Bingo. A couple of years back I built a lot of amps over a 2 year period oscillating back and forth amongst them, each sounding better than the other at different times, depending on what I was doing/feeling. Only later when I reviewed my notes did I see the error of my ways.R-Carpenter said:
Andre Visser said:
Hi Andre,
Could you please explain, in technical and scientific terms, exactly what makes a system "revealing" and how you went about designing this feature? Seems that would be invaluable information for those seeking to hear cables listening to recorded media. Thanks.
Conrad Hoffman said:
Hi Conrad,
Perhaps it is the act of measuring itself that is inducing the hearing deficiencies?
BTW, I use quad ampliflication myself, but have no low cut dresses covering my system. So I guess mine isn't "revealing enough" either.
cheers,
AJ
Groan. 🙄 Wire has come back to haunt us again has it? I thought this thread was dead a couple of years back.
OK, IMO, wire can & does make both measurable & audible differences to a system, but none of it has a blind thing to do with the lies & half-truths churned out in advertising for high priced wire. Its LCR parameters simply affect the behaviour of the components it's tying together. Swap out 10ga speaker wire for something 30ga but otherwise identical in design & construction. You will find both audible & measureable changes. Rocket science it is not; common-sense? Er, yes. Does one sound 'better' than the other? Depends on the system & what you're trying to achieve as to which is preferable, or indeed, if there are any audible differences.
What's rather amusing is that carrying a signal really isn't that difficult a task. Compared to, say, what the amplifier has to do it's laughably simple. Studios seem to manage it all the time & they do the recordings for pity's sake. Some of the most beloved of 'audiophile recordings' date from the 1950s... odd, because something tells me the studios weren't using monsterously priced wire. If they even gave it more than a passing thought, which is unlikely if it was doing its duty.
Look at the waffle about group delay in wire. I don't know about you guys, but a ~16 micron apparant difference in distance between HF & LF isn't causing me lost sleep. Another favourite of mine is Nordost. Nice looking products. I was howling with laughter over a review I read commenting that their more expensive cables tend to provide improved LF clarity & dynamics & speculating on various pseduo-scientific reasons for it. Personally, I'm wondering if it might possibly have something to do with the fact that they have more metal in them, lowering resistance & increasing the usable LF BW of the wire, when before it was too small to avoid clipping LF transients?
OK, IMO, wire can & does make both measurable & audible differences to a system, but none of it has a blind thing to do with the lies & half-truths churned out in advertising for high priced wire. Its LCR parameters simply affect the behaviour of the components it's tying together. Swap out 10ga speaker wire for something 30ga but otherwise identical in design & construction. You will find both audible & measureable changes. Rocket science it is not; common-sense? Er, yes. Does one sound 'better' than the other? Depends on the system & what you're trying to achieve as to which is preferable, or indeed, if there are any audible differences.
What's rather amusing is that carrying a signal really isn't that difficult a task. Compared to, say, what the amplifier has to do it's laughably simple. Studios seem to manage it all the time & they do the recordings for pity's sake. Some of the most beloved of 'audiophile recordings' date from the 1950s... odd, because something tells me the studios weren't using monsterously priced wire. If they even gave it more than a passing thought, which is unlikely if it was doing its duty.
Look at the waffle about group delay in wire. I don't know about you guys, but a ~16 micron apparant difference in distance between HF & LF isn't causing me lost sleep. Another favourite of mine is Nordost. Nice looking products. I was howling with laughter over a review I read commenting that their more expensive cables tend to provide improved LF clarity & dynamics & speculating on various pseduo-scientific reasons for it. Personally, I'm wondering if it might possibly have something to do with the fact that they have more metal in them, lowering resistance & increasing the usable LF BW of the wire, when before it was too small to avoid clipping LF transients?
For sure if you design / build speakers, measurements is very important but in the end you have to listen to it to decide whether it can accurately reproduce the sound of different instruments. That you can only do by listening.
My amplifiers are black and surely don't sound "dark".
On my system, I will without doubt tell you which cable is which.
Spend your money on important things. Get the best drivers you can and invest time in a research and design. If you building your own boxes, get a nice router bit or better router. There are plenty of other places to spend money and actually affect the outcome then cables.
I agree, and after you are finished with the important things, you will definately be able to hear how important cables is also.
MaVo said:
it is quite a challenge to hear music from a loudspaker without amplification
But maybe with the right cables...
Please read my post again, I was talking about acoustic instruments, synthesizers and amplified instruments like electric guitars.
I have several cables (ICs and speaker), they all sound different. I suspect their measured resistance / capacitance / inductance are similar. The sonic differences are not subtle.
My current IC is a listening compromise. It is "better" in some areas than my other similarly priced IC, but worse in others. Overall I prefer it.
Not sure about some of the rather simplistic psychology going on here - although it undoubtedly plays some part. I invested a lot of time and effort weaving CAT5 cables and hated the sound from the start. I bought a silver IC kit and struggled to enjoy what I heard. In both cases the psychology would have been for me to ignore their shortcomings.
Reading about high-end cables - what fun. One manufacturer claimed that his wire was designed with an air dielectric, only touching the teflon at a few tiny points along it's length. Another boasted that the teflon was tightly bonded to the wire at all points. Both claimed that the design resulted in the best possible transmission of the signal.
