Quote:
Originally Posted by upstateguy  Hi KW
I am trying to make sense of this. When this discussion started I was attempting to investigate the possibility of an unmeasurable quantity being being transmitted over a wire, that would account for some of the claims being made in other forums about wire. All the claims eventually fall back on belief, individual perception and opinion and remain completely without scientific evidence.
I have never heard this unmeasurable thing so I cannot describe it to you. I have heard differences in cables but the differences I heard were frequency differences and therefore measurable and not what we are talking about.
If you are a cable believer, or are knowledgeable in what cable believers believe in, is there anything you might be able to offer that could help us understand what this phenomena is in terms of jonathanjongs revised question?
USG
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Ok, I will do my best here. Thanks for the further explanation, BTW.
First, I guess I personally am one of those people that you could characterize as a "cable believer" because I have heard and can hear repeatable differences between cables. Widely understood theory says there can be no difference between one cable and another WRT sound. I used to be firmly in that camp. I am no longer, but I do have a foot in each of the two camps.
With certain amps and cans in my collection, and certain program material, I can clearly identify interconnect cable differences between source and headamp, with other combinations of equipment and program material, I cannot hear differences between the same interconnects. The differences that I do hear, when I can hear them have to do with the preservation (as best I can determine) of existing information recorded in the program material.
I do not have the proper instrumentation at hand to "measure" what I'm hearing, even though I have some "ideas" about why I hear what I hear.
Part of the complexity is the program material itself. Whether you observe the constantly changing "signal" in the time domain or the frequency domain, it's a very, very complex waveform, and too complex to obtain and resolve meaningful measurements of "live" data.
If you were observing a simple single frequency waveform, you could more easily quantify & qualify the faithfulness of the propagation of that waveform through the chain of equipment, in our case, the interconnect cable. Even though you have qualified & quantified the faithfulness with which said waveform was transmitted, the faithful conveyance of said waveform does not necessarily correlate to the very complex waveforms representing the music/program material, replete with all of the complex waveform interactions, some of which interact differently with one another in different mediums, such as sound in air vs. electrical signals in a conductor.
Perhaps using a fully qualified A/D-D/A process, one could examine the data in the digital domain where the complexity of the data could be analyzed in a meaningful fashion, and correlation between observed difference and measured difference could be discovered with complex program (music) material. Just some musings...
What should we call it? Wouldn't it be nice if you could read a spec sheet and know how well an amp, interconnect, etc imaged? You can infer that now from some specs, but you really can't know until you hear the gear for yourself.
Let's see...
