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

Status
Not open for further replies.
AJ for comparitive testing purposes I only use a few CD's that I know very well (that is the boring part of comparative testing for me). I use the Holly Cole Trio - don't smoke in bed (CDP7811982), the Sheffield drum&track disc - track 5 and 6, then I have a compilation that were made for displaying purposes of a system at some big hi-fi show in Europe. Unfortunately I know very little about the music on it, my favourites on that are one with male voice going lower than I thought possible and a solo guitar player which sound like he have six hands :). Also good are Sounds of Wood & Steel - Windham Hill, Diana Krall also have good recordings. I think that will give you an idea. Other suggestions would be appreciated.

Sorry for the double question, thought you had missed the original.
Thanks, I'll investigate those specific CD's, with the understanding, as we previously agreed, that the studio equipment/cabling used must have been "good", as not to have robbed detail, masked resolvingness, induced midrange glare, etc, etc. All of which would have been embedded into the recording and agreed upon, impossible to reverse even with the goodness of your playback system equipment and specifically, cabling.

Regarding my system, not that repeatable, my CD Player is a seriously modified Marantz CD63KI, the rest made by me. I use 220W classA monoblock MOSFET amplifiers, a balanced dual mono pre-amp, mostly jfet and my speakers are 2.5way TL's using Seas Excel 7" magnesium cone drivers with Millenium tweeters, XO's with Goertz foil coils, Hovland and Sonicap capacitors.

Cool. So low efficiency dome over cone box speakers are sufficient to magnify any low level non-linearities in the system and hear cable details. Ok. Thanks.
Any pics of the speakers?
 
I forgot to mention in my reply to bud, even tho it was the 'continuing education of curly', I had no doubt that you were not labouring under the same miscomprehensions as curly was. To that degree it was 'tongue in cheek'.

I too feel a little sad that curly took the ultimate dive. Make no mistake, I think he was pretty damned wrong headed and very wrong, but he was sincere and (according to his own lights) genuine.

I can only imagine a few posts got quietly deleted...as what I saw was not that bad at all.

TBH I didn't see many insults from either side...unless it happened while I was asleep.

Are the wallabies gonna bliksem the boks??

Curly should only have bin binned and given a chance. He was just expressing his point of view from a subjectivist standpoint, as a guy who trusts his ears.

He was hounded a lot because of it.

In the Blowtorch thread moderator Anatech (Chris) constantly hounded JC, never for any good reason. It was really disruptive. There's a double standard here as far as I'm concerned. And others on this board that constantly cast insults, have gotten away with it for the most part.

I'm glad the moderators are putting their foot down more but wish they'd be more fair.

Curly's are really nice guy. He chats on the HTGuide.com forum where they have excellent moderation and a great crowd. He's been a great contributer on that forum. Never caused any trouble.
 
Well said, Johnloudb. If people still go after Curly on this thread, when he has been effectively muzzled by the moderators, I will step in, for his defense.
I did not know, till recently, that Curly works at TI as an electronic tech. That is more than many of you can offer, in education, and up-to-date experience.
 
I did not know, till recently, that Curly works at TI as an electronic tech. That is more than many of you can offer, in education, and up-to-date experience.

And? I don't really care if you are an aerospace engineer or ET at TI your actions speak much louder than your credentials in my book. The guy was constantly making this issue personal. He wouldn't insult other people but he did a good job making it look like anyone who disagreed with him was calling him an idiot.
 
I for one noticed that the tone and usefullness of this thread has immensely improved after C and D were gone. So in that sense it was a good decision. Lets see what happens when D gets released.

jd

He won't be the same when he comes back because he knows the moderators are not joking.Things became much worse by the time he appeared in the first place.I wonder why you are afraid to take a straight position on this.
 
Last edited:
Hmm. I thought we agreed, but now I doubt it. The test definitely was NOT DB, because the administrator's *knowledge* of the group's IQ was able to influence the outcome, hence this shows the need to have an administrator who has no prior knowledge whatsoever hence the need for DB testing.

jd

We still agree on the more important principle of impact of administrator expectation. Whether the IQ test was 100% double-blind - again there is no reasonable way an administrator could have know which question all individuals of the group were answering at any one time and prompted them specifically - is an interesting and partially linguistic question. I'm OK with it but didn't go there because the strict definition would seem to invalidate almost all audio tests reported here, and certainly everything structured as a personal challenge. Adios Randi.
The strict definition is my recollection how audio labs like Nortel conducted their research. Engineers determined what they wanted tested then the protocol and implementation was entirely handed off to independent internal administrators, the latter psychologists specialized in testing.
 
