skogs said:
Skogs.. if you're serious - who is your brother?
panomaniac said:
Oh yes, -- indeed! It's paid my bills for 33 years, and I've been involved in various ways in some 800+ of the sort.....
Wow, Frank, an anecdote unsupported by any data, details, or protocols. By someone who makes money peddling this stuff! That sure convinces me!
L, C, and R don't have to be identical, just close enough to reduce frequency response variations to some minimal value (0.1dB would certainly be a good target).
L, C, and R don't have to be identical, just close enough to reduce frequency response variations to some minimal value (0.1dB would certainly be a good target).
AuroraB said:
Hi, yes im serious, Skogseide, if that tells you something. He participated in developing the infrared sensor, and its software, that was used on the "Chandrayaan-1" that was launched from india.
http://www.romsenter.no/?module=Articles;action=Article.publicShow;ID=51130
@ Jlsem,
training under the specific conditions of a certain test protocol and test setup should have been included, but quite often information about this is rare.
But in any case, more important is to include positive controls on a sufficient sensitivity level to show that listeners reach the sensitivity level needed under the specific test conditions.
(Obviously, it sometimes difficult to choose a sufficient positive control if you don´t know about the general audibility of a difference; therefore it is often wise to approximate the highest sensitivity level reported to be reachable under blind test conditions)
Training in general listening will help, additional training under blind test conditions should be mandatory too, but a positive control must be included in any case.
training under the specific conditions of a certain test protocol and test setup should have been included, but quite often information about this is rare.
But in any case, more important is to include positive controls on a sufficient sensitivity level to show that listeners reach the sensitivity level needed under the specific test conditions.
(Obviously, it sometimes difficult to choose a sufficient positive control if you don´t know about the general audibility of a difference; therefore it is often wise to approximate the highest sensitivity level reported to be reachable under blind test conditions)
Training in general listening will help, additional training under blind test conditions should be mandatory too, but a positive control must be included in any case.
skogs said:
The perceived magnitude of the differences will largely depend on what qualities of a system is important to you.
skogs said:
We are discussing whether cables can make a difference or not, it has been said many times that cable quality (sound quality) can not be measured by its price.
skogs said:edit: Another thing, we are only talking about signal cables here right? If someone her tries to defend expensive power cordsplease try to convince me!
Easy, put an expensive power cord on your kettle and make yourself some nice coffee. 😀
skogs said:
100% pure oxygen-free copper will be better if you can find some. 😀
Andre Visser said:
Maybe 99% (or as close as you get) oxygen free pure (again as close as possible) copper will be a better description if you wanna get picky. anyway, you knew what i meant.
In these cable discussions, price is always a factor🙂
skogs said:
Yes I know what you meant, couldn't resist. 😉
skogs said:
First we have to decide whether there are differences, then we can start complaining about the prices. 😀
skogs said:
OFC silver plated PVDF insulated wire, better known as wire wrap wire. 🙂
EDIT - I think 30AWG is fortuitously close to M. O. Hawksford's optimum, though as we discussed many times he was seriously in error in his analysis.
Hmmm, well the room may make some difference for cables that have too much dielectric material that has a constant above about 2.8 or so.
Those really small amplitude short duration signals are going to be stripped off of the information packet and become noise. If there is a fairly thick, relatively tough high voltage casing, covering a conductor with a large surface area, says a large diameter multi-strand power cord from some hardware chain or another, you will likely get resonance peaks in low frequencies that can help excite room resonances where other cables will not do so.
When I began to look for a reliable speaker connection wire to use as a development tool for our very high resolution output transformers, my thoughts turned to Litz wire, due to low inductance, low DCR and huge surface area for AC signals. Plus it would come with a built in, reasonably low dielectric constant coating, approximately 0.002 inches thick on all individual wire strands (140 strands of #40 AWG).
I made up 3 meter lengths that were to be covered with nothing (true Litz is remarkably insensitive to external fields by the way) more than their native costume. The second set was to be used with varying amounts of dielectric materials. The drivers were of course EnABL'd.
The sound quality from the bare cables was extremely detailed, transients were fast, bass and mid bass were dry and somewhat recessed, mids were as deep as you cared to listen and highs were clear and sweet, with very good articulation. They were also very dull and boring to listen to, very little gradient information was available. This is the internal emphasis stuff, in rim shots, piano strikes, etc. that musicians apply to make the music an expression of their attitudes.
I spent some 20 hours with these cables, just getting used to their characteristics and then switched them in and out with the set designated for fooling around.
First was woven sleeving, 70% Orlon 30% cotton. Modest time extension in the Bass and mid bass, more internal information became available and both the time smear and coloration took off from there, to the point that high frequencies were just a mess. Large changes in amplitude seeming to occur. Not likely, much more likely, with the attendant time smear, that it was a phase problem. I switched back and forth four times, just to get an average over time, but the problems were not going away from the woven sleeve covered cable.
