Brett said:
heh heh, yeah it always pops up don't it!
SY said:
heck SY, we ARE good. (but not that good)
Hi panikos, see you've just replied. To answer your concern, no it was just what we had laying around (expensive wise). Also, another confounding point is that the system was new to all concerned. It WOULD be a more robust test if it could be done with someones system that has been 'synergistically optimized' and throw any old cheap stuff on the front as a comparison.
As you can imagine (and can see from the very little discussion that resulted) it is hard to get something like this off the ground amongst audiophiles. the fact that it did was a great start.
Somehow now tho, (at least amongst those who attended) it will be even harder to get someone to host it, too much at stake.
Re cables, as I said, it needs to be done instantly from the LP, the second you stand up and move opens the door to all sorts of interpretations.
terry j said:
Hi Terry,I was not trying to find any excuses in favor of the expensive cables and if I gave this impression then I apologize.What I want to say is that a good combination of low cost equipment is enough to give good sound without the need of any "help"from cables etc......I did't mean that if the expensive system was better matched it would sound even better with the better cables either.In the end I agree with you in that,if,such an expensive system is so badly exposed by a much lower cost system then who cares about the cables? 🙂
The use of the word synergy was not intentional,but for my English it was not easy to find a better or nore correct one 🙂
dukeoyork said:
Which is why you don't let the guy doing the mixing do the mastering. 🙂
Recording studios are great examples for audiophiles. There's a lot of good equipment and good interconnects, but there are no $400 power cords.
dzzmiller said:
true, true. just wires everywhere. so many wires. so many inputs and outputs.
madness ensues.
terry j said:
Vastly? Actually there are not so different. A midrange chinese amp cannot be "vastly" better than anything 🙂
In fact it is quite remarkable that despite the generally poor setup there was an 80% preference for the slightly better system. Under ideal setup it would probably be just Terry not hearing it. Too bad Brett could not attend 🙂
analog_sa said:
ha ha, touche.
anyway, care to expand on the 'poor' setup? anything that can be done to get more robust results in the future is to be encouraged!
The point is that to get the first off the ground was hard, only going to be harder in the future I assure you.
The 'vastly different' did perhaps turn out to be an overstatement, esp considering the final acoustic results.
It seems that you read the responses, well done (most wouldn't?).
It was perhaps a mistake to force a decision, mainly done so that someone (like myself really) could not hide behind a 'no difference' decision. On hindsight, that prob wasn't necessary as any actual 'vast' differences would have shown up anyway. As you would have read, if a preference was not forced the results would have been different.
You may have also noticed that towards the end we violated good protocol by skipping tracks and going straight to the ones that were proven (by feedback) to be the easiest to pick? So that meant that everyone did not do the same test. (it is valid in a dbt to choose tracks best suited to testing what you want, but once a test has begun it should remain constant for all participants)
Yeah, 80% did prefer the expensive one. The test however (which seemed to be forgotten) was something like 'was the extra spent on the expensive front end worth it' (whatever the actual wording was).
That answer was quite explicit.
No.
terry j said:
This is the main reason some of us are into diy. Average "high-end" generally sucks and only the extreme high end is really worth pursuing. IMO of course. If you really have to use store bought equipment the answer is likely more dependent on disposable income than on the degree of improvement. Some people really demand the best and cost is only a secondary factor.
I realise that putting a proper DBT together is a daunting task. Especially if you believe that everything makes a difference. The idea of having a switch box in the first place does not fill me with optimism. It will obviously use relays or analogue switches to enable remote switching and possibly cheap jacks and internal wiring if it wasn't build to very high standards. God forbid if some level matching had to be done on top of that. Like it or not this box already constitutes a passive pre of sorts.
Not to mention the lack of attention towards equipment support and isolation which i rate higher or equal in sonic effect to cables.
One may argue that both sets were in equally non-optimal conditions but setting everything up well will only highlight the differences.
Panicos K said:
Panicos, I wish more will realise that high prices doesn't automatically mean better sound. I've listened to a lot of really expensive systems that I would not pay even a tenth of the price for. However I must say that I haven't found one "cheap" system that sounded really good also. There are no easy way to build a good (realistic) sounding system.
André
analog_sa said:
went quite well actually, but it did involve a bt of effort behind the scenes.
I fully expected that to be one of the first targets, strangely enough it was never mentioned by anyone.
Till now.
From halfway across the world.
(will get back to enjoying the cricket after typing this heh heh)
terry j said:
According to me that is the only way to evaluate differences between equipment, there is no use in comparing different CD players, for example, if the rest of the system can't reproduce the differences.
terry j said:
To me there are no need to switch instantly to evaluate cables on my system especially when I use my well known reference CD's to evaluate. It get much more difficult on an unknown system.
analog_sa said:
Well if anyone start biting the nails or loosing sleep over a connector or a high quality switch box (or even a high quality active line stage) it's just to test the test equipment first.
