In everyones vast analysis procedures has anyone taken the time to log the individual cables resistance,capacitence, and inductance?
Is there any running list that one might download to see if there is any pattern going on here?
Is there any pattern between the input impedance of a particular amplifier and the sound of a given cable?
Is there any running list that one might download to see if there is any pattern going on here?
Is there any pattern between the input impedance of a particular amplifier and the sound of a given cable?
I know it's a bit off-topic, but the way I see it we are at a significant advantge compared to other species. What is the metric? Potential for survival. We are the only species ever (as far as we know!) that could potentially survive a catastrophe on a planetary scale (by colonizing other planets) and on a longer time scale potentially surviving stellar and galactic scale catastrophes by spreading even further. Every other single species will become extinct sooner or later where we (or rather our decendants, who by that time probably wouldn't fit the definition of human anymore) could, with a little luck, survive as long as the universe itself (or maybe longer, if certain theories about the nature of the universe prove true).Prune said:
First to the Overlord, yes the G word was meant in a kind of ironic way. The kids use it all the time. "It's so..." Point taken, though.
And, no, I'm not that pragmatic. I would have loved for the SACD format to succeed. Had it had the portability of the CD it would have been a killer. But with the restrictions imposed by the paranoid music industry I can't say I care much for it as it is.
I'm a huge believer in cables. I have to believe my ears. I just don't believe in witchcraft. I take a sound €10 cable over Transparent gimmicks and shrewd marketing any day. At least that way I won't feel like an idiot.
And the test I linked to has nothing to do with me not going tubes. I just don't like the degrading nature of tubes. The irony with tubes is that there are people with expensive equipment that sounds inferior to any cheapo amplifier. No, you don't hear the degradation. You get used to it.
Now, getting a bit serious and perhaps insulting to some at the same time. You can ask any psychologist and he or she will tell you most people want to be sheep. People want to belong. Big corporations rely on it. Why else do you think they tell us how many records some artist has sold? People like to watch the same movies as everybody else. That way they belong and can take part in discussions on the school yard or workplace. People don't want to be left out, to be different.
Maybe I think too highly of forums like this. But I thought people went here because they didn't want to be sheep. Now, kick me.
And, no, I'm not that pragmatic. I would have loved for the SACD format to succeed. Had it had the portability of the CD it would have been a killer. But with the restrictions imposed by the paranoid music industry I can't say I care much for it as it is.
I'm a huge believer in cables. I have to believe my ears. I just don't believe in witchcraft. I take a sound €10 cable over Transparent gimmicks and shrewd marketing any day. At least that way I won't feel like an idiot.
And the test I linked to has nothing to do with me not going tubes. I just don't like the degrading nature of tubes. The irony with tubes is that there are people with expensive equipment that sounds inferior to any cheapo amplifier. No, you don't hear the degradation. You get used to it.
Now, getting a bit serious and perhaps insulting to some at the same time. You can ask any psychologist and he or she will tell you most people want to be sheep. People want to belong. Big corporations rely on it. Why else do you think they tell us how many records some artist has sold? People like to watch the same movies as everybody else. That way they belong and can take part in discussions on the school yard or workplace. People don't want to be left out, to be different.
Maybe I think too highly of forums like this. But I thought people went here because they didn't want to be sheep. Now, kick me.
To Bogie:
"My theory is that folks maybe take a little extra effort with the SACD recording. I've heard some pretty darn crappy CDs, but rarely a truly gnarsty recording on SACD."
You are correct. Try this site:CD-6
But done right, CD is great. And I speak as a vinyl junkie. The thing is, I accept the CD for what it is. No digital format will ever sound like vinyl. And that's why I'm a huge fan of 47 Labs. They make CD players. They try to get the best out of the flawed format. Despite my earlier Öhman quote, I hate oversampling. I think it's to CD what anti-skating is to vinyl. Whatever improvement it does, the end result is still worse.
And from what I have read, DVD-As sound bad as well due to poor mastering. I can only go by hearsay as I don't have a player that takes DVD-A.
"My theory is that folks maybe take a little extra effort with the SACD recording. I've heard some pretty darn crappy CDs, but rarely a truly gnarsty recording on SACD."
