audio cables

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#82
cracked case said:
How do you wire them ( for analog audio ) ? Use each twisted pair as " positive / negative " ?
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The StudioHub standard. Been around for a couple decades now. You wire the Cat5 in the standard pinout, then plug into a StudioHub adapter. Done. Fast, and cheaper (if you count the cost of time) than making the adapters yourself.

There is now quite a bit of equipment the RJ45 connectors configured for the StudioHub standard, no adapters required.

https://studiohub.com/
 
#83
MrKlinky said:
In so many high-end installation photos we see meticulously engineered and isolated 100kg turntables between gargantuan amps and exquisitely veneered speakers, all hooked up with cables costing more than family cars, the whole sitting in a maximally rectangular room with plain plastered walls. Is it that room treatment remains a mystery, or is it simply deemed unnecessary or ineffective by audiophools, who would very quickly deride any 'flawed' recording made in a toilet. Room treatment remains the most cost-effective and real upgrade above a certain expenditure on equipment - if WAF permits!
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IMHO, the WAF aspect is pretty huge. You can tuck cables out of sight (unless you don't), but the walls of a room are sacred ground.

Also, acoustic treatment makes a HUGE change, both visually and audibly. And there's no really mythology surrounding it, because the actual science is difficult enough to understand. Cable mythology is greater than cable fact for several reasons, not the least of which is the subjective results are all the evidence there really is. And cable subjectivity can't be verified or quantified. Acoustic treatment can be subjectively verified, quantified, and to a large extent, predicted and replicated. Bad things for that market.
 
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#84
Evenharmonics said:
It already involved objective listening comparison. The answer is in the results.
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That's subjective. No measurements, opinions only = subjective. You can collect opinions and analyze them statistically, but the data is subjective.
Evenharmonics said:
Which evidence and how did you find that out about those people? Was it through your own survey of them? If so, how many people?

What method can he use for finding his own answer? It would be nice if you can share the details so that he can apply the repeatability and avoid "no two people in different places and at different times ever seem to run exactly that same experiment."
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Oops! The emperor is naked!
 
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#85
jaddie said:
And cable subjectivity can't be verified or quantified. Acoustic treatment can be subjectively verified, quantified, and to a large extent, predicted and replicated. Bad things for that market.
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But the good thing for the cable sellers (bad for consumers) is that the mark-up is huge. There is little cost of material and construction but very high in MSRP. Plus it's easier to handle and ship compared to acoustic treatments (& speakers). No wonder this business is still going on.
 
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#86
benb said:
I can't imagine all the different brands and models of cables would have such different characteristics as to make them sound noticeably different. Perhaps some preamp output was on the edge of oscillation and slightly different cable capacitances made it closer to the edge of oscillation. It's not just "cables have a sound," it's the electrical interactions between equipment.

Did anyone there have an electrical engineering background? What there ever any hypothesis given as to why different cables sounded different?
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There have been several papers, articles, etc. It gets down to cable electrical parameters and the specific application. You can miss-apply a cable and make it sound bad. You can also apply a range of different cables to an application and all do equally well. Exotics may well be at the extremes deliberately.

Just to simplify, you cannot correctly say "all cables sound alike" or "cables make no audible difference". Neither is true when you exclued a discussion of application. Cables can have a sound character in some applications. But when they do, it's always degenerative to the signal, the signal is somehow modified from the original. The result may be perceived as positive in specific circumstances. Those degenerative effects are measurable to thresholds below the point where they become audible. Of course, nobody does that, and really, most don't want to know anyway.
 
#87
Evenharmonics said:
But the good thing for the cable sellers (bad for consumers) is that the mark-up is huge. There is little cost of material and construction but very high in MSRP. Plus it's easier to handle and ship compared to acoustic treatments (& speakers). No wonder this business is still going on.
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Yes, exactly. It's perhaps the one accessory that has persisted the longest since it entered the market. Amazing.
 
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#88
jaddie said:
Both Wheatstone and Axia have products
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Our architecture always puts Wheatstone Blades in studio physically close to analogue sources, limiting cables to a few feet. Those occasions are rare. Other than microphones. A/D conversions are very few; from music sources to phone calls and sat feeds most audio content enters the studios as digital and stays in that format until reaching the antenna. Interesting note about StudioHub use in the US. My experience here is it's part of the toolkit but I never heard of major plants wholly based on it. That's possibly related to the preferences of domestic installation contractors too.
Swinging back to cables, where have you experience issues with magnetic interference?
 
#91
rdf said:
Our architecture always puts Wheatstone Blades in studio physically close to analogue sources, limiting cables to a few feet. Those occasions are rare. Other than microphones. A/D conversions are very few; from music sources to phone calls and sat feeds most audio content enters the studios as digital and stays in that format until reaching the antenna.
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Nice when you're building something new, not always possible when you do stepped-upgrades. Yes, if I could start from scratch and had zero analog-only gear, that's how I'd do it too. That's just not a universal reality. I've also had issues in high RF fields of between 1 and 1.5 Mhz, where AES/EBU fails with Cat5E Shielded cable, but an analog interface works fine. It's hard to get 1 Mhz out of AES, no problem to filter analog above 50KHz. AoIP seems to work fine, always. But you can't always have the AoIP interface close to the source.
rdf said:
Interesting note about StudioHub use in the US. My experience here is it's part of the toolkit but I never heard of major plants wholly based on it. That's possibly related to the preferences of domestic installation contractors too.
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I didn't mean to imply that entire studios are StudioHub-based. It is just a ubiquitous too for moving analog signals in a facility.
rdf said:
Swinging back to cables, where have you experience issues with magnetic interference?
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Magnetic interference is present anywhere there's an AC field. Transformers, motors, etc., the ones you mentioned. The balanced line and CMRR usually handles it completely. I was only pointing out for those who may not realize it that the cable shield is not a magnetic shield at all, and may tend to over-value the shield.

I'm not having any issues currently.
 
#94

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#97
@jaddie, That definition makes a lot of science subjective. If a doctor looks through a microscope and says, this is 'large cell lymphoma,' that is subjective? If two doctors agree then its still subjective? Once 300 or so doctors agree then is it still subjective?

In medicine maybe the most objective tests are blood tests analyzed by a machine?

Whether or not you describe a bulls-eye pattern following a tick bite, its subjective? Even if deemed subjective, it can still be critical to diagnosis and treatment.
 
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#98
jaddie said:
If the data did not result from measurement, then the data is subjective by definitions.
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By definition per Merriam-Webster dictionary, objective is "expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations". Standardized and repeatable bias controlled test is objective test. In audio cable's case, controlling visual bias to detect audible difference is a way to "perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations". Note that it wasn't about detecting audible preference.
Markw4 said:
If a doctor looks through a microscope and says this is 'large cell lymphoma,' that is subjective? If two doctors agree then its still subjective? Once 300 or so doctors agree then is it still subjective?
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False narrative. The objective test mentioned in cable comparison or soda taste above is about comparing one to the other. Nice try. 🙄
 
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