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The "truth" about different speaker cables - Page 2

post #16 of 309
3/2/09 at 11:22am
Having read the article, I must say that I'm disappointed: nothing new at all, just a summary of well-known facts and opinions.

Thanks, Bullseye, for your effort nonetheless -- I appreciate it.
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post #17 of 309
3/2/09 at 12:27pm
Thread Starter 
Well jazz, I do not know why you are disappointed... Where you seriously expecting something new, like some kind of new property discovered in cables?

We are talking about physics here, not about changing reality in any way. Things work as explained on that article you like it or not. Gravity, as an example, also affects all humans in the same way.

Then you also said it, "just a summary of well-known facts and opinions". It is just a summary, what some people were looking for and did not find. Being a well-known fact it may be in your case, my case and others, but not in the majority of the people who lurk on this pages.

You can give it a try, say you are looking for another sound with your current headphones and some people will say "change the cables", instead of change the housing size, materials, tweak the drivers, etc...

Anyways i am happy to help, and this thread is not focused on people who know about acoustics, physics, electricity,etc; it is mainly focused to people who have a preconception about something, but can not explain the reason why. Here it is explained, and in my opinion it is nicely presented.
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post #18 of 309
3/2/09 at 1:50pm
I really have only a few substantive gripes with the article, which of course do not reflect on the translation.

1. A stylistic point, I am without a doubt somewhat on the skeptical side , but boy are those chaps absolutely certain of their case. The tenor is very much this is how it is let us demonstrate to you gullible fools. In terms of actual evidence this is a minor issue, the evidence is there or not, but it is confrontational and this can alienate even slightly sympathetic readers.

2. The graphs, sorry, I just cannot read them, so I do not know what is happening at 20K, 80k or 120K. Similarly I do not care if something is rolled off at 120K but I do want to know how rolled off it is at 20K, even if it is
0.01db.

3. Listening tests, it is one thing to assert that a difference may or may not be audible in a casual internet forum but for a published article unless you provide support from other reputable sources you really should support your case with emprical tests, blind of course. A model is just a model and even smart chaps can get it wrong, Like Julian Dunn who was forced to revisit his assertions after empirical evidence challenged his model.

Certainly < 1 db differences have been easily detected in some experiments so dismissing all small differences as unnoticeable out of hand is a bit previous. For instance noticing a 0.5db drop at 60db is much more likely than noticing it at 10db.

No reflection on the tranlastor of course
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post #19 of 309
3/2/09 at 2:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bullseye View Post
...We are talking about physics here, not about changing reality in any way. Things work as explained on that article you like it or not...
Yeah, thanks!
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post #20 of 309
3/2/09 at 2:42pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by nick_charles View Post
I really have only a few substantive gripes with the article, which of course do not reflect on the translation.

1. A stylistic point, I am without a doubt somewhat on the skeptical side , but boy are those chaps absolutely certain of their case. The tenor is very much this is how it is let us demonstrate to you gullible fools. In terms of actual evidence this is a minor issue, the evidence is there or not, but it is confrontational and this can alienate even slightly sympathetic readers.

2. The graphs, sorry, I just cannot read them, so I do not know what is happening at 20K, 80k or 120K. Similarly I do not care if something is rolled off at 120K but I do want to know how rolled off it is at 20K, even if it is
0.01db.

3. Listening tests, it is one thing to assert that a difference may or may not be audible in a casual internet forum but for a published article unless you provide support from other reputable sources you really should support your case with emprical tests, blind of course. A model is just a model and even smart chaps can get it wrong, Like Julian Dunn who was forced to revisit his assertions after empirical evidence challenged his model.

Certainly < 1 db differences have been easily detected in some experiments so dismissing all small differences as unnoticeable out of hand is a bit previous. For instance noticing a 0.5db drop at 60db is much more likely than noticing it at 10db.

No reflection on the tranlastor of course
Just wanted to comment your answer. I too felt that the article had some weak points. However i imagine that if they wanted to cover absolutely all points of view the article would have been way longer, and it would have become a very specialized article.

1. The underlined sentence i do not understand it And neither some of the following...

2. The graphs are very low quality, even in the original article scan. I asked them for better pictures of those graphs, before I started translating, or for a copy of the original article, in better quality, however they answered that they did not have it and they knew the same information about where it came from as i did. I can not do more than that, sorry.
If they only put that there is some roll off at 120K, 200k or 1M, it is because the differences are not relevant to those 10-20k, don't you think. Will it make a difference for you to know that instead of a difference of 0.05 dB there is one of 0.08 dB? When you listen to your music through your speakers/headphones will you think like "damn those 0.05 dB, they are making my ears bleed..."