Next was a 100% cotton sleeve covering. This provided a very slight softening to all leading edges and no other obvious differences. The trade off routine did confirm that the softening was always there, and I did imagine some other changes too, but not with every cable trade.
Teflon sleeving with double wall thickness was the next trial. Lots of colorful sound, so much so that the bare wires really sounded dead in comparison, across the entire frequency bandwidth. After a couple of cable trades I began to notice that the musical colors were strident and that there was not really any more internal information available, than what the bare cable provided. But, there was a lot of lively coloration in a general sense.
Next came a woven fiberglass tube, with a polyester coating (Mylar). This was the least interesting of the alterations. The colors were exaggerated in the mid range and yet still sounded muffled, again likely a phase shift problem.
Finally shrink tubing, polyethylene, but without shrinking it down. The characteristic's were very close to those of the Teflon covered cables, and I did make up a third set just to make sure my memory was at least in the ball park here. Dielectric constant of the two materials is very close at around 2.2. The real difference I noted was the amount of internal gradient the shrink tube provided
Woven copper shield. Just by itself, not connected to anything and without dielectrics other than what was on the wires, there was no audible difference. Once connected as the return path, the woven material increased the "nature" of every dielectric I could put in and this included not having anything other than the native wire coating, though that set of changes was as cumbersome to make as any of the others and the differences slight enough that they could just as easily be imagined. For everything else, having that charged plate adjacent to the signal send cable was a clear magnifier of the characteristics of just having the dielectric on separate cable wires, for send and return. Connected as just a ground drain on one end, I could detect some magnification of dielectric differences but this was a pretty small change.
Since I had found the shrink tube and Teflon tube to be roughly equivalent in character and I wanted to explore some physical changes in amount of dielectric and how it was used I chose the shrink tube due to cost.
I began to cut ever shorter lengths of shrink tube and alternating the now three cable sets began to zero in on how much dielectric was needed. I noticed, over some time, that the length of the shrink tube piece had more effect on high frequencies than it did on low frequencies. I wondered how I could equalize this and chose to start slitting the tube wall on one "side" of the tubing. This turned out to be just what was needed to balance the upper and lower regions of musical color. For what I considered to be a neutral sound, with just enough color and time extension to be interesting to my ear I ended up with an inch long piece of shrink tubing, spaced on 1/2 meter distances, down the length of the cable, with an inch also at both ends, for a total of 7 inches, for three meters of wire. Starting from the middle piece, I alternated 2/3's slit, a 1/3 nibble at each end, with fully slit pieces.
This ratio provided the best balance of coloration, internal note information and balance across the frequency bandwidth. Then I built a set with the tubing shrunk down onto the wire, choosing a diameter that gave me close to the full shrinkage limit of the tubing. I could not detect a difference in shrunk and unshrunk tube, cable sets, and shrinking the stuff kept it in place.
Finally, I tried out single equivalent strands of coil wire (18 gauge) in the same alternating fashion with the same materials. The differences noted above were all available, but their degree of alteration was not in the same league as those of the Litz wire, though I usually liked the naked single strand of wire a bit more than the naked Litz wire, unless the signal source was a dense orchestral recording from Mercury or Reference Recordings. The single strands had to be run very carefully however, as they proved to be sensitive to parallel power cable orientation.
The things I draw from this set of ad hoc experiments is that dielectric constant to signal carrier surface area is important. That dielectric constant of the covering materials is very important. That thickness of the dielectric is not sonically important. That a woven shield, used as a signal return is maybe not a good idea. That Liz cable is a bad idea unless you have a solder pot (I have many). And finally, that layers of dielectric materials provided unpredictable changes in time smear and frequency location of that smear, as I did try that out too, just to see what happened. No rigor to this step at all though.
Bud
Those really small amplitude short duration signals are going to be stripped off of the information packet and become noise. If there is a fairly thick, relatively tough high voltage casing, covering a conductor with a large surface area, says a large diameter multi-strand power cord from some hardware chain or another, you will likely get resonance peaks in low frequencies that can help excite room resonances where other cables will not do so.
When I began to look for a reliable speaker connection wire to use as a development tool for our very high resolution output transformers, my thoughts turned to Litz wire, due to low inductance, low DCR and huge surface area for AC signals. Plus it would come with a built in, reasonably low dielectric constant coating, approximately 0.002 inches thick on all individual wire strands (140 strands of #40 AWG).
I made up 3 meter lengths that were to be covered with nothing (true Litz is remarkably insensitive to external fields by the way) more than their native costume. The second set was to be used with varying amounts of dielectric materials. The drivers were of course EnABL'd.
