The only CM noise mic cables suffer from is from airborne RF as their sources are isolated.
Sure, and yes it normally does involve modding.
It's good practice if the cable is low inductance/high capacitance (think Litz
or Mogami coaxial) and long, and if the bandwidth of the amplifier is high.
In the old days of Cobra cable, many of your faster amplifiers smoked into those
cables without termination at the speaker end. (I did write an article about that...)
In the early 90's I developed some of the single mode optical transmitters for a high end digital audio company or two. Then I oem'ed fiber cables to a couple of the biggest names in high end cables at the time. The fiber cables used a couple of tricks the almost every EE would miss and they did make a difference. This allowed me to see the inner workings of some of these cable companies. One thing that comes to mined is the word "surplus. Later in the mid 90's I introduced an analog fiber optic transceiver pair. I had one distributor tell me the thing works better than any cable, but cable amount to the majority of advertising revenue. Going to be s tough road. I have noticed high dollar to slink. If anyone wants a design for a home brew that will work better. Let me know. I can forward a parts list. The analog fiber thing was based on some hydrophone work for the navy. It did work to. What would be interesting to do is to incorporate it into the final output stage. Single mode and you could go kilometers without any of the arguments above. Currently we are doing the same for a future F-35 application witha run of -170 db or so.
You failed to understand the intention of my post.
I think I know what you know if you're thinking about Physics (I think I have learnt all the topics in physics). The most advanced physics, which is quantum theory, cannot explain all. What I can do may be something you can't. And it is obvious.
It's an old story, isn't it. Too old that it is boring to talk about (even to read the same old words).
"it's not magic". That's an interesting words. An old words that means something. It could mean "you see, it is not understandable by you, but for me it is a simple thing". It could also mean "ah! Now that I just know how to measure, I can see how stupid I was, and I think you should learn what I have just learnt". But you forget something. People with less intelligent will tend to think that everything is simple (because they can't think with complexity). Otoh, intelligent people will tend to think further, stretching their mind, and find out that everything is complicated.
I agree with you that anything that sound different should be measurable. Take some branded cable, one "silver" and the other one "copper". Can you explain what are the possible differences in measurement?
Isn't this rf bridge intended for range 100kHz and above?? How about "accuracy" of such measurement at 10kHz?
http://www.home.agilent.com/en/pd-1...ional-bridge-100-khz-to-100-mhz?&cc=SK&lc=eng
It is the only 8721A bridge I found..
Jay,
still waiting for your revelation of how different metals sound different.
Canyoncruz,
Would be interested in a parts list for analogue fibre, as from what I remember from the past it was getting linearity out of the transducers that was one problem. These days though you convert any analogue sensor to digital as soon as possible and transmit it as digital, less problematic.
still waiting for your revelation of how different metals sound different.
Canyoncruz,
Would be interested in a parts list for analogue fibre, as from what I remember from the past it was getting linearity out of the transducers that was one problem. These days though you convert any analogue sensor to digital as soon as possible and transmit it as digital, less problematic.
That's the problem, I have no interest to measure or to explain the physics. I just can hear it, why should I have the explanation? People often said: those who make "extraordinary" claim have the responsibility to explain. But I just don't think it is extraordinary at all
The trouble is that most of the electronics fraternity do think it is extraordinary. I do find this attitude one I don't subscribe to, if I hear see or notice a difference, I go to great lengths to determine firstly is it repeatable, if so what is the mechanism behind it, that is the only way to move things forward and improve things. I do find that there is only really esoteric audio that ascribe properties to cables and use them to tune their system, whereas a cable like a PCB trace is there to take a signal from a to b, with the required fidelity and without adding noise to either the system or the connected electronics.
I know that, but I don't see it as my trouble/problem
I found nothing to improve in this cable thing so I don't want to invest time there. I did blind test some boutique cables and despite my preference I didn't want to pay a quarter of the price for that kind of sound difference.
I did some serious listening to decide cables for my reference speakers (from what I have on hand). Not just cable but everything.
I care only with my ears and my enjoyment listening to music. Once it is achieved I don't care with Noble prizes hehe. Yes it was very frustrating then but after I got sufficient theoretical knowledge I knew which direction to go and everything became easily repeatable.
I thought, may be I need to improve my skill on measurement, but I was "wrong". Because the more I know about the technical skills, the more I found the strength of my ears. I think once the theory improved, the ears also "improved". What I mean is, at the end it is the ears that make differences
Technical skill is only to support the advancement of listening skill.
10kHz wave length is 30km (30 000m). The speaker cable in question has length of some 2m. There is no way to apply transmission line reflections of 30km wavelength on 2 meters of cable (1/15000 of wavelength). You guys are catching ghosts and should check your test methods. Anyone else than Bateman measured 10kHz reflections on 2m cable? I would like to see REAL results (with proper instruments designed to measure 10kHz waves, not >1MHz waves). I do not believe much in Bateman's measurements, same as in case of capacitors, when he applies voltage directly on capacitors (with very low source generator impedance) and measures distortion, instead of loading capacitors by some real life load like 10 - 100 kohm.
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So no empirical data, just supposition, pretty much the same as all the cable related threads, manufacturers sites, forums related to audiophile cables. And for your knowledge I have stated in posts that cables can make a difference (down usually to bad engineering), that difference will be measurable and there are science based explanations for difference, it is the different metals, non measurable quantum changes that cant be identified in DBT etc that are extraordinary.
