No, he's quite precise. He is saying that a cable that is anything less than perfect will be audible. Period. Which is absolute nonsense.
Very trivially easy to do.
se
You'd be hard pressed to find one that lacks that level of competence. You'd pretty much have to intentionally screw it up.
se
In fact, he covers his backside with this,
He's not saying that it must be audible, to everyone - that's silly, and he knows it - just that if one chooses to delve into it then there will be a difference. Whether that's important or not to the listening experience is something else again ...
The cable link, rather than just the cable, is key. Get a perfect cable, put ordinary connectors from the hobbyist store on the ends, plug in, and leave the equipment on the covered balcony of a home adjacent to the sea for a year - do we have a perfect link at that point?
He's not covering his backside at all.
But he's saying that anything short of perfection must be audible to someone which is no less absurd than if he had said everyone. Again, that carries the premise that human hearing is perfect and without limit. Which you yourself agree is silly.
He hasn't covered anything. The article is a flat out embarrassment.
se
Trivial counter example: cable is perfect except it has intrinsic pure resistance: cut off two lengths, one minimally short, the other long enough so that its resistance is a significant proportion of the speakers' impedances. Those two will have an audible difference which almost everyone will detect.
Au contraire ... an audio system is a system, no part of it exists in isolation, the individual element's perfection is meaningless unless it's contributing to the whole. Therefore it has to suffer the slings and arrows of that whole, take its fair share of the blame.
A beautiful example happened for me: a friend who was caught up in the cable hype, took notice of my advice to hardwire while I was absent. He commented the next time I saw him, "You know, a special audio cable I have and just ordinary wire, which always sounded so different, I experimented with hardwiring both of them ... and the differences went away, they sounded the same!"
Like I said, Mayweather and Pacquiao are both good boxers.
This is pointless. No one is claiming that you can't screw up a cable design bad enough that it can have deleterious audible effects. But Skoff is claiming that anything short of perfection must be audible to someone.
Why are you belaboring this? The article is pure nonsense from beginning to end. But here you are grasping at every feeble straw you can think of to try and give it some sort of legitimacy.
se
Hi John.... you know Walt Jung as well as I do or maybe better. His very nice expose on real world capacitor behavior in Audio was an eye openeer to any new engineer. I got a call at my work from Walt... he was asked by TRW if they could copy it and use it in their training of new engineers who only had limited school knowledge of what a cap is or does. Walt called me at my work (LLNL) and told me this... what should we charge them was the question. iirc we decided to let them make all the copies they anted to for free.
The entire 2 part article was written by W.Jung. My name is on it for my contribution to him as technical information and resources. The application of the cap info is what Walt thought would be best for audio... a hobby of his also. He actually did do the recommended changes to his own opamp based audio design and found it made for better sound. Thus, his app in the article.
I actually thought the article didnt go far enough in discussing DA enough. So, I published more on it. The reasons are all there to agree or disagree. But it is clear then as is now that you must have a voltage drop across the cap to get distortion from dielectrics. If coupling caps produce distortion, just increase the value of the cap until the distortion is what you like it to be. [ though, at higher cost and larger size].
Regarding the Multi-Cap that I received a patent for is not about DA at al. Nor anything to do with the dielectric material. It is a technique to reduce the inductance of the cap in order to raise the useful operating range of the cap to higher freq than a 'standard' mfr cap construction.
There are a lot of assumptions made, I hope this clears up some of them. Others have capitalized on the information for marketing and income.... people began to look everywhere -- cable dielectrics, pcb dielectrics, capacitors... all aimed at either making a btter product or cashing in on the hype they could generate.
But then things start to get distorted about the origins and who did what and how things got to be as they are... right and wrong. I did coin the term 'The best cap is No capacitor' when i discovered a technique to eliminate them and it was W.Jung again who I confided in. He found an App for it in his preamp... the DC Servo. In this preamp article my name was never mentioned. Only came out later that I was the source of the idea which I told the editor at that time. JC also knew I was the source. What I am saying is W.J introduced the cap to audio thru his own circuits and wrote about it.
I think some here doesnt know what went on back in 1985. So, there it is.... The main point of my research into cap dielectrics and those who followed decades later is that when you have a voltage developed across the cap you get increased distortion. The first run of those tests on coupling cap as Walt's App suggested.... does not refute that but reinforces my understanding. Recently, those same esteemed authors have since qualified their published results by reminding us it applied only to coupling caps.... not EQ/ filter circuit Apps which inherently have a voltage across them by design. Then the caps with lowest DA and DF have the lowest distortion.
Nothing has changed in my mind about distortion in apps from that time some 35 years ago. Might want to argue his article with him if you dont like it. Or, with TRW et al.
THx-RNMarsh
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Not pure nonsense. Mostly, pointing out that if you take it to the, yes, extremes then the reasons are there for people finding the reality of things not being that simple - and then the arguments go back to, what level of whatever is audibly detectable, and significant.
The key conclusion is
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Night, night ...
(Coming up to 3 in the afternoon here ...)
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You still haven't stated how you isolated DA from everything else in order to attribute the distortion you supposedly measured to DA. Otherwise, you're no better off than John measuring some distortion and falsely attributing it to micro diodes in the wire.
se
You still haven't stated how you isolated DA from everything else in order to attribute the distortion you supposedly measured to DA. Otherwise, you're no better off than John measuring some distortion and falsely attributing it to micro diodes in the wire.
se
Let me be the sucker then, because I really think some people don't honestly get it.
Just some pointers:
- If two things ain't perfect, there must be audible differences between them - who sees the flaw in that?
- Nobody ever told me it is perfect, therfore it must be imperfect - who sees the gaping hole in that?
I think that's enough for now,don't want to overload squirming brains!
Edit - I see I am a bit late to the party - ohh well.
Jan
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