Ltralus
I cannot. All of my cables are Litz wire, with woven cotton over sleeve and very small amounts of additional plastic. They are not audibly microphonic, regardless of the signal sent.
I suppose there can be some reality to a hard surfaced, stiff, microphonic cable, being aided by resonance suppression, but how is this attributed to the sound coming from the speakers? Is it being claimed that the benefit is purely the acoustic noise no longer being added to the listening space, by the audibly ringing cable?
I am pretty sensitive to this, due in part to the beating I have taken just introducing EnABL to the DIY crowd. We don't even want to speak of the responses from those extremely conservative engineers involved in actually designing drivers. I would be pleased to converse with those folks experimenting with this, so, sorry to fly off the handle.
Bud
I cannot. All of my cables are Litz wire, with woven cotton over sleeve and very small amounts of additional plastic. They are not audibly microphonic, regardless of the signal sent.
I suppose there can be some reality to a hard surfaced, stiff, microphonic cable, being aided by resonance suppression, but how is this attributed to the sound coming from the speakers? Is it being claimed that the benefit is purely the acoustic noise no longer being added to the listening space, by the audibly ringing cable?
I am pretty sensitive to this, due in part to the beating I have taken just introducing EnABL to the DIY crowd. We don't even want to speak of the responses from those extremely conservative engineers involved in actually designing drivers. I would be pleased to converse with those folks experimenting with this, so, sorry to fly off the handle.
Bud
At Utah??? University of Utah? Sy, what were up to there? That's where I went to school, and all they cared about was research and gave no concern to teaching credentials. Fortunately they had some very good professors and teachers when I was in school, but the systems professors were absolutely appalling. I hated it.
My first systems professor Thomas G. Stockham was very good. Unfortunately he had to quit shortly after the class started do to his Alzheimer's. I felt really bad for him. He was clearly having trouble with giving lectures, and would repeat himself or cover material he'd already covered before in class. He was a really nice guy. He's credited for inventing digtal audio.
Thomas G. Stockham - GHN
So, afterward I got three bum professors. And the first one just didn't care about teaching, and others weren't good at from my point of view. Of course despite horrible student ratings, the first one I know got tenure.
It was all about research, not teaching. The engineering school was about to loose it's accreditation when I had to drop out due to my heath. They gave a survey out to students to help them identify the problem. 🙄
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I had a physical chemistry that did that also. No smack on the head though. One of the other chemistry teachers was so undereducated that in my second year, I proved to the other teachers that the required lab manual written by him, was incorrect on several points. The other teachers (but not him) corrected student scores (some of answers that were considered wrong were actually right) and voted to get another book. I never got along with him very well after that.
Steve, my P-Chem prof wrote a mimeographed text for the second half of the course. It was really quite good. He offered an extra point on the final grade for every mistake you could find. Smart guy, he ended up with 20 eager proofreaders.
John, I was there probably before you were born (went there for grad school). My next-door lab neighbor was a fellow named Stanley Pons...
John, I was there probably before you were born (went there for grad school). My next-door lab neighbor was a fellow named Stanley Pons...
You were lucky. My P-Chem teacher would take 2 points off if you ask if something he wrote was incorrect.
OK, just checking I understand what you are claiming: that vibrations from speakers hit the case of a CD player and cause the capacitors in the analog stages to vibrate, causing variations in the output signal that are audible. Such variations would presumably be frequency response changes compared with non vibrating cases. Is this correct?
It seems highly implausible, since I can lightly tap the outer case of my CD player (and thats orders of magnitude more energy than from sound waves or vibrations from the floor) and there seems to be no audible change in the frequency response. Still, might be true. Could you provide any links to measurements or dbt tests that back up your claim on variation in frequency response or audibility?
Member
Joined 2002
The article has not yet been published. But if you care to try it yourself just plug a capacitor in to for example a guitar amp. Be sure to bias it. Some capacitors are so microphonic you could just about use them as a pickup!
But if you are still skeptical try placing you CD player right on your loudspeaker.
For this test I used a Peter Daniels Gainclone without an output inductor. The normal listen (this week) is a push-pull 6FM7 'music-machineish' thing with feedback based on Rowe/AMI jukebox iron. It's an interesting speaker, both punching way above its weight while victim to awful marketing/preference choices like an over-ripe low end that barrel chests any male voice deeper than Woody Allen.
Just read it. No listening or dbt results in the paper. Instead uses objective measurements (frequency response, noise etc) of interconnect and speaker cables to see if any level of data would support the subjectivist claims. Objective results (eg distortion measurements) are not supportive of claims for audible differences.
Some excepts:
“…it has been suggested by many commentators that where differences between cables do exist they are caused by changes to the performance of the connected equipment due to the cable’s inductance and/or capacitance. While high capacitance, for instance (in this context ‘high’ means in the order 1nF - 10nF), has been known to cause instability in some amplifiers, the vast majority of amplifiers are at worst barely measurable affected by load capacitance in this range. Simple arithmetic shows that any possible resonance between such a value and the typical inductance of loudspeaker drive units (0.1 - 10μH) will be well outside the audio band and well damped.” (page 3)
“The majority of ‘evidence’ that audio cables have a distinctive sound of their own is at best weak, and most of it falls into the category of casual comment. Such formal listening tests as have been carried out typically show no audible difference between cables.” (page 3).
“..it will come as no surprise that it has proved quite impossible to isolate any measurable differences between cables (of whatever type) due to differences in metallurgy, dielectric purity, stranding or any of the other more arcane factors often claimed to be important in cable design.” (page 5)
And finally, except from conclusion:
“The audio cable market certainly owes something to the appeal of ‘audio jewellery’ but there is also, with little doubt, a significant element of self-delusion on the part of consumers and probably also reviewers, retailers and manufacturers...”
Thanks boconner, somebody just mailed me the paper, the heading is quite misleading, clearly aimed at selling more copies. 🙄
This quote is quite interesting though, it suggest to me that there can still be unaccounted differences and also show the limitations there still are with some measurements. Figure 1 also show remarkable influences from cables.
"To date it has not proved possible to null recordings
quite to the limit of the noise floor (which would surely
provide the strongest proof that cables do indeed make
no audible difference), but nulls have been achieved to
better than -70dB. To better this, not only must the
hardware be of a very high standard as regards jitter,
gain stability etc. but the software must have
impeccable processing accuracy while performing
mathematically quite complicated operations."
Member
Joined 2002
On most everything, especially movies. Your question got me to look into it and confirm my listening impressions. The sound correlates with what I see in these measurements, including the top-end funkery that caused worries about my amps.😀
Realistic expectations of what can be done with $50 (?) in parts doesn't stop the Atom from being a tremendous value. When Millenialist doomers bemoan the 'death of hi fi', Atoms + Gainclone make for a devastating counterargument.
Realistic expectations of what can be done with $50 (?) in parts doesn't stop the Atom from being a tremendous value. When Millenialist doomers bemoan the 'death of hi fi', Atoms + Gainclone make for a devastating counterargument.
Member
Joined 2002
Thanks jleaman, I really appreciate the offer and the trust it implies but can't accept. My system is currently in no state to provide trustworthy information, in heavy transition with unfamiliar budget gear moving in and out. I would have no idea how to interpret what I heard and don't want to inadvertently mislead you. I'ld love to take you up on it once things settle down but right now I might do more harm than good.
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