I don't believe cables make a difference, any input?

[fredex]

Hi,

If and when you'd get the chance to discuss scientific stuff with Russian internautes you'll find them so clever it will pale our little notion of what can and can't be into triviality.

Believe and trust your senses is all I can say. One day maybe?

Cheers, 😉

While waiting for the boat to come in, keep those home fires burning. 😉

 

[audio-kraut]

Time will also tell you that timing is the essence of anything music

Believe and trust your senses is all I can say

One platitude chasing the next.

Believing in your senses is like believing in to any of the about 2500 gods out there. You can believe all you like. Doesn't make it correct or true what you belief.
Trusting your senses alone could be deadly.
But - we've been there, so just my repetition to counter yours

 

[fredex]

I still can't see any properties in cables that would alter the "timing" of music signals.

Surely you all mean a subjective impression of such, fair enough, but apart from EQ what else could prompt this impression?

 

[BudP]

The only clue (as if) I have is the different charge and release times for dielectric materials. We certainly are not talking much change in time either.

Adding too much of the polyethylene does seem to smear the signal in time. Sounds get very non specific in location, size balloons out of proportion and everything gets slow and thick sounding. These are all interpretations of an illusion to begin with, so I can't put a great deal of quantitative reliability to them. Qualitatively, the effects are pretty obvious, even when not going for over the top stimulus.

A less extreme application allows the comprehension of the internal structure of transients, along with other notes. This information is obviously already there, but it does seem to be portrayed, with a bit more time to become conscious of the amount and qualities of that information.

Adding any dielectric at all starts to enhance the dynamic nature of the music. Adding what is likely a coloration, not available in the perceived amount ,from the original source. It is, to a point, very pleasing and seems to become more intense and less pleasant along with too much stretch in time, with too much dielectric material.

Does this help?

Bud

 

[fredex]

Bud, it helps me understand where you are coming from but I still think your

...the different charge and release times for dielectric materials

as real as they are, don't affect the actual timing of audio signals.

You should be able to measure any differences that altering dielectrics may have on a signal. I know others say we don't know what to measure yet, but a null test would be a good start it will prove that some effect exists, then let us explore further.

 

[40 watt]

My starting baseline for comparison tests: Cheap-*** 18awg speaker wire at the dollah store for...you guessed it... one dollah.

😀

 

[BudP]

This best guess of mine comes from viewing the Electrostatic field and Electromotive field as alternating components of an AC signal.

If we are to believe that electrons do more than jiggle in place and pass voids along, then, when a vector change occurs in an AC signal, an electrostatic moment occurs. All moving parts stop and attach to the end of a dielectric molecule. This attachment process is different in time vs charge ratio for different materials. The release of those electrons to a current flow is also dependent upon this set of characteristics. The passing of electron voiding may also cause all of this complexity too.......

I assume that most of the signal has no problem with this activity. However, those low amplitude signals that describe much of the tonal details in a musical instrument's signal, are going to be affected more than the major structural stuff.

In the uncommon Litz wire application, adding more of a low dielectric constant material seems to aid this situation, to a point. I am reasonably sure that, to a lesser degree, the same is true of more normal wire and more normal applications of dielectric materials. I would also think that in these more normal situations the resultant changes in sound could be influenced in more subtle fashion than the Litz cables allow.

How and where we can go to poke at this and discover what is actually going on, is quite a bit beyond my skill set. Even developing an actual theory, is beyond my skill set. But I can find the chink in the dike anyway and manipulate the parameters I know about to suit my taste.

Bud

 

[Andre Visser]

Bud, it helps me understand where you are coming from but I still think your "...the different charge and release times for dielectric materials" as real as they are, don't affect the actual timing of audio signals.

According to me "the different charge and release times for dielectric materials" may act like a filter on low level detail, something like averaging the levels.

Maybe the effect is similar to clock jitter on a DAC, there we are talking about pS differences?

 

[SY]

I still can't see any properties in cables that would alter the "timing" of music signals.

There aren't. We just saw Sean Phillips at a club here. Played through a PA system. Wire was certainly not audiophile grade. Neither was the amplification.

Timing was just fine.

 

[Jakob2]

Well it indeed isn't the last word on this, but lets keep it in perspective.

Personal, anecdotal, uncontrolled and sighted tests are so far below tests like this wrt credibility that even mentioning them as if they are somehow comparable is a laugh.

jd

That seems to be sort of a misunderstanding.
I was only commenting your argument (or better the phrase that you used in your argument):

Well, in doing both a sighted and a blind test, they ALL gave more preference to the large and shiny box in the sighted test. ALL, including those experienced guys that said they know the effect and thought they could beat it.

As i recall it, the score was counted groupwise and the scoring (given by the group) was higher in the sighted compared to the blind test result, and for a particular loudspeaker the ranking was different.

But that simply just does not mean, that _all_ members of the _group_ were acting in the same manner.
It is possible, that some members of the group were able to give the same scores sighted and blinded, but were swamped out by higher score of other group members; you just don´t know without having the detailed numbers of the group members.

So, the data only justifies to talk about the group scores, but not to conclude that no members of the group were able to resist their bias. Not to speak about any further generalization.

 

[Jakob2]

Jakob, that is indeed true, with the larger groups having more of the dilution. But because the hard bottom limit is guessing (50%), one would expect to persistently see numbers somewhat greater than 50%. It's not Gaussian.