You are correct. Try this site:CD-6
But done right, CD is great. And I speak as a vinyl junkie. The thing is, I accept the CD for what it is. No digital format will ever sound like vinyl. And that's why I'm a huge fan of 47 Labs. They make CD players. They try to get the best out of the flawed format. Despite my earlier Öhman quote, I hate oversampling. I think it's to CD what anti-skating is to vinyl. Whatever improvement it does, the end result is still worse.
And from what I have read, DVD-As sound bad as well due to poor mastering. I can only go by hearsay as I don't have a player that takes DVD-A.
Yup. The "show me" state.
I just wonder - since I'm essentially transmitting ones and zeros right now, will using a $500 cord between the confuser and the wall improve my spelling? I'd rather see some of the effort that's put into the "magical" cables put into faster and more reliable error correction.
Oh yeah... Then there are the folks who get a removable power cord (I'd rather just avoid that removable connection myself...), spending major bucks on it, and plug it into a $2.50 wall socket that's hooked up to romex back to their breaker box, etc...
I just wonder - since I'm essentially transmitting ones and zeros right now, will using a $500 cord between the confuser and the wall improve my spelling? I'd rather see some of the effort that's put into the "magical" cables put into faster and more reliable error correction.
Oh yeah... Then there are the folks who get a removable power cord (I'd rather just avoid that removable connection myself...), spending major bucks on it, and plug it into a $2.50 wall socket that's hooked up to romex back to their breaker box, etc...
Great post phn!
And i say this as a tube junkie. At least 90% of commercial tube amps are intolerable. Whether made by CJ or Jadis.
I've always had my doubts and as a reality check keep half a dozen SS amps. Yes, building a tube amp with the same low subjective distortion as good SS is very difficult. The difficulties sometimes appear insurmountible - impossible to design a dc coupled circuit; very low psrr; high-voltage passive components which generally sound bad - the list goes on and on.
For some, the basic nature of tube amp sound - the natural timbre and smoothness is redeeming enough to excuse a whole lot of audio mud and distortion. It doesn't have to be like that. I am sure one day you'll hear a tube amp you like.
For that matter, the GREATEST degree of distortion that you'll hear is from your speakers themselves... I'd rather put $500 into my speaker budget than $500 into wire...
Anyone ever do a "memorex" blind A/B? Take a pair of speakers, stick a guy with a guitar between 'em. Then alternate between him, and a "perfect" recording of him...
Anyone ever do a "memorex" blind A/B? Take a pair of speakers, stick a guy with a guitar between 'em. Then alternate between him, and a "perfect" recording of him...
Ok about jitter. But: what does a cable have to with it? How does cable -of the proper impedance - influence the jitter?
phn said:
Don't forget professional sports; one of biggest scams ever foisted upon the American public by big business. Baa, baa.
To epicedium:
You wrote:
"a hypothetic situation:
if we take 10 people and do an a/b/x double blind test and the results come to 5/5, what is the conclusion? No more than this: out of the participants, a sufficient number either didnt have the ears or the knowledge to differenciate.
Perhaps 4 heard the difference clear as day, and appreciated the razor sharp reproduction of the classical instrumentation. 5 prefered the opposite cable since they prefer extended bass and dont understand imaging. the final member of the panel didnt know either way, but thought the bassy cable was too loud on her ears.
It tells us nothing. you can take 50 people and perform a blind test with close on 50 / 50 results- does that mean you are suspicious and belittle a young man from calcutta who believes one cable is obviously superior and claims to be able to blind test with close on 100% accuracy? that is what I have seen in this thread! you are suspicious because you cant hear it-- do you deny the existence of people who can?"
So why don't get scientific here? Take those 4 people that "heard the difference clear as day" and do a blind test. And remember, for a test to have any scientific validity, it has to be replicable. Anything else you can chalk up as belief, hoodoo, witchcraft, whatever.
You wrote:
"a hypothetic situation:
if we take 10 people and do an a/b/x double blind test and the results come to 5/5, what is the conclusion? No more than this: out of the participants, a sufficient number either didnt have the ears or the knowledge to differenciate.
Perhaps 4 heard the difference clear as day, and appreciated the razor sharp reproduction of the classical instrumentation. 5 prefered the opposite cable since they prefer extended bass and dont understand imaging. the final member of the panel didnt know either way, but thought the bassy cable was too loud on her ears.