But of course there will always be people that refuse rational thinking and ideas and find something to critisize, if nothing else the moon and the barometric pressure.
/Peter
SY said:
Depending on the speakers used, it can be easy to make everything else sound relatively the same.
Pan said:
Peter, analog_sa make a very valid point, in an optimised system it take very little to undo the good qualities of a system. When you want to compare different high quality components there are no room for compromises.
Andre Visser said:
Read the thread on stereo.net to see what they used. You'll need a much better excuse than that. C'mon, be creative!
Andre Visser said:
Hi Andre,I agree with you.An expensive well set up system has more chances to sound good than a much lower cost one.Of course there are some lower cost equipment that are a very plesant note in this race of money no object audio.
Swithing in the middle of a piece of music is I believe the most dificult thing for someone to tell the diference correctly.IMO it is not only which cables or equipment you are comparing.Music used is IMO the most important factor.Choosing a piece of music because we think it is easy to show a diference it might as well be a trap because that piece of music can be within the ability of the items under test,at least for a few seconds.Many times I have concluded that a new toy is not good enough for me after a week even more.I like to "judge"new toys after long listening sessions with all the kinds of music I hear.Last toy for me were some diferent 12AX7 tubes,and while first impressions on some music were good,after a few days when I saw what they did to diferent music,I prefered something else.It needs time to come to safe conclusions,and good friends can lend you or borrow from you things for evaluation.Listening to as many things-not necessarily cables- and for as long time as possible will lead to more "correct"conclusions to our tastes of course.
In most situations the degradation is insignificant enough to worry about. There are some loudspeakers that have high impedance at high frequencies, ( like the original Quad ESL ) and maybe one or 2 other designs, and certain types of cable are not suitable. You want to keep the cables as short as possible.
I prefer not to think of any signal as flowing, like there is some sort of signal path highway that it travels down from the input to the output.
All the interconnect manufacturers lend to this notion which makes me laugh every time they use the term "signal path"
Taking the analogy of the signal "flowing" in a conductor like some sort of vehicle travelling down a motorway lane ,
you need only one lane for your vehicle to flow, the best cables are the highways with 100 lanes, and the worst are like highways with 90 lanes, but you only need one lane. Those best and worst cables bare no cost relationship.
It's like the difference of an op-amp bandwidth of 8 MHz compared to the bandwidth of an op-amp with 9 MHz
In fact that's mostly what a cables limitation is, it's bandwidth.
A cables bandwidth is far in excess of the frequencies needed in audio. The limiting factors are far more influenced by the circuitry.
Many of the cables' artefacts can be eliminated by matching, or driving the signal correctly. I do believe a lot of differences that people hear with cables can be attributed to bad design of the circuitry itself. There are a number of manufacturers who do not take this problem seriously ( phono stage designers, Digital outputs in CD players )
I encourage all those who are in the pro "expensive cables make a difference" to read this stuff, especially the stuff about what constitutes a signal path. These are not my words, but I agree entirely.
From:
http://www.lampizator.eu/HERESY/heresy.html )
"HERESY No 1. SIGNAL PATH
I read about signal path so many times I am almost ready to believe it. Short signal paths, pure s.p., elegant s.p. silver wire in s.p. you name it. I am sure everybody knows what I am talking about.
The bitter truth is IT IS NOTHING LIKE what people think it is. The so called "signal" does not flow along some PATH. Lets take a pre amp for an example. The signal (current) enters via RCA jack, and the first thing it sees is usually a parallel resistor or some kind of parallel pot. The signal sinks to the ground through this resistor and that's all. Yes. The journey is over. It is like the movie hero who dies in the first scene. Hard to believe?
Having said that - lets agree once and for all - the CURRENT flows, and the VOLTAGE IS. The voltage does not flow.
The Waves PROPAGATE in circuits but they happen everywhere at the same time and involve all circuits.
The minuscule current flowing from your CD source to the ground via this parallel impedance of a mentioned pot produces small voltage resulting from the impedance of the pot (Ohm's law) This voltage is then being "read" by the grid electrode of the tube, or in non-hifi units - the base of transistor, and this signal in turn regulates the series impedance of the active element. The electricity from power supply then copies the original signal in what we call "amplification stage". So this is a copy, not the original. Signal path is a myth. The VOLTAGE - does not flow by definition. The voltage IS. The current flows. But it does not flow from source to the load (receiver). The current flows from power supply to the ground via active elements. In every STAGE of amplification the current flows in VERTICAL manner, not "horizontal". If an amp has 3 stages, there will be 3 cases of current flowing from PSU to ground by the active part. So path is from PS to ground, not from CD to speakers. Once we understand it - it is easier to talk further.
Another thing is timing of signal - it does not go from one place to another. The WHOLE CIRCUIT responds to signals instantly, the whole event HAPPENS. It does not flow. The circuit response is everywhere at the same time, all elements at the same time. No flow. Input receives - output responds. At the same moment.
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