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

[fredex]

Originally posted by SY


.......People are free to try oil-soaked silver wire, freezing their photographs, and volume control knobs made of polarized wood. They can demagnetize their vinyl records, cryogenically treat their vacuum tubes, and mark their speaker cones with mysterious patterns. ......

So much to try and so little time! I have to prioritise so I am using my rational side to explore audioland, which means that some places will have to remain unexplored, as in the above list.

Just why other folk spend so much time on these things seems a mystery to me. I can only surmise that they, like everyone else, are after something, and for them that could be a feeling that they are at the cutting edge of technology, ahead of the curve, and someday they will be proved right by the very science that they now ignore.

Of course I could be completely wrong.

[fredex]

BudP
Another good post. In all sincerity you are a brilliant writer, you make me want to believe, it all sounds so plausible. Keep posting. (no sarcasm intended, please take it as a compliment from a non believer) cheers

[BudP]

Thank you SY. I will dig these out of whatever hidey hole they are in.

Another good post. In all sincerity you are a brilliant writer, you make me want to believe, it all sounds so plausible. Keep posting. (no sarcasm intended, please take it as a compliment from a non believer) cheers

Don't believe. Try this stuff out please. This is the reason I have posted on all of the various kinds of madness that I have explored. You can duplicate a lot of this stuff, for very nearly free. DIY after all!

Bud

[Key]

Originally posted by fredex


In audio someone may point out some little sound that you didn't notice before. If this happens at the time that someone inserts a new cable into your system, it is logical to assume it's the new cable doing it, and that may or may not be the case. This has happened to me many times, but I have found that once this new insight is heard I can still hear it without the new component. It may not jump out so much but it is still there, and even there on a lesser system.

What fredex said

Back to fine art printing, when an a unoticed difference is pointed out it is a real physical difference, and it would still be noticeable through less than perfectly transparent glass.

But if a person is presented with two identical prints and says, 'this print affects me emotionally but that one leaves me cold,' what can you do, give them a blind test?

If there is one thing I have learned from when I did color correction on prints is that it is very difficult to percieve small amounts of manipulation to the photo. Some of the adjustments I would do you really had to A/B or do a side by side comparison to see the difference.

More often than not an enhancement to the high end of the spectrum is percieved as an increase in detail and nothing more - not brighter even though it is.

If I was forced to color correct the way a lot of people expect an audio test to be conducted it would be very hard for me to honestly detect small differences. It would be like me being required to close my eyes for 5 seconds before looking at the other print. And in that case - I have tried this - it's hard for me to notice anything at all.

[Pano]

Originally posted by fredex
But if a person is presented with two identical prints and says, 'this print affects me emotionally but that one leaves me cold,' what can you do, give them a blind test?

A very good point! However I don't ever remember that happening where I worked. I do remember artists liking or disliking a new print run for "emotional reasons." But we at the shop could see the differences.

I have proposed (somewhere on this forum) wiring up the listener to test for heart rate, muscle tension, that sort of thing. Really...

Originally posted by Key
. It would be like me being required to close my eyes for 5 seconds before looking at the other print.

Yes indeed!! That's what has always bothered me about audio tests, it's so hard to compare 2 things at once. Much easier with images, even many at once. Therein lies so much of the trouble with audio listening tests.

[jlsem]

Well the thing that surprised me bigtime is the notion that if you had a perfect, zero-resistance material, the current would all be in the skin! The radial field inside the conductor pushes the moving charge outward to the boundary, and since it is zero resistance (in the perfect case), skin depth becomes very small (don't know, maybe one electron deep?).

Of course none of the equations mean anything at that kind of extreme - sort of like applying the Lorentz–FitzGerald contraction hypothesis to the notion that if a person could travel at the speed of light he would be everywhere at once.

What is interesting to me is that (IIRC) skin depth was originally defined as the depth at which the plane wave lags by one radian and the current density at that depth is e^-1 as a consequence of that definition. One wonders if it it possible to hear such "smearing" due to phase lag. The complexities of calculating such a thing involving music signals would be enormous.

John

[Key]

Well that was what I wanted to know.

Can you explain what the smearing sounded like a little better? Anything that sticks out as being obvious or that you could put into other words besides time/lag or another synonym for phase response?

[BudP]

Can you explain what the smearing sounded like a little better? Anything that sticks out as being obvious or that you could put into other words besides time/lag or another synonym for phase response?

I can try. Purely hypothetical situation to follow, or Auplater will have a fit.

When you get hold of a set of ribbon driver based speakers your first response to them is that they are thin. They seem tinsely and fast and while you can tell that everything is very finely detailed, it is difficult to appreciate. You take these bare Litz cables and slip them into a cotton sleeve, XXL shoelaces, only to find that the sound seems to have become diffused slightly. Were you plagued by a potent imagination, you might describe it as being able to hear the woven pattern of the cotton threads, within the sound the speakers are making. But of course, that could not be.

So you begin to add pieces of shrink tube and notice that this, tinsely, fast sound, with such clean and hard edges, begins to grow softer, almost as if it were being blurred.

Then you notice that the blurring has information content, it is not just a smear and you begin to realize that the instruments and their sounds have a sort of gradient that was not really noticeable before. Were you to strip off all the dielectric, back to the bare wire, you would still hear this seemingly new found information content, but it has again become less accessible. But now you know it is there and can find it, even without the pieces of plastic.

As you return those pieces of plastic to the Litz wire you will be very aware of the increase in information, to the edges of sounds and a greater degree of internal gradient within the musical notes. As you add more plastic this sense of greater detail unfolds further and then, with the addition of an extra piece, the sound seems almost strained, but at the same time it also seems fat and sluggish, overblown and hollow somehow.

If you continue to add pieces of plastic, this entire house of sonic cards collapses, into a what could be compared to looking through a rain drenched window, at a gray, leaden sky.

It is all still music, but you have simply gone too far.

Does this paint a picture with any meaning for you?

Bud

[Key]

Thanks Bud

Well I can see what you were saying but I guess I was sort of fishing for something different from you.

One of the clear signs of a system with decent phase coherancy for me - this was after switching DACs mind you but they are from the same company and sound very similar if not the same in almost all respects - was percieving sounds that are out of phase in regards to left and right channel relationship (reverbs and echos mostly) to come from the sides of my head or behind my head. And I admit that I think the better DAC accentuated or made the effect more obvious and that I could probably go back to the worse DAC and notice it to a lesser effect. But I also have to admit I may be wrong about the whole thing and I was just expecting a change because hey it's my new DAC and I want to like it.

Another problem I have is that I have experienced weird time shifts with songs after mixing them for long hours. It can all of a sudden maybe the next day or after getting fatigue sound like the song is in slow motion um but not. It messes with me at times and it makes me doubt the bpm I am using is correct for the song. I call it "song fatigue". And I think it might be from my natural inclination to improvise or change a song - rarely is the live version as slow as the studio version.

Anyway just some random thoughts/doubts on the subject. sorta

[BudP]

One of the clear signs of a system with decent phase coherancy for me was percieving sounds that are out of phase in regards to left and right channel relationship (reverbs and echos mostly) to come from the sides of my head or behind my head.

I think most of us have had an experience of phase so out of whack that you comprehend it as coming from some place other than the ordinary. I am aware that some folks have made an art form of this, using it in computer games so that even with just two channels you still get a location ID from approaching threats that are most definitely not in front of you.

I would be interested to read about how this is done, just to get some notion of what characteristics cause some recorded music to have substantial information coming from lateral positions beyond the speakers, even if you turn your head and look directly at the perceived source.

Beyond this tiny and trivial bit, I am ignorant.

Bud