As usual, the red hearing from John when the truth is: "The effect of eliminating all grain boundaries on resistance at room temperature is significantly smaller than the effect cooling the wire 1 degree C would have."
They try to keep all of the circuit cold. When the circuit has to leave the cold, there are warm to cold transitions. The tradeoff there is, need lots of copper to support the current, (two, three inch diameter cylinder) but that means you have to keep one end really cold and the other at room temperature despite copper being a good heat conductor, this takes a lot of refrigeration. At 4.5K, it is about 1000 watts power for every watt loss, and at 1.8K, about 2000 watts per watt. So exits to room temp are costly energy-wise. In the last decade or so, they started using high temp superconductors to go from 4.5K up to about 50K. That way, they can use mostly liquid nitrogen cooling from room to 50K, that is much much cheaper than liquid helium.
At room temp, for example the cabling to the power supplies, either water cooled conductors, or lots of 535 kcmil wires. We were only running 7kA, and that needed 18 paralleled 535 wires per leg. An awful lot of wire, my shoulder hurt for over a week helping the guys pull the wires. I'm getting too old for that physical stuff.
jn
edit... no, not a stupid question...a very good one in fact..
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Oh, that is a pretty good example of "handwaving". 🙂
Completely different situation, but anyway, it does not help to shoot the messenger. 😉
Keep trying to invalidate the test, it's good practice for me to defend the test when I do it again - hopefully better.
I am not sure, why you think about "trying to invalidate"? Test results are data points and which way should the refutation of a conclusion, that is not justified by the data, be able to invalidate the said data?
The hypothesis "no audible difference" is a valid one and it might be true, but you can't know from this experiment, that's all it is.
So you're facing the same probkem as thermo electric generation ( Seebeck effect ), electric conductivity, without thermal conductivity, I thought this had been solved in the 1980s with super conducting ceramics ( before semiconductors were used for Seebeck devices ), but my knowledge on both is more than limited I'm guessing from "magnets " and fat solid copper that it's DC, so you're " exciting " lots of amps DC, more problems.
If bending single crystal copper ruins it, does that mean we should avoid bending solid core, or is there so many crystal already, it's totally irrelevant ?
Everyday wire, solid or stranded, don't worry about bending it. The only worry is to not overbend so the insulation can be compromised. Typical wire bend radius limits (NEC) are either 5 or 8 diameters, tighter than that and the insulation may crack over time.
jn
jn
I'll stick with the art vs print analogy, it's pretty good. Bottom line of my experiment was that it was very difficult to tell source material from anything else. Most people could not do it, despite frequent claims of how different metals "sound" in the signal path. If different metals sound so different in the signal path, why can't you tell copper wire from a potato or a bucket of mud? Or even from the original recording? That's not a result that I expected, and it's a little disheartening, but those were the results. Later in the test at least one person did request a track to test.
If I do a second round, I will ask for tracks to use - that way people will already know what they are listening to. I have to be careful with that, as some people use software tools and not their ears to find the differences. The point of the test is - can you hear the difference?
If we can draw a line under single crystal wire as inaudible and impractical anyway, what about another thorny issue, oxygen free copper? - I guess it's irrelevant as I'm not going to be able to get oxygen free slug tape or copper tube anyway. I guess all audio goes through aluminum anyway.
What Hans did was some work that can be applied to ANY cable in terms of matching the impedance to the load. This is about as far as you can get from the flowery prose on cable changing many talk about. There is a valid theory behind what was done there, unlike most of the weapons grade **** that high end cable manufacturers spew out. Is it audible? Don't know, but plenty of other cable manufacturers flourish despite MIT being still on sale so clearly it's not windows cleaned and veils lifted for all.
But you knew the point I was trying to make but decided to just stir the pot some more. This forum has changed you...
Actually, I'm grateful John put that up, a nice input..thank you John.
That writeup, while generally on the right track, is too clean.. What I mean is, straight lines to an asymptotic level...I wish.
I had to do an analysis of a 24 AWG copper wire at 4.5 Kelvin, to determine the temperature rise of the wire during a 300 ampere exponentially decaying current pulse. (heat leaking from large gauge wires from warm to cold was the issue). In order to do the analysis, I had to develop an equation relating the heat capacity and resistivity of copper from 4.5 Kelvin to room temperature.