Individual tests have, to date, only shown null results. Although there's a possibility of the Black Swan, one can't test everyone, and at a certain point of testing individuals who claim to hear these effects, one can reasonably say, "There's no physical reason that effects beyond LCR should be audible, no group or individual tests have shown anything other than null, so it's unlikely there's anything there." At that point, as with dowsing, homeopathy, astrology, or ESP, it's up to the faith-based folk and wire peddlers to demonstrate that there's an effect before any serious practitioners will bother looking at it again.

"Demonstrate an effect" means actual subjective data, not invective, armchair hypothesizing, or anecdotes. The ball is in their court.

While i don´t like to discard any subjective evidence (as posted before there are people who have to trust their senses because they couldn´t do their work otherwise; which means that they most likely will fail sometimes, just as they are human beeings, but will _only_ fail _sometimes, as it is possible to resist ....)
you´re absolutely right if it comes to scientific acceptable results.

But to quote jneutron "if you bring science to the table, then it has to be real science" 🙂 .

I have given citation to at least one (see the Olaf Sturm trials) double blind test that gave a positive result and after analyzing it, i´d conclude that it was more controlled and better conducted than most of the other tests i´ve read about in the audio field, and it even included a negative control.

Was it good enough? Not really, but is there any other test around, that was better done?
Could you cite at least only one dbt that had positive controls on sufficient sensitivity levels included?

If not, does it really make any sense to argue with tests that were not up to par with scientific standards?

 

[Jakob2]

Humans are able to distinguish voices and even retain memory as to which voice belongs to whom, that's what happens when you evolve as a social animal.
To by memory distinguish between sonic differences of equipment - I like that claim to be shown valid.
Bragging doesn't count, evidence does.

BTW - yours is an extraordinary claim not supported by any studies. So - it requires extraordinary evidence.

The claim isn´t extraordinary at all. While the echo memory is just a few seconds long, the other parts of auditory memory aren´t any different that other memory mechanisms.

There is still a long term memory and it is more likely to recall an event if a lot of cerebral areas are involved during the categorization process; it helps a lot to maintain a mental state of socalled awareness during listening to involve a lot of areas on high attention.

If you´re concentrating to much on technical aspects it´s more likely to miss something important. 🙂

 

[jan.didden]

[snip]As i recall it, the score was counted groupwise and the scoring (given by the group) was higher in the sighted compared to the blind test result, and for a particular loudspeaker the ranking was different.

But that simply just does not mean, that _all_ members of the _group_ were acting in the same manner.
It is possible, that some members of the group were able to give the same scores sighted and blinded, but were swamped out by higher score of other group members; you just don´t know without having the detailed numbers of the group members.

So, the data only justifies to talk about the group scores, but not to conclude that no members of the group were able to resist their bias. Not to speak about any further generalization.

Jakob,

Yes you are correct, strictly speaking we only know that the group as such showed the effect. However, reading the text it at least appears that in particular those who had said that they knew the effect and would be able to cancel it were not able to do so.

I am not familiar with the Olaf Sturm trials, do you have a link or something?

jd

 

[scott wurcer]

According to me "the different charge and release times for dielectric materials" may act like a filter on low level detail, something like averaging the levels.

Maybe the effect is similar to clock jitter on a DAC, there we are talking about pS differences?

No offense intended but this is why pataphysics was involked. Wild speculation on supposed behavior, sort of fits the definition.

 

[Jakob2]

Hi Jan,

afaik there is no weblink anymore to Olaf Sturm´s Thesis paper, but i´ll send it per mail. 🙂

 

[scott wurcer]

On the muti-tone topic, I made a decent cut at it. 30 tones centered on the standard 1/3 octave frequencies. Frequencies computed for a 65536 bin FFT and TPD dithered down to 16/44.1. Averaging gives a clean >100dB DNR on artifacts.

A 1min long file is a 10Meg .wav if anyone wants to host it you can have it.

BTW it does not sound that bad, sort of like Boris Karlof or Vincent Price passing out on their keyboard as they come up out of the floor playing some dreary music.

 

[Pano]

Cool Scott. I should be able to host it. Just email me.

 

[scott wurcer]

Same file 192k mp3'd

 

[jan.didden]

Scott,

These are the ISO-31 freqs that AP uses in their multitone.
BTW a good method to generate any waveform is to download an AP app program (they are free) and run it, it will run without any equipment connected.
Then there is a utility 'make wave' which will build anything you specify, with any freq components, relative phase and crest factor, either in ascii or as .wav . A well hidden secret in audio (oops - its out now...).

jd

17.575
23.450
29.300
41.025
52.725
64.450
82.025
99.600
123.050
158.200
199.225
252.000
316.500
398.500
498.000
632.750
802.750
1,002.000
1,248.000
1,599.500
1,998.000
2,502.500
3,152.500
4,002.500
4,997.500
6,352.500
7,997.500
10,002.500
12,497.500
16,002.500
19,997.500

 

[scott wurcer]

Thanks Jan,

But you know engineers want to DIY their own toys. 🙂
Those numbers look fairly rounded off, I was playing with different FFT sizes and sampling rates and the exact frequencies get messy and different for each combo. Probably does not matter. I was also playing with some true Gaussian noise generators.