It tells us nothing. you can take 50 people and perform a blind test with close on 50 / 50 results- does that mean you are suspicious and belittle a young man from calcutta who believes one cable is obviously superior and claims to be able to blind test with close on 100% accuracy? that is what I have seen in this thread! you are suspicious because you cant hear it-- do you deny the existence of people who can?"
So why don't get scientific here? Take those 4 people that "heard the difference clear as day" and do a blind test. And remember, for a test to have any scientific validity, it has to be replicable. Anything else you can chalk up as belief, hoodoo, witchcraft, whatever.
...or maybe there was no difference? Why discount the simplest explanation in favour of questioning someones ears or knowledge?
Jan Didden
slowmotion said:
Jan,
I don't get it. When 5 out of 10 hear no difference, why does that mean they are either deaf or lack knowledge? It just doesn't make sense. Why not say: those other 5 are just imagining things? After all, we humans are champions in imagining things, or rather explaining things in our own preconceived opinion, and we are notoriously bad in absolute perception, whether it is vision or hearing. Just unquestioningly assuming things are the way they *seem* to you is naive to the extreme.
Jan Didden
We need a lot of luck to survive the next thousand years.
As for surviving as long as the universe, that's ridiculous. The accelerating expansion makes it impossible. The amount of material within any given Hubble volume will approach a constant. Consider our own. Everything beyond the local group of galaxies is not gravitationally bound to us. As space expands faster and faster, everything beyond will eventually be moving away from us faster than light (light speed is only a limit of how fast something can move through space, but space itself can expand arbitrarily fast). That will eventually put everything outside the local group forever out of our reach, leaving a finite amount of matter inside. As all the stars die out, and any other energy differentials that can be used to do work are used up, the entropy in the region increasing, life becomes impossible. Eventually even black holes evaporate, and over extremely long time periods (beyond 10^120 yrs), quantum effects 'smear' out any structure. I remember reading a while ago of a poposal that entropy increase within this region that accelerating expansion makes our prison could be dealt with by slowing down all life processes at a rate faster than the increase in entropy, so that life could go on forever. This cannot work, however, as due to quantum theory, as time goes towards infinity, the probability of the timing mechanisms regulating this failing tends to certainty. The final blow comes from the well known result of black hole study, the Bekenstein bound, which limits the information content (number of distinguishable quantum states) of any finite region of space. This means that in any Hubble volume of the distant future universe there is only a FINITE number of possible states, including a finite number of mental states (thoughts). After enough time, any life surviving would have experienced and thought and done everything that could be, and any further thought or experience would be a repeat of a previous one.
If one of the theories predicting an eventual reversal and big crunch turns out correct, I fail to see how we are any better off.
So you continue your ignorant ramblings. Clearly you did not follow the suggestion in my last post, or you would have clearly understood the difference. Computers and the internet form an asynchronous system. A transport feeding a DAC is generally not. There is more information transmitted in a synchronous system than the digital data itself. A DAC is not purely digital -- after all, the A in DAC stands for Analog. Jitter in the digital transmission will affect the conversion process. Putting an ASRC in front of the DAC will attenuate but not eliminate the jitter. Even CDs are nowadays mastered with jitter in mind.
As far as I can see, and this is from having only A level physics, is that cables should NOT make any difference past simple electrical characteristics.
If the resistance, capacitance, and inductance (or any other parameter you wish to include) is the same for a two bits of cable, then there should be no difference between the sound. This also includes the shielding of the cables, if one picks up more interference you can see how this would effect the sound.
But if your £1500 super interconnect and the £1 one you make have the same characteristics then there is no reason why the expensive one should sound better, appart from your belief that they should. I use cable I bought for something like £20 for 5 meters, this sounds brilliant and I can hear everything I would like to hear in the music.
It baffles me why people want to spend a fortune on cable. The signal exits the CD players IV stage via bog standard copper tracks on the PCB. Then rejoins another standard copper track in the pre or integrated amp. Why is putting a "magical" interconnect between these two going to make any difference.
The best people to use for these blind tests are people without any expectations of these expensive cable etc, or people without any prior "audiophile" conditioning. These people are more likely to say they sound the same because they are not trying to invent differences in soundstage width, depth or perceived lowering of the noise floor etc.
Laymen if you like, are actually good at saying if there is an improvement, whether or not they can tell you why in absolute terms is a different matter, they dont know the lingo or know what to listen for, but they do know if one thing sounds better then the other.