The sound quality from the bare cables was extremely detailed, transients were fast, bass and mid bass were dry and somewhat recessed, mids were as deep as you cared to listen and highs were clear and sweet, with very good articulation. They were also very dull and boring to listen to, very little gradient information was available. This is the internal emphasis stuff, in rim shots, piano strikes, etc. that musicians apply to make the music an expression of their attitudes.
I spent some 20 hours with these cables, just getting used to their characteristics and then switched them in and out with the set designated for fooling around.
First was woven sleeving, 70% Orlon 30% cotton. Modest time extension in the Bass and mid bass, more internal information became available and both the time smear and coloration took off from there, to the point that high frequencies were just a mess. Large changes in amplitude seeming to occur. Not likely, much more likely, with the attendant time smear, that it was a phase problem. I switched back and forth four times, just to get an average over time, but the problems were not going away from the woven sleeve covered cable.
Next was a 100% cotton sleeve covering. This provided a very slight softening to all leading edges and no other obvious differences. The trade off routine did confirm that the softening was always there, and I did imagine some other changes too, but not with every cable trade.
Teflon sleeving with double wall thickness was the next trial. Lots of colorful sound, so much so that the bare wires really sounded dead in comparison, across the entire frequency bandwidth. After a couple of cable trades I began to notice that the musical colors were strident and that there was not really any more internal information available, than what the bare cable provided. But, there was a lot of lively coloration in a general sense.
Next came a woven fiberglass tube, with a polyester coating (Mylar). This was the least interesting of the alterations. The colors were exaggerated in the mid range and yet still sounded muffled, again likely a phase shift problem.
Finally shrink tubing, polyethylene, but without shrinking it down. The characteristic's were very close to those of the Teflon covered cables, and I did make up a third set just to make sure my memory was at least in the ball park here. Dielectric constant of the two materials is very close at around 2.2. The real difference I noted was the amount of internal gradient the shrink tube provided
Woven copper shield. Just by itself, not connected to anything and without dielectrics other than what was on the wires, there was no audible difference. Once connected as the return path, the woven material increased the "nature" of every dielectric I could put in and this included not having anything other than the native wire coating, though that set of changes was as cumbersome to make as any of the others and the differences slight enough that they could just as easily be imagined. For everything else, having that charged plate adjacent to the signal send cable was a clear magnifier of the characteristics of just having the dielectric on separate cable wires, for send and return. Connected as just a ground drain on one end, I could detect some magnification of dielectric differences but this was a pretty small change.
Since I had found the shrink tube and Teflon tube to be roughly equivalent in character and I wanted to explore some physical changes in amount of dielectric and how it was used I chose the shrink tube due to cost.
I began to cut ever shorter lengths of shrink tube and alternating the now three cable sets began to zero in on how much dielectric was needed. I noticed, over some time, that the length of the shrink tube piece had more effect on high frequencies than it did on low frequencies. I wondered how I could equalize this and chose to start slitting the tube wall on one "side" of the tubing. This turned out to be just what was needed to balance the upper and lower regions of musical color. For what I considered to be a neutral sound, with just enough color and time extension to be interesting to my ear I ended up with an inch long piece of shrink tubing, spaced on 1/2 meter distances, down the length of the cable, with an inch also at both ends, for a total of 7 inches, for three meters of wire. Starting from the middle piece, I alternated 2/3's slit, a 1/3 nibble at each end, with fully slit pieces.
This ratio provided the best balance of coloration, internal note information and balance across the frequency bandwidth. Then I built a set with the tubing shrunk down onto the wire, choosing a diameter that gave me close to the full shrinkage limit of the tubing. I could not detect a difference in shrunk and unshrunk tube, cable sets, and shrinking the stuff kept it in place.
Finally, I tried out single equivalent strands of coil wire (18 gauge) in the same alternating fashion with the same materials. The differences noted above were all available, but their degree of alteration was not in the same league as those of the Litz wire, though I usually liked the naked single strand of wire a bit more than the naked Litz wire, unless the signal source was a dense orchestral recording from Mercury or Reference Recordings. The single strands had to be run very carefully however, as they proved to be sensitive to parallel power cable orientation.
The things I draw from this set of ad hoc experiments is that dielectric constant to signal carrier surface area is important. That dielectric constant of the covering materials is very important. That thickness of the dielectric is not sonically important. That a woven shield, used as a signal return is maybe not a good idea. That Liz cable is a bad idea unless you have a solder pot (I have many). And finally, that layers of dielectric materials provided unpredictable changes in time smear and frequency location of that smear, as I did try that out too, just to see what happened. No rigor to this step at all though.
