Zip cord for speaker test

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To be honest, I only skimmed the first paragraph - it looked like someting you read here and there so at this point I gave up and entered my reply :)

Even if you really tried to be sarcastic, reality wasn't so far away - just prove how some parts of this ballgame has gone totally pear-shaped :)

Noon, at the well? ;-D

//

What's the point of being in forums when you treat them as a tweet or a cell phone text message?

The whole idea about forums is the ability to converse in an intelligent manner and knee jerk reactions to just skimming a single paragraph... and a short one at that, hardly comprises an intelligent reply and negates the entire point of a forum.

You know, you don't have to reply if you don't have the time to READ and think. This is not a 128 byte medium.

Now sarcasm... "reality not so far away"... you realize that is the WHOLE POINT OF SARCASM, right? Unwittingly you've paid me one hell of a complement.

Now, I gotta go. Gotta replace the battery in my Tice Clocks. I've found out that alkaline batteries in my Tice Clocks make the sound in my stereos too glassy and the video in the displays too flat. So, I use old fashioned batteries but I discharge them halfway before using them. Otherwise, a fully charged battery makes the sound too energetic and the video too vibrant.

So, I got to replace the batteries every month, but that's the small price to pay for caring about soundstaging.
 
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Back in the old, old days at the radio station. When we did a live remote broadcast, we would use and land-line. Phone company engineers would come in with big network matching boxes at each end. and tune the line for reasonable response.
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For those interested in how complicated audio frequency transmission line are and about 600 Ohm audio interconnect systems.
Jim Brown has an old article. (just skip over the math parts)

"Transmission Lines at Audio Frequencies, and a Bit of History"
http://www.audiosystemsgroup.com/TransLines-LowFreq.pdf

Hmm... what's wrong with the "math" parts? That's the whole point.

Anyhow...

"Digital" signals are also analog.

Back in the early 90s I had PacBell install an ISDN line into my house... they were offering two B channels and one D channel (). Theoretically, the B channels were good for 64Kb and good old PacBell -unlike the bastards at GTE- did indeed provide bundled B channels as their only service tier (*) with compression for a theoretical top bandwidth of 384Kb!

I had the fastest residential Internet access in the county... as I was connecting to my work (an Internetworking company) and we had huge bandwidth to the nascent Internet.

The problem was that the service crew techs were used to seeing ferrite cores on the lines going into the residences. Every time they went down into the vault, they'd see my B channels and they'd add a ferrite core onto them... WHAM. there went my connection.

Eventually, I got the Tier 2 techs, who were sick and tired of sending crews to REMOVE those ferrite cores, to put big plastic signs on the deployed ISDN lines so the techs would not touch them, and the service crews also learned about ISDN.

I was a very early adopter, you see?

(*) This meant they gave you two phone numbers so you could do a lot of things with it. I was using a Motorola BitSurfer Pro and it was an awesome set up: two phone lines, conferencing, auto drop of a data line if a voice connection was made, etc...

(**) GTE only offered 58Kb in one B channel with no compression. You had to pay a lot more to get both B channels working.
 
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The "math" parts are for engineers only. Audiophiles don't do math.
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Make that:
Audiophiles don't do engineering math.

Well, I'm an audiophile and physicist. I make my living as an engineer becuase Fiziks wouldn't pay the bills.

I think I just invalidated your postulate.

Besides, you don't think threre audiophiles who are also engineers? If so, we wouldn't have a hobby, huh?
 
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Back in the early 90s I had PacBell install an ISDN line into my house... they were offering two B channels and one D channel (). Theoretically, the B channels were good for 64Kb and good old PacBell -unlike the bastards at GTE- did indeed provide bundled B channels as their only service tier (*) with compression for a theoretical top bandwidth of 384Kb!
I was on B+D as the only way to get a reliable internet connection until late 2005. I then moved to somewhere that was no better. exhanges are few and far between in the country. Your posts have reminded me of the horrors of SDH at scale that I had forgotten. I'll have nightmares thanks to you :D

Hands up anyone old enough to remember when 256 QAM was first proposed for domestic broadband who thought 'that'll never work over *****y aluminium twisted pairs?
 
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I was on B+D as the only way to get a reliable internet connection until late 2005. I then moved to somewhere that was no better. exhanges are few and far between in the country. Your posts have reminded me of the horrors of SDH at scale that I had forgotten. I'll have nightmares thanks to you :D

Hands up anyone old enough to remember when 256 QAM was first proposed for domestic broadband who thought 'that'll never work over *****y aluminium twisted pairs?

I remember the proposal for QAM.

Do you remember ATM? I learned the whole thing, used it for working in a DSLAM. DSL used ATM as its transport layer.

Anyhow, my house set up got better.

Sometime around '98, my cable company got into the act, so I signed up as soon as they came to my neighborhood.