We are talking cables here, its not as if we are presenting massive system changes, whereby the laymen might prefer an unnatural, boom and tizz presentation over neutrality. Here a trained ear comes in use because they know what to listen for. But if a system has a pronounced midrange which leads to a forward or hard fatigueing sound, we know what to call it. But a laymen would still know it hurts his ears, and the system without it sounds better.
If the resistance, capacitance, and inductance (or any other parameter you wish to include) is the same for a two bits of cable, then there should be no difference between the sound. This also includes the shielding of the cables, if one picks up more interference you can see how this would effect the sound.
But if your £1500 super interconnect and the £1 one you make have the same characteristics then there is no reason why the expensive one should sound better, appart from your belief that they should. I use cable I bought for something like £20 for 5 meters, this sounds brilliant and I can hear everything I would like to hear in the music.
It baffles me why people want to spend a fortune on cable. The signal exits the CD players IV stage via bog standard copper tracks on the PCB. Then rejoins another standard copper track in the pre or integrated amp. Why is putting a "magical" interconnect between these two going to make any difference.
The best people to use for these blind tests are people without any expectations of these expensive cable etc, or people without any prior "audiophile" conditioning. These people are more likely to say they sound the same because they are not trying to invent differences in soundstage width, depth or perceived lowering of the noise floor etc.
Laymen if you like, are actually good at saying if there is an improvement, whether or not they can tell you why in absolute terms is a different matter, they dont know the lingo or know what to listen for, but they do know if one thing sounds better then the other.
We are talking cables here, its not as if we are presenting massive system changes, whereby the laymen might prefer an unnatural, boom and tizz presentation over neutrality. Here a trained ear comes in use because they know what to listen for. But if a system has a pronounced midrange which leads to a forward or hard fatigueing sound, we know what to call it. But a laymen would still know it hurts his ears, and the system without it sounds better.
slowmotion, I trust myself. How could I not? I have reason and logic on my side.
I have never argued cables don't matter. But that's unimportant. My point is that those that don't like the test result haven't added one word of proof in these now 22 pages. Just unsubstantiated opinions. What they offer is nothing more than superstitions. That works in church, not in the real world.
I'm not out to insult anyone. I don't care if people want to pay thru their collective noses for snake oil.
I have never argued cables don't matter. But that's unimportant. My point is that those that don't like the test result haven't added one word of proof in these now 22 pages. Just unsubstantiated opinions. What they offer is nothing more than superstitions. That works in church, not in the real world.
I'm not out to insult anyone. I don't care if people want to pay thru their collective noses for snake oil.
Do you even know how a blind test works? The listener has to not merely find a difference, but make an identification. If he's making differences up or imagining them, it will show in the test results, as is the case with both common forms, ABX and ABC/HR. You want to use the people that have the best chance to hear a difference, regardless of whether they are more likely to make up cr@p, and so audiophiles are what you want, since despite them being more likely to imagine differences, they also tend to be better trained to hear real ones.
You're sure it works there?
Anyway, my approach is simply that of a tradesman - if someone tries to sell me something he better prove to me it works. I do not have any emotional stake in audio gear or anything else i buy, not even in politics anymore - if it works and solves the problems - lets go for it. If it doesn't solve the problem - its no good.
My emotional stake is in interpersonal relationships - and approbriately so, because emotions developed to assess situations fast and fairly reliable.
Anything that i can buy - its just a thing.
And being in a trade - if i install things wrong - it can cost lives. So i better make darn sure i know how and why the thing works that i install or i give my supplier hell if the info is lacking or the equipment is c..p.
That is the same approach i take to audio - there is too much money at stake for a hobby that i can afford to buy snakeoil to make somebody elses day.
Well, maybe a $500 cable between YOUR computer and the wall could improve your personality...
"He sounds so much sweeter."
Sheesh.
IMHO, it's not about physics. It's about the digital signal. The signal may "fluctuate," but as long as the receiving end sees the proper digital information, with the proper error correction, and has a fast enough processor to decode it, what's the worry? Unless you're selling high $$ interconnects and speaker wires...
I think that some folks are convincing themselves to hear things that aren't there. I suppose I'd be trying Really Hard to hear a difference if I'd just spent in the high triple digits on a handful of wire...
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