What was the question again?
My current IC is a listening compromise. It is "better" in some areas than my other similarly priced IC, but worse in others. Overall I prefer it.
Not sure about some of the rather simplistic psychology going on here - although it undoubtedly plays some part. I invested a lot of time and effort weaving CAT5 cables and hated the sound from the start. I bought a silver IC kit and struggled to enjoy what I heard. In both cases the psychology would have been for me to ignore their shortcomings.
Reading about high-end cables - what fun. One manufacturer claimed that his wire was designed with an air dielectric, only touching the teflon at a few tiny points along it's length. Another boasted that the teflon was tightly bonded to the wire at all points. Both claimed that the design resulted in the best possible transmission of the signal.
What was the question again?
R-Carpenter said:
My amps are 220W ClassA monoblocks, own design.
Pre-amp, fully balanced dual mono, own design.
Speakers, 2.5 way transmission line with Seas Exell drivers, own design.
CD Player, modified Marantz 63KI.
Listening is the first step into detecting a difference, but measurements should be used by the developer to try and make some sense out of what is heard.Andre Visser said:
When I was trying out some speaker internal cables of only 45cm long, one original set had quite good tone balance, but one listener pointed out a difference on detail compared with another pair that should be not as good. I noticed the difference between the two, and assumed the tone balance was was different due to different component quality, but ignored the fact that the one that sounded a bit boxy revealed more detail. It tuned out that when I changed the internal cable to be the same as the one using better components but using cheaper cable, the detail became less revealing. So I started to swap the cables around and found that the more expensive cable had more strands even though the sizes seemed the same for both. I think the increased strand number somehow provided better capability to reveal detail; but the downside of the one with more strands was that cymbal timbre sounded a bit mushy and not clean, a bit different from what we would hear live. So I tried Cat5 and also started measuring the harmonics at the amp output when driving the speaker load. Then I discovered that Cat5 cable using only 6 strands produced noticeably lower harmonics below 100Hz. In listening tests, this is also the configuration that gave the most clean and detail music.
AJinFLA said:
If that was easy, all hi-fi's would have been perfect. 😀
Technical, perhaps but I'm no scientist
.A revealing system is one that every component / signal path is designed to give "accurate and lossles" reproduction. I have my own ideas of what is necessary to achieve that but I don't want to get involved in another argument 🙂 .
André
And what is your system AJ?
Anyway, I just went on MIT cables web site and wow. The hole theory to justify $999 per foot cables.
Not a single number to prove anything. WOW
Anyway, I just went on MIT cables web site and wow. The hole theory to justify $999 per foot cables.
Not a single number to prove anything. WOW
interesting read
Article
Starts page 51 (i.e. page 39 in the pdf document).
Can anyone argue against it, without using the typical anecdotal evidence or the childish "But I can hear the difference" argument?
This is the same discussion as the "amplifier sound" one. A lot of people are simply in denial of the facts.
Article
Starts page 51 (i.e. page 39 in the pdf document).
Can anyone argue against it, without using the typical anecdotal evidence or the childish "But I can hear the difference" argument?
This is the same discussion as the "amplifier sound" one. A lot of people are simply in denial of the facts.
Re: interesting read
That one can only make me smile, all the graphs showing differences between the expensive cables and in the end lamp cord is good enough. (Claimed without a supporting graph.)
schumpe said:
That one can only make me smile, all the graphs showing differences between the expensive cables and in the end lamp cord is good enough. (Claimed without a supporting graph.)
Ofcourse cables are different...but personally I just use what I have in the box, nothing special if cheap rubber insulated tinned copperwire is ordinary...well, I do have some IC cables with flat silver wire with cotton insulation 😀 but I really dont need special tuning anymore 🙂
Hi,
I believe that there could be tonal differences between cable due to the inherent capacitive, inductive and resistive features of each design. To the extent that a £10,000 cable sounds better than £10, then I am not so sure.
What about carbon based conductors which exhibit negative resistance co-efficients? (Also helps explain why people do not get along too well with large voltages)
Thanks
Gareth
I believe that there could be tonal differences between cable due to the inherent capacitive, inductive and resistive features of each design. To the extent that a £10,000 cable sounds better than £10, then I am not so sure.
What about carbon based conductors which exhibit negative resistance co-efficients? (Also helps explain why people do not get along too well with large voltages)
Thanks
Gareth
Interesting point! When did they stop using cloth covered wires and start using ones sheathed in plastic?
I doubt they even noticed. Or cared. 😉 IIRC, rubber coating wasn't uncommon either for wire until plastic coating became more widely available. At a guess, mid 1950s onward.
IMO, most of those recordings sounded good because they actually had professionals doing them, who'd learned their trade the hard way, actually engineering & recording live performances, when mixing etc. facilities were minimal at best so they had to get it right, and quality actually mattered to the powers that be. Different era, different attitudes, different standards.
IMO, most of those recordings sounded good because they actually had professionals doing them, who'd learned their trade the hard way, actually engineering & recording live performances, when mixing etc. facilities were minimal at best so they had to get it right, and quality actually mattered to the powers that be. Different era, different attitudes, different standards.
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