We think exactly alike.
I do worry about how gas tight the contact could be. Imagine a server farm with thousands of aluminum network cables, only to find that 5 years from now they start to have intermittent connections.
Aluminum power connections afaik, do not rely on gas tight anything, but use the paste (some kind of fluorine compound I believe.)
At work, copper quadrupled in cost between estimates and purchase...never, ever, would I have considered going aluminum. It only takes one connection out of tens of thousands to bring the machine down.
Jn
Scott, I am still totally shocked by your earlier post where the electrician said don't worry it has a 50 amp breaker on a #10...
Any maroon knows the breakers are not there for the protection of the appliance, but to protect the wire...
Good thing you caught it, the average person wouldn't. Hopefully an inspector would. In my town, kitchen upgrades even by the homeowner require permit and inspection.
Jn
I would be astonished if the change was truly audible, given the physics of trivial potential dividers.indra1 said:
Such studies may or may not exist, however, we can be sure that these effects, even if real, have no relevance to audio wiring because they are simply too small.
It must be boring for people designing the latest technology when they have to use the same tired old equations such as Fourier, Maxwell and Schrodinger - all dead men. Much more exciting to just move a few polished stones around and then listen to the universe - this is how LIGO did it, wasn't it?john curl said:
Nice one, John! Smart of you to suggest that the alleged brightness will not show up in a frequency response test. Can we assume that this alleged higher order distortion also might not show up in a 'conventional' distortion test?
Ok good you have decent gear, you ought to hear fine differences. Try swapping interconnect direction one channel at a time, IME you ought to hear sideways shifting of centre panned sound sources. Swapping the second interconnect IME ought to recenter the image but now the depth imaging will be different. You may need to try this detailed/close listening on a selection of tracks to display the effect, this is sort of subtle stuff but once heard and noted cannot be unheard.
Of course a decent system will sound good with interconnects in both the directions, but it will sound more correct and with more realistic depth imaging in one of the directions. This process is not hard to do but may take a little time, I recommend that you try it properly.
Dan.
Presumably it would only be possible to tell this if you'd been at the original recording/mixing session and had a perfectly photographic(?) audio memory?
We sneaked this one by, it's a long story. He was doing work for our managing board and he just fit this one in, it was obvious he was not and electrician or plumber (though the plumbing seemed right).
As usual we don't communicate. Current is assumed to flow from the positive terminal to the negative one. In actuality as this was determined by looking at sparks they got it backwards.
Now a signal wavefront is symmetrical. Is there something unclear about that?
And how do your comments apply to loudspeaker cable? I have some that is PVC insulated and other that meets fire codes for plenum use and is kynar. Teflon costing more!
Do you really think it takes 50 nS for the signal to propagate in a 10M loudspeaker cable? Where would this matter? What inductance range do you get for loudspeaker cables?
Vaccy,
I do have conversations with some of the loudspeaker manufacturers' technical folks, they tend to blame the marketing folks for the misuse of the word "dispersion." One of the fun bits of jargon is it let's you know who is a member of the club and who isn't. So we will continue to disagree. I will use the word to describe the frequency/speed issue. You are free to use it as you wish. Eventually the definition may adapt.
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Discussion across several fields are often a bit difficult due to different meaning/usage of the same terms.
For a single tone the slew rate is level dependent, for a complex tone the rise time (for the more "square" that you´ve mentioned) depends on level and spectral composition.
"Attack" would mean the difference between playing the same notes by "plucking" or by "slamming" the strings.
Assuming the same amplitude any high frequency hearing loss will result imo in a different perception of "pluck vs. slam" due to the reasons i´ve outlined before.
SaM mentioned already that age related effects were not restricted to only high frequency hearing loss (typically the thresholds are higher across all frequencies for elderly subjects).
Experimental results for age related effects on localization are up to now a bit inconclusive as some found that localization got worse in the horizontal and vertical plane while others only found an impact wrt to localization in the vertical plane.
But it seems to be safe to conclude that age related effects do have an impact on localization of sound sources.
Interesting side effects is the morphology of the pinna as one experiment found that larger pinnae (growing with age) compensated partly for the impact of high frequency loss.
Using complex musical stimuli might in such experiments might lead to different results i´d assume as experience growing with age could help to compensate for aging effects.
Although I appreciate the opportunity to comment, I already besmirched my boots once wading into this mess.
Wire (not a cable assy) cannot show directionality without causing distortion. Period. Its very definition as well as simple logic both show this must be so if you assume audio to be a signal of alternating polarity of electron pressure.