Bud
Bud, I see you omit the step of analysis. In 35 years of working with the most sophisticated makers of medical, deep sea reasearch, and oil exploration equipment I have not run across a single instance of anything remotely resembling such nonsense. This includes CAT scanners, multi-hundred remote sensor channels (picking up nano-Volt signals), doppler ultrasound (phase/delay resolution is a matter of life and death, literally). Not one instance of a competitive advantage via special component or "secret tweak" that was not understood. No startups finding billions of dollars in missed oil with magic cabling in their front ends.
Pointless drivel
So Scott... tell us what you REALLY think... 😀
At NRAO some 35 years ago or so, I was working with point contact diodes and josephson junction niobium planar waveguide structures used in mixer blocks as rf detectors measuring thermal radiation from outer space in the single digit degrees Kelvin....
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=1...=false&qs=Ns=PublicationYear%7c0&N=4294884355
wire type definitely DID make a difference here.... but not for any of the reasons promulgated in this worthless thread.
John L.
scott wurcer said:
So Scott... tell us what you REALLY think... 😀
At NRAO some 35 years ago or so, I was working with point contact diodes and josephson junction niobium planar waveguide structures used in mixer blocks as rf detectors measuring thermal radiation from outer space in the single digit degrees Kelvin....
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=1...=false&qs=Ns=PublicationYear%7c0&N=4294884355
wire type definitely DID make a difference here.... but not for any of the reasons promulgated in this worthless thread.
John L.
I'm waiting for someone to bring up the Seeback effect to explain why plated wire shouldn't be used...
C'mon, tweaks, where's your imagination????
C'mon, tweaks, where's your imagination????
Hot!
Only if you're listening to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrKM1Z_te8
at the Burning Amp festival...
SY said:
Only if you're listening to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrKM1Z_te8
at the Burning Amp festival...
SY said:
I tried back in 1982 to find a single expert who could reference me on the Seebeck effect in thin metal films and failed. Gold plated Kovar to Al bond wire had a measurable effect but we just gave up and relied on perfect cancelling symmetry.
Hi,
Someone who makes money peddling his stuff?
Geezzz, I never received a dyme for any of those tests.
I either just happened to be there or got invited to participate in those tests.
It was not up to me to keep data of whatever the results of tests being just a member of the listening pannel.
Besides, this was years ago. Many years ago.
What mattered to me at that time was simply how I could improve my system. Nothing extraordinary about that.
I see Mr. Arrogance is becoming increasingly annoying, misreading messages and craving for proof of everything His Majesty can't hear or isn't willing to face up to.
You've turned into a very small person, Sir.
That condescending tone really doesn't become a moderator of such an otherwise fine forum. I regret that.
Cheers, 😉
SY said:
Someone who makes money peddling his stuff?
Geezzz, I never received a dyme for any of those tests.
I either just happened to be there or got invited to participate in those tests.
It was not up to me to keep data of whatever the results of tests being just a member of the listening pannel.
Besides, this was years ago. Many years ago.
What mattered to me at that time was simply how I could improve my system. Nothing extraordinary about that.
I see Mr. Arrogance is becoming increasingly annoying, misreading messages and craving for proof of everything His Majesty can't hear or isn't willing to face up to.
You've turned into a very small person, Sir.
That condescending tone really doesn't become a moderator of such an otherwise fine forum. I regret that.
Cheers, 😉
Hi,
Just letting the artillery out:
IC's more often than not will sound worse with shielding then without.
Cheers, 😉
Just letting the artillery out:
Magura said:
IC's more often than not will sound worse with shielding then without.
Cheers, 😉
Re: Pointless drivel
I hope that wasn't too strong, I do want to stay on good behavior.
To emphasize one point, there are several (many) fields that rely on the processing of extremely small and fragile analog signals that have virtually unlimited money to spend on better results. Draw your own conclusions.
auplater said:
I hope that wasn't too strong, I do want to stay on good behavior.
To emphasize one point, there are several (many) fields that rely on the processing of extremely small and fragile analog signals that have virtually unlimited money to spend on better results. Draw your own conclusions.
Hi Key, thanks.
Back to cables.....any ideas on how to reproduce the sound of various cables in the studio?
I am thinking of a CD that allows the listener to choose a cable based on the way it sounds. This would allow someone who lives out of a big city to sample the sounds of all the available cables at home and order with confidence. cheers
They say different things so no. They are both good in context.
Boosting the top end. I agree it is not new so I shouldn't blame the youth. But I still think computers give an 'artist' too many 'quick' options. If an effect is hard to implement one will think differently before using it. Call me old fashioned.
I hate it.
Good one.
Back to cables.....any ideas on how to reproduce the sound of various cables in the studio?
I am thinking of a CD that allows the listener to choose a cable based on the way it sounds. This would allow someone who lives out of a big city to sample the sounds of all the available cables at home and order with confidence. cheers
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