"I've been thrown out of classier establishments than this one!"
I've only been banned at one forum (Home Theater Review), so Steve is likely still ahead of me.
What pisses me off the most about his "articulation index" BS is that it is a complete misrepresentation of real research carried out by Bell Labs many decades ago.
Bell had to transmit voices over very long lines which could be incredibly noisy. So what their research did was to figure out what frequency bands were the most critical for the intelligibility of speech. That way, they could keep or emphasize those bands and filter out everything else for improved intelligibility.
You familiar with the Fletcher Munson equal loudness contours? Well that was work that came out of this research.
Basically an articulation index was a description of how bad a noisy line was with respect to speech intelligibility. And articulation index of 1 was essentially perfect, and degraded from there with progressively higher numbers.
Bruce would have people believe that a short length of cable in an audio system has an atrocious articulation index, and requires a number of these "articulation poles" (which are basically just RC networks with various center frequencies) in order to get the cable closer to the "ideal."
Of course even the cheapest cable from Monoprice is effectively "perfect" and would have an articulation index of 1.
So either Bruce is a complete buffoon (the more likely scenario in my opinion) or he's just cynically and fraudulently misrepresenting something that he in fact does understand.
Like so many other things in this nutty industry, it's a cure in search of a problem.
se
That would literally be patently absurd since he's managed to secure a patent on his nonsense.
se
What is there to learn? The whole premise is nonsense.
Irrelevant. See above.
Ditto. See above.
One is being sent to SY so he can have a peek at it with a network analyzer, just for giggles.
se
Finally. Some one will be able to tell me what the circuit consists of and real data.
Anyone know the patent number? I suspect that the patent is more about the multiplicity of RC and their values in that particular cable configuration than only an RC across the line(s) as that isnt patentable.
THx-RNMarsh
Yes, that's right.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6658119.pdf
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What do you mean "real data"? Again, Bruce's whole premise is nonsense. How does "real data" manage to come from nonsense?
You'd be surprised what's patentable. Ray Kimber got a patent on a cable design that was patented in 1960. The patent office is just a rubber stamp. Any quack can get a patent on the craziest things.
And why is it impossible for you to simply look up Bruce's patents?
se
Thank you..... note it was filed 17 years ago.
Phase cancellation to make the cable purely resistive.
THx-RNMarsh
This distinction escapes me. In the active domain bridged amplifiers are what creates balanced signals. The only topological difference between this and a 5532 driving a transformer primary appears to be power delivery. In the headphone case two amplifiers drive two copper wires feeding a floating driver coil. If this isn't 'balanced' why would replacing the driver's voice coil former and magnet gap with an inductively coupled second winding suddenly make it a balanced circuit?
Don't get me wrong, that headphone cable is comical and save for special niche circumstances the benefits of 'balanced' headphone drive also escape me, I just don't see bridged and balanced as contradictory concepts.
A lot of people get confused (including myself in the past). Balanced means same impedance in both send and return. But for most of us we consider balanced to also have a differential drive. But you can have balanced and single ended drive and differential but unbalanced (although that is daft).
Either way if you are selling a product you should check what it's being plugged into!
Either way if you are selling a product you should check what it's being plugged into!
Hi Bill. Not sure I understand what that means or agree. In the early days of studios, designs followed telephony practice by using 600 ohm source and termination impedance but that practice disappeared decades ago. Overwhelming more common are 'balanced' sources with 30-70 ohm output impedance driving 'balanced' end equipment at or above 10kohm input impedance. The interconnection is universally referred to as balanced, of course into a bridging input.
Or am I missing something?
In the purely technical sense it is "balanced" in that the impedance of each line relative to ground is the same. But the whole reason d'etre of "balanced" as applied to audio is common mode noise rejection. And this requires balanced impedances and differential inputs.
If you take a stereo amplifier and bridge it to make a single channel amplifier, it's "balanced" in that the two impedances to ground are the same, but you don't have a differential input and zero common mode rejection. Common mode noise just gets amplified along with everything else.
So in my opinion it is just silly to refer to a bridged amplifier as a "baanced" amplifier.
se
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