Interconnect cables! Lies and myths!

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#121
janneman said:



Well, if you classify the attempt to clearly express what you mean as "literary skills" then perhaps your standards are too low...?😀

Jan Didden
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pretty good standard but they r better not used here.there r many other forums where they better b used.

fancy wires,fancy components,fancy words.high standards:xeye:

oops,is it true diyaudio thread?😕

sift thru any wire or components(''bling bling'' variety)thread.

offline::what does jaan-e-mann mean in URDU language?



hey quasi!!!! what happened to avatar?its u?
 
#122
sagarverma said:


pretty good standard but they r better not used here.there r many other forums where they better b used.

fancy wires,fancy components,fancy words.high standards:xeye:

oops,is it true diyaudio thread?😕

sift thru any wire or components(''bling bling'' variety)thread.

offline::what does jaan-e-mann mean in URDU language?
Click to expand...



What does "URDU", 'b', 'r', stand for in English???

Jan Didden
 
#125
I suppose what aggravates some people (at least me) is that: the same science which brought us audio in the first place, not to mention an affordable world-wide-web in which to share it, is for the most part thrown away when we discuss what are arguably the simplest parts of a system to implement. The fact that these are also some of the most difficult components to measure and characterize compounds the paradox.

This is a forum and as such... almost anything goes. If I had a point, I guess it was this: newbies and others asking genuine questions should not be encouraged or swayed to believe (or invest large sums) in things that remain to be proven... I didn't say OBSERVED. They should learn about what is known, understood, and repeatable.

Until the double blind gold plated silver teflon welding cable versus coat hanger & re-bar tests are concluded, and we reach a concensus re the method of test, we might benefit by sticking to the basics.
 
#133
SY said:


It's not even vaguely analogous though. In the wine world, blind tasting to determine claimed differences is routinely done. We have no internet forums that ban the discussion of blind tasting with moderators protecting the delicate sensibilities of people who can't support their claims with proper tasting tests.
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It's an analogy worth pursuing. Wine tasting as I understand it has a strict and standardized regimen which covers everything from style of glass to deodorant. It also values the concept of skill through experience and familiarity and doesn't presume the ability to determine between years of a particular vintage is a natural human aptitude. Wine tasting is also a direct experience, cable tests must always (we hope!) be intermediated by support equipment and, most importantly, the speaker/room.

Many of the cable tests I've seen are equivalent to holding a wine tasting among a group of Old Spice tea-totallers at the Taco Time using tin cups. Or perhaps trying to determine the vintage by using it in spaghetti sauce. The rooms, speakers and systems are unfamiliar, the participants often members from the public at large with no particular experience. Some have been absolutely ludicrous, such as the IEEE demonstration - from the Seventies as I recall - that used speakers, on a table, on stage, in an auditorium. (I also recall another IEEE demonstration proving that a string of ten 741 opamps has no audible effect over headphones. I'll wager few participating in this discussion would agree.)

For a tangential and recent example, Radio World or one of the other industry magazines recently published the results of a comprehensive listening test performed at public venues by the NPR engineering group, which they claim demonstrates 48 kbps is a sufficient data rate for the digital standard to replace FM. They even suggested it was better than CD quality for this use since many heard the difference as preferable. This is the data rate assigned to VOIP phones. Engineers are people and just as prone to agendas and preconceptions as anyone else.

As always I'ld love to spend some quality time with real experimental data if someone would point me in the right direction. The first billion Google hits are to audiophile discussions. And is it correct to say most wine forums don't tolerate the vilification of opposing opinions demonstrated early in this thread? Or would ban from a specific vintage group members whos only discussion point is "they all taste the same and those who claim otherwise are delusional"?


NO ONE claims that "there are no differences between cables."
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Come on Sy, that's not even remotely true. In the context we're talking here the claim is made consistently. Arny Kruger for example. Unless you mean no one claims 48 and 14 guage wire perform identically as speaker cable, which is true but hardly representative of the overall debate.


