I don't believe cables make a difference, any input?

[Steve Eddy]

Originally Posted by john curl

I spoke to Bruno myself. We agree and we are both engineers. You should stay out of it.

Really? Bruno agrees that cables produce a fair amount of harmonic distortion?

I'll be sure and ask him about that.

se

[john curl]

It is true that your cables were not BAD examples, and the distortion, if any, was minimal. I have other examples, however, that measure differently. By the way, your soldering is very good, better than most.

[fdegrove]

Hi,

O.K., fair enough.
So what cable drawing process is causing this directionality and to what is it attributable exactly then?

Cheers,

P.S. It's Bruno Putzeys, Steve.

[john curl]

Whether it is drawing, or compressing it through a die, I don't know the mechanism. Of course, for many years, I could hardly believe it, either. I think that it compares to serving a good wine at a certain temperature. If you actually look at a book of electron photographs of metal specimens, you might be surprised as to their complexity and even mobility of some components within the specimen.

[Steve Eddy]

Originally Posted by fdegrove

P.S. It's Bruno Putzeys, Steve.

Yes, I know. Meant to type Putzeys'.

se

[vuki]

What about Scott's proposition, John?

[fdegrove]

Hi,

Originally Posted by john curl

Whether it is drawing, or compressing it through a die, I don't know the mechanism. Of course, for many years, I could hardly believe it, either. I think that it compares to serving a good wine at a certain temperature. If you actually look at a book of electron photographs of metal specimens, you might be surprised as to their complexity and even mobility of some components within the specimen.

Thank you.
I am well aware of electron migration and that kind of stuff, even posted an animated .gif file of it here some years ago showing a shot of a recording on an electron microscope.
IIRC the work was done at the Instute of Material Research at Diepenbeek, Belgium by (and I'll all the academic titles out) Mr. W. Deceuninck.

At that time we met on a regular basis and discussed wire with one of the directors of Hudson International (NJ?) whom were willing to do small production runs of the purest silver and gold wire for us to test.

I'm not sure if anyone actually did some measurements of the samples but as far directivity is concerned I gave up breaking my head over it as to my ears the finished cable sounded great either way.
Anyhow, this is in the league of the topflight systems and super golden ears.

Rest assured, I was met with the same skepsis from the same guys as you are now almost ten years ago......

Cheers,

[Bruno Putzeys]

Blast from the past! SE wrote me to ask if I would come here. So:

My goodness is this thing still going on?!!

Unbalanced cables are notoriously sensitive to contact noise in connectors (what with the same connection being responsible for equalising ground potentials and providing a reference for the signal), and RCA connectors are notoriously liable to develop such trouble. What I remember John explaining during our chat was that somehow his setup highlighted these. The unbalanced I/O of the AP test sets are floating so such problems would not ordinarily arise.

During my measurements in 2004 -done by request of SE who wanted a second opinion whilst being embroiled in a discussion with John- I still occasionally got distortion but when that happened I always checked solder joints and cleaned the connectors which invariably solved it. Again, in a system with non-floating I/O this might still not cut it.

So where John and I agree is that these (and some other) problems are real. His test setup was not so much different from the kind of condition under which these cables would be normally used. The worst thing you could say is that it did not allow proper control of all variables involved. After all, a layer of oxide on the connector shell belongs neither to the cable, nor to the test equipment. Same for a circulating current. But that does not mean the readings are meaningless. The same problems arise whenever an RCA cable (and occasionally XLR, see "pin 1 problems") sits between two boxes.

Where John and I take different routes is not in the physics but in emphasis on where to start working the problem. I'll first try to address it electronically (design circuits which are minimally sensitive to anything a nonideal cable might throw at it). His is first to attack the connection (use cables & connectors that don't cause problems for most circuits). This is as literally as I can remember what we said.

Both go a long way, but for perfect results you need to do both of course. You can't design an input that'll successfully recover an audio signal transmitted along two parallel wires, and you can't design cable that will prevent hum in an unbalanced connection with a ground loop and stamped sheet-steel pcb-mounted RCA connectors.

Now note that I didn't bother reading much of this thread. The lone fact that nearly 6 years after all this I could still suddenly be yanked back into the same discussion says something. I hope you'll understand that I'm not going to follow up on this thread, but I hope that this reply will be helpful.

[john curl]

Well said, Bruno.

[fredex]

So changing the wire changes nothing.