1) As indra quoted, think about the possibility for contact issues at the connector which inevitably has oxidation, dissimilar metals, entrained moisture (anyone with high vacuum experience knows H2O is very sticky!) and contaminants. Now compare this to the magnitude of any possible issues with the internal structure of the Cu/Al/Ag/Au/Ei/EiO conductor itself. Add to these variables the differing ways of terminating a cable to establish proper shielding and grounding which by design cause desired directionality. I will state unequivocally: ANY WIRE TEST MUST BE DONE WITHOUT CONNECTORS. To think a wire test is valid including connectors is delusional, like checking the brightness of the moon with a photometer in broad daylight.
2) Any directionality would be either in the amplitude or time domain, and amplitude directionality (i.e. micro-diodes or the imagined non-linear zones of conduction) would cause measurable distortion. If the distortion is caused by propagation issues (time) the distortion would be due to IMD between the direct and time shifted signal. As both a broadcast engineer and radio amateur I work with transmission lines which have both a characteristic impedance Zo and velocity factor Vf which describe how a signal propagates on these lines. However we are talking about audio with much longer wavelengths, even 20 KHz in a piece of RG-58 with a Vf of 0.66 has a wavelength of ~10 km. The phase difference between the direct and reflected 20 KHz signal in that 1m cable would be 360 micro-degrees. I won't bother calculating the amplitude loss due to cancellation or resulting IM...
Can we PLEASE talk about something else real? When not distracted JC, Scott, PMA and many others have some really solid ideas on circuit design which I value, like with FET buffers and PS buffering, not to mention the excellent DAC discussions ...have we exhausted the topics?
My conclusion is the best engineers have the best imaginations. The difference between those who merely hypothesize and those who actually create is the ability to analyze and winnow down the possibilities from impossibilities using scientific principles and analyses. John, your designs weren't hypothesized into existence...
Best regards,
Howie
Recordings with decent depth information including spoken word and nature sound recordings are best for showing audible differences according to interconnect direction.
The effect is 'somewhat' like the audible changes that occur when swapping polarity of loudspeaker connections at the speakers.
Dan.
Good for you. And yes it is not an important issue for me, but I'm not giving up my curiosity yet.
Thank you Howie, Klaus was also asking about how to reliably make a directional cable, I think you got it covered.
Is the same said about video - is there a cone of confusion spoken of in reference to video as there is to audio?
It seems to me that we can recognise what is natural looking & when some better/more natural image is seen we recognise it as such even though we were quiet happy with the previous display.
Thanks, Jakob - that is interesting info
I must be stuffed. My MC cartridge has pure silver coils, with silver headshell leads, silver litz tonearm wire and pure silver STP cables coming out (including screen). By your reasoning this should be bright beyond listenability, but I can't spot it.
I love it when 'facts' trump the laws of nature. You know there is no chance of sense or reason entering the discussion, just slap on the fraudulin (monty python toothpaste advert).
Again where did I say that, the reversed sense is EE or physics 101. You close a circuit current flows (or whatever you want to call it) I never specified the direction the electrons flow, you avoid addressing specific questions and make up some misdirection (which in this case is totally irrelevant) to form what amounts to an insult.
The average speaker cable (zip cord) is also a t-line and has a characteristic impedance, L, and C per foot. I guess you missed it jn and I posted at length on the convergence of the lumped model vs the piece wise distributed model of speaker cables. You get the same answer because you have to. Lots of folks parallel up CAT 5 pairs as speaker cable, I should hope it behaves as a t-line.
BTW if you read Franklin's description of his convention he had a concept of "electric fluid" and materials that had a surfeit of it he called positive and materials that had a deficit of it were called negative and the flow of the fluid was in the obvious direction. I doubt there was any technique to actually observe the direction of small sparks.
@jn If you remember the distributed line sims looked like a zero order hold version of the continuous solution sampled at 2X the transit time. The analogy to the Nyquist limit of sampling at f/2 can't be a coincidence.
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Surely you are going to have to have been there to know how "correct and realistic" that was. BTW, I'm all for "better"
BTW2, I swapped the basic interconnects that came with my CD player for some silver plated ones I have, no difference
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Well Bill, by JC's reasoning you are highly knowledgeable or extremely lucky.
You will have to put that into the context for those way over the age of 50.An objectivist with good ears will become a subjectivist
Apart from the effect of atmospherics, the moon whether it be day or night, is always the same brightness.
An engineer without an imagination is not an engineer.
Actually, what you are saying is a breath of fresh air. Bravo!
ToS
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Well Bill, by JC's reasoning you are highly knowledgeable or extremely lucky.
Well all the wire has been there 30 odd years now so should be well 'bedded in'
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