After so many years of asking I still have not had an explanation as to why copper sounds different to silver (or even more worrying different purities of copper, and here I believe we are in the points of a per cent).
After so many years of asking I still have not had an explanation as to why copper sounds different to silver (or even more worrying different purities of copper, and here I believe we are in the points of a per cent).
Despite how it may appear to you, I am trying to understand what was written.jneutron said:
I thought I was disagreeing with them.
On the contrary, I said that a t-line analysis was unnecessary as for a short line it must give the same result as a lumped calculation. The misconception is yours, in believing that the result from the two different calculation methods could be different.
I will ignore your comments about my supposed ignorance. Sorry for exasperating you!
Now to the actual matter:
Agree.jneutron said:
Agree.
Agree, but I am still unconvinced that this is relevant. See below.
Agree, apart from the part about this being not obvious (unless I have misunderstood what you are saying here).
It is not as simple as that. The RF model uses a resistive line impedance and (IIRC?) a resistive load impedance. This means that the reflected signal is in phase (or antiphase) with the incident signal, and they can be simply summed. At audio frequencies the line impedance becomes not only high but also reactive - at mid frequencies where R dominates over L, but G is still negligible, the line characteristic impedance has equal amounts of resistance and reactance. This means that in the unmatched state (the norm) the reflections are phase shifted. Each reflection at each end adds more phase shift. They don't simply add up, they have to summed vectorially. The net result of a lot of reflections is approximately zero, as they will be at lots of different phases, apart from the total which happens to come out to the value predicted by the low frequency lumped model.
So yes, lots more reflections, but they mostly sum to near zero as they are all at different phases. As the phase shifts are likely to be quite large (45-90 degrees?), any small temporally adjacent sub-group of reflections will also sum to near zero hence there will not be a long tail - or to put it another way the tail may be long but it will be very small!
I will state my position again, which I believe to be the established science as found in the EM textbooks: if you carry out a full wave calculation/simulation at audio frequencies on a short transmission line with an unmatched termination then the result you will get is identical to that obtained from the corresponding lumped calculation. This is what I have been stating, and this is what you have been disputing. I am unclear whether you accept that this is what you are disputing.
Now let's turn to audibility. I have two points to make:
1. The lumped calculation produces a filter - the effect of this may or may not be audible but in most cases I assume people will choose a setup which does not degrade the signal by too much.
2. You keep mentioning audibility of inter-channel delays and then assume that a delay of a similar magnitude will be audible in-channel - forgive me if I have misunderstood you here. My point, which I have made many times, is that any delays (if they exist) will be similar for each channel. They may be frequency-dependent but they will still hit the ears with the same time difference as though they had not been delayed at all. The issue is the audibility of in-channel delays, not inter-channel delays. My understanding is that our ears/brain are quite poor at temporal localisation - so much so that it remains something of a mystery why we are so good at detecting inter-channel time differences and hence spatial localisation. If all sounds above, say, 1kHz were delayed by 1ms we probably would not notice it. The fact that both ears receive signals from both stereo channels does not change this, as the delay would be the same in both channels.
I don't expect us to agree, but can we at least agree about what it is we disagree about?
What is "extraordinary", in an overall sense, is that human hearing can be remarkably sensitive to subtle variations in sound - and as soon as B doesn't sound quite like A, for whatever reason, then figures of merit will be applied. The arguments will rage on as to 'why' there is the variation - but I have found the biggest battles, headaches have been in progressing practical expertise, to be able to consistently achieve desired quality outcomes.
The theoretical world is relatively neat, the practical counterpart is quite remarkably messy - matching the two up, always, is never going to be easy ...
The theoretical world is relatively neat, the practical counterpart is quite remarkably messy - matching the two up, always, is never going to be easy ...
Yes. Try to understand my position. And now I'm trying to understand yours. Why do you need all of these "explanation"?
Yes of course. I'm aware of that one. So you have a need to prove to yourself that when there's no difference in measurement, as in copper versus silver, there should be no sound differences, is that it? What measurement and to what extend you expect two cables will have audible differences? (as you know, it is always about what to be measured).
If you understand my position, you'll know that I have never thought that I can hear differences between cables that measurably the same. So again, you found no differences between generic copper cable and aluminum cable? Between generic silver cable and copper cable?
If you really want to know, may be we'll find out something...
This is what we get as early reflections. These reflections are caused by sudden turn-on of the sine wave in the voltage zero. This turn-on has infinite spectrum, so it excites reflections/oscillations that disappear after some time.
This is similar to so called 'first cycle distortion', similar misconception.
This is similar to so called 'first cycle distortion', similar misconception.
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No, there is no difference between silver and copper cables of the same construction, other than a small decrease in resistance for silver, and I can not determine any difference in sound of such cables. In fact I would worry if a cable caused an audible difference, my concern being that either the cable is not engineered properly for the job or the electronics are so badly designed that a cable can cause a difference. With analogue I do agree that in certain circumstances there can be some interaction that may cause a change to the waveform thus causing a measurable change, but again this would be measurable, for digital transmission the correct cable will not cause any subtle changes, if it doesn't work it will be very noticeable (I will not include noise pick up as this is a separate subject and involves a whole system for assessment).
As to aluminium cables, I only see them for power distribution and would not use them for audio/digital etc.
Shooting from the hip, I would bet it behaves like an analog to the Gibbs effect.
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