Just for safety, I kept the ISDN and added an NAS router ( with Windows 95WG ) behind the modems. This allowed me to select which path to the WAN, except that being Windows, it required a reboot (so if one went down, it would take five minutes to reboot and reconnect). But at least the machines in my home LAN didn't have to worry, all they had to do was connect to the local gateway (192.186.0.240).

Doing this forever foresook any hope of support with Tier 1 personnel since they had no clue what I had at home. Eventually I got direct lines to the Tier 2 support for both ISDN ( already had them ) and cable modems.

The cable modem kept going up and down and sideways. Long stories... needless to say, I ended up adding a windows NT machine behind the cable modem and the Win95 router. This was a zona franca and I installed the cable companies feedback tools. In exchange for that, and running the biggest, hotest cable modem ever made (some kind of a Motorola) I got free Internet service.

This ran until '04 when my Bitsurfer Pro broke it's ringer. PITA, as I was using as a normal dual line phone, which at $30 a month was a steal.

Anyhow, ever since, I went to a DOCSYS modem ( on my 2nd Cisco ) and a litany of routers (COTS generic one now). And I can use my cell phone as a gateway, if needed, via the WiFi access points.

Oh, WiFi... you know, if you place two of them far away in the house, use the same SSIDs but specify channels far apart, then you can build a poor man's roaming wireless set up. Works great for Android. Apple is stickier so you have to disconnect and reconnect to bind with the strongest signal.

There.
 
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I remember it, luckily I didn't have to work with it much. I do remember being horrified on the price for STM-64 cards to go into the routers in the lab. For 6 happy years I was playing in a lab that had a soup to nuts telco network in it. Only thing we couldn't do there was print paper bills.

X.25 was also in use. I wonder if that will ever die...
 
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I remember it, luckily I didn't have to work with it much. I do remember being horrified on the price for STM-64 cards to go into the routers in the lab. For 6 happy years I was playing in a lab that had a soup to nuts telco network in it. Only thing we couldn't do there was print paper bills.

X.25 was also in use. I wonder if that will ever die...

Appletalk, Decnet, X.25... our routers had it all. I remember bringing up SNMP.

We used to create ad hoc networks for R&D by tossing cables over to the next cubicle. We each had a couple of switches and a few routers in our cubes.

So one day we got this notice from Legal, in the East Coast, saying that we were hijacking GM's email servers in the West Coast.

Huh?

Well, we used whatever IP addresses we felt like during development and it seems like someone had put a wire that connected us to an alpha router that somehow got into the Internet and was publishing some addresses and sockets. It turns out that we threw away a big chunk of GM's email for almost a week.

Those were the days.

Then I moved to fiber... remember multi mode fiber? You could see that coming from a mile away... all the fiber the telcos were laying out on '98 and '99 and suddenly we come out with multi mode fiber... ooops!
 
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There are number of things audiophiles don't do.


Traditional definition of "audiophile" is very different from the contemporary one. It's been downgraded over the years.

Aaahh.... slipping the goal posts, huh?

Audiophile, someone who likes music and has a hobby of having electronic components and source devices at home that play music. Does not own Bose.

Physicist, the true pinnacle of Western Empiricism. Knows why we don't own Bose.
 
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Possibly you've been living under a rock? The traditional definition of audiophile is https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/audiophile
Now it's more about the snobbery of components.

No need to call me names...

There has ALWAYS been a snobbery about components... that has not changed. We have always had the Top Top End and the Low Low End.

What I have seen changing is the entry of so called "audiophiles" who have no clue... they go and pay through the nose for 1970s Superscope receivers because they were "built by Marantz"..

And then you got the clueless flippers like this one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/284710274768?hash=item424a0e06d0:g:AuAAAOSwQDViNOVO

I actually sent him a message asking about the condition of the unit and why does he think it's worth so much. I had mine rebuilt recently and it cost near a thousand bucks to do... so why does this guy think his unit, untouched but surely in 'mint' form, is worth so much?
 
There are number of things audiophiles don't do.
Traditional definition of "audiophile" is very different from the contemporary one. It's been downgraded over the years.
Sadly this is so very, very true.
In the part, it was about investigating and getting the best sound in audio equipment systems.
Now it's about, well I don't know what it's about, but it's more of a belief cult.
 
After reading Cyril Bateman articles, I was curious to build a reflection bridge to test myself what he found. I had found this link which helped me understand how it works.

https://www.giangrandi.org/electronics/tandemmatch/tandemmatch.shtml

I have built three versions of the reflection bridge. Cyril Bateman experiment is reproducible.

Also the impedance testing is doable (Amp Zout, Cable Z, Load Z), providing the most meaningful information as Pavel has shown above.

All these due to long term (intellectual) agitation from JNeutron and Co
:)

George
Alas, had I known you were winding toroids, I might have been able to help.

Nice work George..

My winder in action..

 
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