Most of the data I got from the CRC handbook, fit the data into an excel spreadsheet, and found that I needed a fifth order polynomial to get close to the data. In NO way was the actual data a linear function down to a gently asymptotic straight line. Reality rears it's ugly head.
jn
edit: This was supposed to be a reply to cbdb, but my computer is really acting up now and it somehow forgot it was a reply...sigh
That writeup, while generally on the right track, is too clean.. What I mean is, straight lines to an asymptotic level...I wish.
I had to do an analysis of a 24 AWG copper wire at 4.5 Kelvin, to determine the temperature rise of the wire during a 300 ampere exponentially decaying current pulse. (heat leaking from large gauge wires from warm to cold was the issue). In order to do the analysis, I had to develop an equation relating the heat capacity and resistivity of copper from 4.5 Kelvin to room temperature.
Most of the data I got from the CRC handbook, fit the data into an excel spreadsheet, and found that I needed a fifth order polynomial to get close to the data. In NO way was the actual data a linear function down to a gently asymptotic straight line. Reality rears it's ugly head.
jn
edit: This was supposed to be a reply to cbdb, but my computer is really acting up now and it somehow forgot it was a reply...sigh
Why not run your speaker cables in class A, for at least the 1st Watt? These amplifiers with the big capacitor coupled output. Run the voltage that cap decouples down the (+) speaker wire, through a resistor to the (-) wire and put the big decoupling cap at the (+) speaker terminal, instead of in the amplifier. (Make the (-) connection as usual...)
That ought to keep all those little cable copper crystal boundaries - and every other metal boundary, at least to the speakers - forward biased for most of the music. If you're running a class D amp in BTL, you're really in luck! Just put a couple resistor at the speaker terminals, each tied to a single return back to Vcc ground. Then your speakers cables will have a small DC idle current - just appropriately size the resistors...for best effect.
I'm late to the "party".
That ought to keep all those little cable copper crystal boundaries - and every other metal boundary, at least to the speakers - forward biased for most of the music. If you're running a class D amp in BTL, you're really in luck! Just put a couple resistor at the speaker terminals, each tied to a single return back to Vcc ground. Then your speakers cables will have a small DC idle current - just appropriately size the resistors...for best effect.
I'm late to the "party".
Bill, Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Expressed as you have above it feels as though we are much closer to agreement.
I would just note that Hans claimed that the sound difference was not subtle, it was obvious. Yes, he didn't use the word veil or say his wife came in from the kitchen, etc. But that might be more from the way he tends to choose words than whether or not veil could have been used instead.
Reason I picked zip cord as an example is that zip cord is often claimed to be perfectly fine as is. Not by you so much that I recall, but I see it mentioned in a number of threads, including the 'funniest snake oil' one. My concern about it is that too many people are overconfident that any disagreement with them about audibility of this or that thing can only be for imaginary reasons. Not that the problem is one-sided. There other side has its problems too, as I'm sure we could agree.
The more time goes on the more I suspect its like ESS found when training their executive team, like Lars Risbo found about his development team verses lay people, and like a professor that studies perceptual research found with her students, and its also what I found and have tried to describe before: People don't normally hear everything there is to hear. To put it in some kind of psychological jargon: IMHO the brain discards some information as noise and does not always make it available to the constructed reality experienced by conscious awareness. Have seen it before but recently noticed some of it in myself when I realized I had been filtering out 'space' as a type of noise that detracted from intelligibility. Now I'm retraining myself to give space more attention.
Bottom line for me: some people hear things other people don't in a way that is NOT particularly a function of frequency response nor of threshold of hearing. Its some other kind of separation-of-signal-from-noise perceptual processing, where noise is, broadly speaking, any unwanted signal. Training is one way to change that, if anyone happens to want change.
Funny you should say that. I was thinking it was you who changed the most. Some of your recent posts struck me as terse mixed with snarky ... where snark is defined in the casual sense as found by Google and quoted below:
(Entry 1 of 2) informal. : an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm … no human endeavor is beyond snark these days, so lots of people enjoy hijacking a corporation's marketing hashtag to mock the company …— Paul McFedries.
That said, I think I have changed some too. Probably not so much from the forum as from external factors.
The reason the snark thing got my attention is because it seems like cable threads start getting to the point of being closed when people get too fed up with not liking what they are reading. Once a few people start up it may snowball into thread closure. Seems like the recently commenting mister Fahey may be among the more commonly aggrieved.
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As someone who got really pissed off with commercial i/connects and indeed all commercially made cables over 14 years ago I decided to start making my own i/connects starting with 'accepted wisdom' types and take it from there. I purposefully didn't look to see what the uber expensive makes were saying as that would, no matter how careful I was about 'influence bias' it would colour and effect my analytical thinking.