What IS incontrovertable is that there is, at present, no evidence from controlled listening tests that factors other than L, C, R, RF screening, amplifier stability, and similar well-established engineering principles can be shown to be audible.
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No reason to believe otherwise at this stage though I'ld still like to see references to those tests done by the scientific community and not engineers intent on disproving a point. However, cable designers unaware of those principles still routinely alter all those parameters, which leaves us at "though they know not what they do, cable manufacturers create products which may sound different in specific systems." Here's where I find these discussions often bog down and become unproductive. "Cables make an audible difference" is often heard as only as a claim of proof for the validity of Golden Stranding, Magic Angel Dielectric or Unobtanium Litz Superconductors.


My own rule of thumb is that if a difference can be reliably heard between decently constructed cables, the designer(s) of the equipment being interconnected has/have done an incompetent job.
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Well, can't disagree there either though it hinges on the term "incompetent". My circuit was a box-stock Mullard-designed 3-3 built on a ground plane with absolutely minimal path length and plenty of grid-stoppers. I'm not sure many here can reasonably claim to be 'more competent' than the Naim engineers. It's possible that by that standard most product has some degree of incompetence, i.e. some degree of reaction to input/output loads at RF.
 
#134
OK back to the DIY part.

There is little disagreement that the exotic cables cost far more than common sense tells us that they should. Whether this is robbery by the vendors or what it takes to make an honest living I will leave to others to discover.

My friend and I have invested considerable energy in attempting to duplicate the sound we hear from the more exotic cables (At least exotic for our budget). We built several cable samples. The first rule we used was: Assume the cable sellers aren't lying, buy the very best materials you can find and provide your own labor and duplicate a known good cable.

So we buy 5 nines bare silver (Cardas wire) Teflon sleeving and Cardas RCA connectors. Sleeve the wire, weave or braid it into a multiconductor cable and solder on the ends (Cardas Eutectic Solder) break in the cable for 40 hours and then listen. Result: Not bad, not as good as the better cables an honest B grade cable at a material cost of around $70 per pair. About 4 hours of work, so the ones by Homegrown and many other manufacturers like them seem sort of honestly priced. We thought ours sounded somewhat cleaner and more revealing than Homegrown's but they were very similar in overall presentation.

We repeat this process with cast copper wire and some different insulator materials with relatively similar results. Some a little better, others not as good, but no breakthrough: we can not duplicate the exotics in sound quality. This listening is much harder than you might think; on some recordings the cables sound beter than they do on others, a matter of synergy or cancelling of opposite errors? Once you've found a recording where the cables sound less good, that particular cable characteristic once identified is now revealed on other recordings that initially sounded OK.

As they say "back to th drawing board". More reading and testing. We discover that spreading the conductors appart improves the sound quality in a noticable way. So our next round of tests will involve various ways of building cables using hollow tubes or spreaders or maybe a core of something with a lot of air already in it to keep the conductors a fixed distance appart. None of this is breakthrough science, others have done similar things, some have gone into bussiness selling their results. It seems as if the dielectric or more likely dielectric absorbtion is a major player in the way a given cable sounds. This is made more complicated by the variations in construction technique, it generally seems that a lower capacitance design has a beter chance.

The problem is that you want the end result to be flexible, immune to damage from ordinary handling and to have decent RFI and magnetic field cancellation. It needs to cost less and be possible to construct with ordinary home tools or equipment.

I look forward to reporting on our next set of results.
 
#135
Just to add my experience, I have never heard ANY differences in cables in a properly balanced system, and that leads me to the conclusion that any perceived cable differences are most likely to do with noise pickup on the line and the lack of relatively standardised input and output impedances on consumer kit.
 
#136
RDF: If you are going to quote me, please use full sentences without eliding the qualifiers. For example, the two wires you hold up have different resistances, something you trimmed out of the quote.

As for "real" tests and data, JAES has 'em. Start with Dick Greiner's work.
 
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