is imo an obvious question (not answered yet).
Don´t know if am within these "some people" , but what about that their view could be correct?
My point of view is in this regard imo quite simple, if you bring science to the table, then it has to be real science (iirc copyright jNeutron) .
If you want at some points to exchange scientific evidence in favour of "strong beliefs" than do so, but please don´t call it science anymore.
Does circuit theory have to be wrong, if someone is able to hear a difference between two cables? You know better,i guess
But wrt your question "given that, how can we design anything?"
The obvious answer imo is, that we just do - as in any other field - because it basically is always correct, that "we" doesn´t know everything and quite often "we" have to correct a lot of errors that occured because of our lack of knowledge, but nevertheless we still desing something.
I found it interesting that it starts here...
But later contains plenty of nonsense engineering wise as the usual inappropriate analogies turn up mixed with endorsements of products from people like Furutech (makers of LP demagnetizers, etc.). Not to comment without examination, do you have any links to the patents? I'm mostly interested in how the speaker is included. A speaker agnostic cable would be interesting, as Nelson showed years ago there was no one answer. I'm sure jneutron would be interested too. For component to component interconnects I don't see a viable argument to improve on a fully match terminated system for signal fidelity so I am interested in seeing how the cable/termination issue is discussed.
BTW some of your links don't work.
EDIT - The patents are easy to find, DF96 would also be interested in the discussion of characteristic impedance at audio frequencies, we have tread over this before. I am reminded of some of the shameless Vishay audio app notes.
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I found a balanced interconnect patent that made most of the dielectric air and maintained conductor spacing. From the background...
Exactly! It always amazed me how all these supposed plagues of problems that absolutely destroy hi-fi audio signals with all of their glorious limited bandwidth properties, never seem to be a problem anywhere else...go figure.
It's pretty simple folks...connector quality and cable geometry is way more important than conductor material for speaker cables and interconnects. Why spend way more money on silver when copper is just as good for this application?
Just my two rubles worth.
Mike
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It's easy to make a change in geometry and measure it. If he wanted lower z or higher z, just target L and C per foot. Easily designed and measured.
Most manu's will take a line "down" for an NRE run. They'll usually do a lump charge and require a minimum length. When we needed some LSZH single 535, 373, and 242 kcmil wires they cautioned us that the minimum buy would be ten thousand feet. Pffft. During the build, we had 9 shipping containers on site just for wire.
Now I'm wrestling with some renishaw linear encoder problems. Whoever designed the wire neglected the fact that we needed controlled impedance twisted pairs ORTHOGONAL to each other. The long runs occasionally hiccup, crc and timeout errors, bad cable. I'm gonna make a cable using a cat5e cable, a 14 AWG 5 volt feed, and an overall shield.
If it solves our problem, I'll probably quote it out and do a buy. We'll drop it into the worst places to start as well as for new builds. Can't just replace all of them, we have over 5000 installed lengths at 100 to 150 feet each.
Jn
Ps. Our basic problem is using the encoder to close a feedback loop. A glitch can sometimes tell the PID loop that the device just moved to Cleveland, then suddenly it's back, but the system will output a large spike to the motor amp, it typically faults out. If we average, loop response drops too much (we're maintaining 20 nanometer move accuracys), filters dull it too much as well. We can do an active hold of previous value if too high a delta, lots of software tricks and trade offs. Me, I'm going after root cause.
I'm sure that's the case.
To me, it has to be repeatable, verifiable, built upon or an extension to existing repeatable and verifiable work.
You need to use your "science" as it were, build a testable entity, show positive results which others can verify. All that with adequate controls.
I'm rather confident that the items you've mentioned cannot survive close scientific repeatable scrutiny, but am open to any valid test data you could provide.
I cannot simply take anecdotal accounts as science, to me that would be faith based.
IIRC, Geoff Kait was also into active stabilization platforms for turntables. I inquired about a custom setup for work use as we needed a single digit nanometer quiet platform for a superfluid cooled magnet (no turbulence in LHe3 as it flows through the pipes of the magnet).
He was not interested.
Jn
IIRC, that background content about smearing originated with long landline telephony away back in the day, and resulted in an understanding of LCR and G.
Not sure how much effect on 100 feet of balanced xlr vs 20 or 30 kilometers.
Jn
If a change makes me happy and the sound is more to my liking that's all I need to know. It's my system and its function is to change the way I feel. I am open minded to all things that could improve it. Are you?
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