.... he did a good job making it look like anyone who disagreed with him was calling him an idiot.

He was called that and more, and 'charlatan' has been thrown around here often without repercussion. Whether the Curly decision was fair given the abuses of his opponents or not, there's only so much required attention you can reasonably expect from a group of volunteer administrators of a free discussion forum.
 
He was called that and more, and 'charlatan' has been thrown around here often without repercussion. Whether the Curly decision was fair given the abuses of his opponents or not, there's only so much required attention you can reasonably expect from a group of volunteer administrators of a free discussion forum.

I guess I skipped over a lot of it and wasn't paying attention. It just seemed to me that he was stirring things up before anyone had made personal attacks. Any attempt to explain an opinion on the fallibility of our perception or hearing ended up with a rewording by Curly with some hyperbolic tone along the lines of "So I guess we are all just delusional and can't think for ourselves". It seemed a little passive aggressive and borderline baiting if not outright baiting.

Anyway I don't want to talk about Curly anymore. And yeah I wouldn't want to baby sit us either :) .
 
Sorry for the double question, thought you had missed the original.

No problem,

Thanks, I'll investigate those specific CD's, with the understanding, as we previously agreed, that the studio equipment/cabling used must have been "good", as not to have robbed detail, masked resolvingness, induced midrange glare, etc, etc. All of which would have been embedded into the recording and agreed upon, impossible to reverse even with the goodness of your playback system equipment and specifically, cabling.

Ah, I thought there would be something behind that question but please check and let us know, it would be quite interesting.
 
Hi

This quote suggests that maybe speaker cables are more likely to have audible results.

Anyone with more knowledge than me care to comment?

It is well understood that the resistance (actually impedance) of the speaker cable is in series with the loudspeaker. This forms a voltage divider. In most loudspeakers the impedance varies with frequency so the voltage division ratio also changes with frequency. That is why people use big thick cables to reduce the resistance of the source and decrease the amount of frequency dependent variation in power delivered to the loudspeaker.

If a loudspeaker is voiced with a speaker cable that has high resistance then it will not sound the same when used with other cable. One pro manufacturer used to use moderately long cables in their test setup. As a result they had loudspeakers that performed very well in large scale systems.

This changed when they got a summer intern who connected the speaker drive cables back to the analyzer input directly and saw that the result was not flat. After they fixed the mistake in the test setup the speakers they made no longer had the same "house" sound.
 
Great story. Off topic: I remember a similar one on Usenet many years ago by Dick Pierce if memory serves. He was called in by a very (and I mean very) renowned manufacturer of professional drivers to solve a quality consistency issue. The company kept a reference sample and drivers off the line were randomly tested against it. Those not meeting a specified variance were removed yet over weeks production still drifted out of tolerance.
What he claimed to have discovered was at the end of each day's production run the sample was boxed for sale and a new one within tolerance pulled off the line to serve as tomorrow's reference. :)
 
I would like to appeal to the moderators on Curly's behalf. Although I may not agree with him, I ask the moderators to give him another chance.

Yeah, me too. I ask that everyone who thinks Curly deserves another chance to PM the moderators, as a kind of petition to bring him back. I've already done so, and whether people agree with him or not he deserves a second chance!
 
Curley was treated very badly by a small number of the more atavistic :darkside:posters. In fact I am quite sure that at least two of them were doing everything possible to goad him into over-reaction - any such people should be ashamed of their actions. It would be good to know that such people have been warned by the Mods.

For Curley to be be invited back to full membership would be not only a right action, but would show some degree of straight humanity. (HOWEVER, I would certainly like to hear less of his appealing to experience in the 'high end' audio trade as support for his arguments.)
 
Now that this thread has turned into the "pleading for Curly Woods", it may be worth pointing your attention towards the fact, that he got quite a few warnings, on several different occasions, and kept on with his act.

So no reason to go all wet eyes! No moderator has AFAIK been particulary hard on him, rather the opposite, as he actually got quite a few chances to clean up his act.


Maybe, just maybe, the good old days, were not that good after all.


Magura :)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.