It quickly became clear that commercial cable construction wasn't about insuring integrity of signal but about production time/cost aka profit margins. I'm not going to enter into any kind of argument about shielding/non shielding/copper v silver or levels of purity/impurity because that immediately turns into ******* contests which is just a waste of time. Being of Scots blood, Lowland and Highland, I don't like spending more than I need to aka value for money.
I did find 3 or 4 points that are rock solid in making i/connects. Someone mentioned right near the start of this thread, balance - that signal and return are one circuit, whatever you use for the signal must be replicated for the return. That RCA plugs are way out of date but since they are considered 'unsexy' not worthy of re-evaluating and that the over whelming majority should be used as fishing weights. If balance is important then this should apply to connectors as well. Puresonic is the only company that has addressed this making the Balance plug in which the signal and return copper is the same weight. Then they got caught up in the stupid rhodium/gold/silver and carbon fibre b/s.
My last point concerns the useful life of an i/connect. Way back in the mid 90s' I attended an audio show in London and by chance got to talk to someone from a Scottish cable company and he was convinced that it was important to hermetically seal an i/connect. I didn't think about this last point until about 18 months ago when I decided to take apart a set of my i/connects after seeing a snap top bag containing a spool of some high purity solid core silver wire which I had bought about 11 years previously - it was still shiny bright. I had some more of the same wire which was not bagged and it was effectively black, sulpher in the air had created sulphides. I also experimented with copper and silver/plated (20 microns) copper, always solid core never stranded.
When I opened up my old silver i/connects I found that after the solder and into the air cored FEP dielectric the wire had turned dark. not black but dark. This discolouration was only around 1cm, never more, this is because via the open ended signal pin some 'air' had entered and the inter action occurred. When I looked in the kitchen drawer where we kept our silver plated cutlery I found that the fish gear which was kept in a small section beneath the main section was essentially untainted. In no way could this said to be sealed. So I now use Pro-Gold diluted 5 parts alcohol - 1 part Pro-Gold to the solder joint and the first 2-3 Cm of wire into the air cored FEP dielectric, this should mean no sulphides or oxide forming - time will tell if this works.
So whatever type of i/connect you make/buy make damn sure that the whole thing is air sealed. Both sulphides and oxides do not make for optimum signal transfer. If air is the best dielectric then air cored construction is the only way to go. The last few years have seen some eye watering priced i/connects appearing using both FEP (much better than Teflon, even though both belong to the same family of Fleurocarbons) and air cored construction.
One other thing I did make and sell analogue i/connects for a short while 12 years ago. I ended up with a design that required multiple conductors, 4 x and not having a specially made jig it was bloody hard and time consuming, so stopped. Using exactly the same design, using silver/plated copper and high purity silver but with different coloured sheathing I sent these sets out to people on two different continents and of very different ages for them to evaluate. I had found that the silver/plated copper were neutral and the silver had just a touch of warmth. What really surprised me was that everyone had the same opinion - they all preferred the high purity silver, regardless of age, income or race. They obviously all had very different systems.
It would be good to know how many commenting on this thread actually make and experiment with different designs of i/connects or just rely on theory and how many actually have had proper hearing tests - conducted in sound sealed booths to know scientifically just how good or bad their hearing is. I know of several people into audio who have terrible tinnitus and some who have damaged their hearing listening to music played at ear destroying levels for far too many years - denial syndrome is just sad.
It quickly became clear that commercial cable construction wasn't about insuring integrity of signal but about production time/cost aka profit margins. I'm not going to enter into any kind of argument about shielding/non shielding/copper v silver or levels of purity/impurity because that immediately turns into ******* contests which is just a waste of time. Being of Scots blood, Lowland and Highland, I don't like spending more than I need to aka value for money.
I did find 3 or 4 points that are rock solid in making i/connects. Someone mentioned right near the start of this thread, balance - that signal and return are one circuit, whatever you use for the signal must be replicated for the return. That RCA plugs are way out of date but since they are considered 'unsexy' not worthy of re-evaluating and that the over whelming majority should be used as fishing weights. If balance is important then this should apply to connectors as well. Puresonic is the only company that has addressed this making the Balance plug in which the signal and return copper is the same weight. Then they got caught up in the stupid rhodium/gold/silver and carbon fibre b/s.
My last point concerns the useful life of an i/connect. Way back in the mid 90s' I attended an audio show in London and by chance got to talk to someone from a Scottish cable company and he was convinced that it was important to hermetically seal an i/connect. I didn't think about this last point until about 18 months ago when I decided to take apart a set of my i/connects after seeing a snap top bag containing a spool of some high purity solid core silver wire which I had bought about 11 years previously - it was still shiny bright. I had some more of the same wire which was not bagged and it was effectively black, sulpher in the air had created sulphides. I also experimented with copper and silver/plated (20 microns) copper, always solid core never stranded.
When I opened up my old silver i/connects I found that after the solder and into the air cored FEP dielectric the wire had turned dark. not black but dark. This discolouration was only around 1cm, never more, this is because via the open ended signal pin some 'air' had entered and the inter action occurred. When I looked in the kitchen drawer where we kept our silver plated cutlery I found that the fish gear which was kept in a small section beneath the main section was essentially untainted. In no way could this said to be sealed. So I now use Pro-Gold diluted 5 parts alcohol - 1 part Pro-Gold to the solder joint and the first 2-3 Cm of wire into the air cored FEP dielectric, this should mean no sulphides or oxide forming - time will tell if this works.
So whatever type of i/connect you make/buy make damn sure that the whole thing is air sealed. Both sulphides and oxides do not make for optimum signal transfer. If air is the best dielectric then air cored construction is the only way to go. The last few years have seen some eye watering priced i/connects appearing using both FEP (much better than Teflon, even though both belong to the same family of Fleurocarbons) and air cored construction.
One other thing I did make and sell analogue i/connects for a short while 12 years ago. I ended up with a design that required multiple conductors, 4 x and not having a specially made jig it was bloody hard and time consuming, so stopped. Using exactly the same design, using silver/plated copper and high purity silver but with different coloured sheathing I sent these sets out to people on two different continents and of very different ages for them to evaluate. I had found that the silver/plated copper were neutral and the silver had just a touch of warmth. What really surprised me was that everyone had the same opinion - they all preferred the high purity silver, regardless of age, income or race. They obviously all had very different systems.
It would be good to know how many commenting on this thread actually make and experiment with different designs of i/connects or just rely on theory and how many actually have had proper hearing tests - conducted in sound sealed booths to know scientifically just how good or bad their hearing is. I know of several people into audio who have terrible tinnitus and some who have damaged their hearing listening to music played at ear destroying levels for far too many years - denial syndrome is just sad.
I have tinnitus and absolutely cannot hear the way I used to. I've mentioned before there are parts of beloved music I just dont hear any more. As in at all.
In the morning my wife will say "the alarm's going off". I dont hear it. It's what I call the "tinkely chimes" on an old iPhone 4, that's only used for an alarm. If I put it right up to my ear - ok 3" away - I can hear it then. Left ear better than right, which has the higher level tinn.
I still fool around with "I wonder if I replace my output inductors with air-core, just on the treble amps" and order some, along with the corresponding film capacitors. Perhaps I'm just being pathetic...
I realize the day is around the corner when I'll need aids to hear at all. That's when I'll probably dump everything and this hobby. Why go through a microphone and an A/D when I could just Bluetooth straight in? I assume they'll have straightened out TRS by then and have some DSP app on the phone that can do anything, including binaural simulation of a pair of separated stereo speakers.
In the morning my wife will say "the alarm's going off". I dont hear it. It's what I call the "tinkely chimes" on an old iPhone 4, that's only used for an alarm. If I put it right up to my ear - ok 3" away - I can hear it then. Left ear better than right, which has the higher level tinn.
I still fool around with "I wonder if I replace my output inductors with air-core, just on the treble amps" and order some, along with the corresponding film capacitors. Perhaps I'm just being pathetic...
I realize the day is around the corner when I'll need aids to hear at all. That's when I'll probably dump everything and this hobby. Why go through a microphone and an A/D when I could just Bluetooth straight in? I assume they'll have straightened out TRS by then and have some DSP app on the phone that can do anything, including binaural simulation of a pair of separated stereo speakers.
My mums half Scot, half Yorkshire and my dads side is just as tight - let's just say the tight genes have been passed down, I use Kenable RCA plugs, no big lumps of brass for the signal to pass through. I'm careful with my hearing, using ( remarkably large ) ear defenders a lot at work, even if I'm just using a small hammer. Over the passed few years I've been trying to get a hi fi that sounds good a low volumes, with class d and avoiding a warm sound I'm about there. I did think about air cores, but went for parallel ferrite toroids instead. I'm still on the fence as far as cables are concerned, I'm thinking low capacitance ( perhaps something like DNM ) interconnects and hollow speaker cable might might be the path I try.
For carrying the current required yes it is. Treating speaker cable as a transmission line is a little avant garde in audio. Impedance mismatch 20-20k shouldn't matter unless, like Bateman it causes your amplifier to oscillate and blow up. it's a long way from accepted though
You are jumping to conclusions again here.
No just breaking my own rule of not posting unless I have time to consider my response carefully. That is my bad, but I will still pull you up if you take 2+2 and try and make 11 out of it as you have been doing on this thread
This-is-a-cable-thread , what did you expect?
Some posters, for unknown reasons but most probably rooted in Psyche, definitely not Acoustics, claim and babble nonsense and when called upon it, just cover their ears and deny even basic Physics.
In extreme cases, some even pretend not to understand simple, grammatically correct English, go figure.
In my view, beyond help.
And in any case, simply not worth it.
Some posters, for unknown reasons but most probably rooted in Psyche, definitely not Acoustics, claim and babble nonsense and when called upon it, just cover their ears and deny even basic Physics.
In extreme cases, some even pretend not to understand simple, grammatically correct English, go figure.
In my view, beyond help.
And in any case, simply not worth it.
Simple:
If anything in the signal path distorts the signal. it is defective.
Pre-amp, tuner, amp, speakers, wire and so on. Even the wires from the pre-amp, which are way more significant as they carry very low signal levels.
The job of all the equipment is to render the signal as accurately as possible.
If the wire spoils the signal, change it.
As posted earlier by jneu, who seems competent, the quality of the wire in terms of purity is not very significant in audio use, maybe the speakers themselves could cause more changes in signal if the cross overs are modified.
And the original person who started this thread seems to have gone quiet, perhaps realizing it was a foolish quest.
And maybe we should have a symbol for commercially motivated posters, a snake and dollar under their names, perhaps.
Or whatever the members and administrators deem fit.
If anything in the signal path distorts the signal. it is defective.
Pre-amp, tuner, amp, speakers, wire and so on. Even the wires from the pre-amp, which are way more significant as they carry very low signal levels.
The job of all the equipment is to render the signal as accurately as possible.
If the wire spoils the signal, change it.
As posted earlier by jneu, who seems competent, the quality of the wire in terms of purity is not very significant in audio use, maybe the speakers themselves could cause more changes in signal if the cross overs are modified.
And the original person who started this thread seems to have gone quiet, perhaps realizing it was a foolish quest.
And maybe we should have a symbol for commercially motivated posters, a snake and dollar under their names, perhaps.
Or whatever the members and administrators deem fit.
My wife had two loves (before meeting me) long distance walking and music, these are/were my passions as well. Sadly like Joni Mitchell said - time and other thieves have deprived her of one, walking and to an extent music. She now has bloody expensive hearing aids which allow her to listen to music but treble comes across as tinny. One day someone will engineer hearing aids to rectify this, at the moment they are engineered for direct human speech only. We used to live in Andaluz behind the Snowy mountains/Sierra Nevadas where a lot of westerns were made in the Tierra Malas/Badlands. For whatever reason most Spaniards couldn't give a toss about the big outdoors and in Spain there is a lot, so you never hardly see anyone. I well remember running through the Badlands with the music of the great Ennio Morricone created for the the trio of great Good, the Bad and the Ugly films with my golden haired friend called Fox because he looked like one when he was abandoned as a pup but grew to look like a very handsome Wolf, to the Celts of old they were spirit brothers and no Celt would ever kill one.
I'm lucky I have almost total recall of music and places, probably because I have the DNA/ADN of a Celtic trailblazer from when the Gaelic and Britonnic Celts left there beginning place in NW China, foothills of the Himalayas. To recall that music in those amazing badlands was something special. He's gone now, it was my duty and my responsibility to end my friend's life not to be cowardly and let some stranger vet administer the lethal injection but I can still see us running through those Badlands - and hear the music. Ennio Morricone you are up there with the greats.
Hearing aids will come that allow music lovers to hear again, maybe they will come in time for you - quien save.
She needs to yell at her audiologist. Music can be more natural BUT the first Rx must be speech and if the AuD can get the customer out the door without further fine trimming, why should they? My guy can do a little better than his first crack IF I ask/demand. (Pandemic issues don't help.)
If there is an App, use it. MyPhonak gives me a 3-band EQ which bluntly shaves the highs and is less tinny/tinky/screechy. There is also a "noise reduction" which honestly does discount more random sounds.