3. About other reputable source could you give me an example of that? I get why you ask, though; but if we have to question every smart chap (Newton, Einstein, Faraday...), we would have to question the "not so smart" chaps, and consequently everyone in this world...
In that site, matrixhifi, they have loads of blind tests between different apparatus -amps, cd players, cables- The problem is that they are in Spanish...
At the moment i do not feel like translating more texts for a while, however I will read them again and choose one or two most relevant tests that some people like you might want to read.

As a final note, i decided to translate it an add it because I believe it covers more relevant aspects than most that has been written on this forums.
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post #21 of 309
3/2/09 at 3:10pm
There is this Al Gore feeling here. Hmm.
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post #22 of 309
3/2/09 at 4:31pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bullseye View Post
1. The underlined sentence i do not understand it And neither some of the following...
The article is permeated by a sense of the truth of its assertions and that anyone who disagrees is foolish, it is quite aggressive in that tone.

Quote:
Will it make a difference for you to know that instead of a difference of 0.05 dB there is one of 0.08 dB? When you listen to your music through your speakers/headphones will you think like "damn those 0.05 dB, they are making my ears bleed..."
But they did not give us the 0.05 or 0.08 just the 3db for 12K or 200K, sice they make so much about the cut-off being 20K they should mention the attenuation at that point.

Also Jitter is certainly audible at ns that is 10 ^ -9 seconds !. Small numbers are sometimes important.




Quote:
3. About other reputable source could you give me an example of that? I get why you ask, though; but if we have to question every smart chap (Newton, Einstein, Faraday...), we would have to question the "not so smart" chaps, and consequently everyone in this world...
What I mean is that if I say "0.0001db is inaudible" you would rightly ask me , where I get that from, to which I can reply by pointing you to prior Psychophysics papers that have measured just noticebale differences and found them to be much higher.
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post #23 of 309
3/2/09 at 8:27pm
"Also Jitter is certainly audible at ns that is 10 ^ -9 seconds !"

Careful about this Nick. Firstly it's never been proven that low levels of jitter can be detected or infact that it is necessarily a bad thing and secondly jitter is usually measured in ps (pico seconds) rather than ns.

G
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post #24 of 309
3/2/09 at 11:52pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregorio View Post
"Also Jitter is certainly audible at ns that is 10 ^ -9 seconds !"

Careful about this Nick. Firstly it's never been proven that low levels of jitter can be detected or infact that it is necessarily a bad thing and secondly jitter is usually measured in ps (pico seconds) rather than ns.

G
There is some empirical evidence for the audibility of jittter being in the ns range

Ashihara et al

http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/26/1/50/_pdf

studied random jitter, placing the threshold at ~ 10ns

and

Benjamin, Eric and Gannon, Benjamin ' Theoretical and Audible Effects of Jitter on Digital Audio Quality,' 105th AES Convention, 1998, Print 4826.

studied deterministic jitter placing the threshhold at
~ 250ns.

We can quibble about how conclusive these are but they do represent the best blind test data so far.
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post #25 of 309
3/3/09 at 2:08pm
Nick - Thanks for the link. It seems to me that their test is faulty though. If I've read the report correctly, they have made no allowance for any jitter which may already be present on a CD. There were all sorts of variables simply not taken into account in the test.

I'm not saying very low level jitter is not audible, just that I'm not convinced by either side of the argument yet and I think this is quite a commonly held view with many professionals.

G
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post #26 of 309
3/3/09 at 3:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregorio View Post
Nick - Thanks for the link. It seems to me that their test is faulty though. If I've read the report correctly, they have made no allowance for any jitter which may already be present on a CD. There were all sorts of variables simply not taken into account in the test.

I'm not saying very low level jitter is not audible, just that I'm not convinced by either side of the argument yet and I think this is quite a commonly held view with many professionals.

G
Since the music files were held on PC any jitter in the CD would be a non issue since you have a captured in a wav file all the CD data so any timing variations on the CD will be moot since you just now have raw but de-interlaced data which does not need to be read in real time. As far as I am aware a wav file is just a bit-stream with no timing data in it ? So as long as the extraction was error-free all the raw data is there.

Also, since we cannot hear anything before it comes out of the DAC there is a strong argument that the only place to worry about jitter is at the DAC.

You should also read the Benjamin and Gannon paper which is much more detailed (longer) and much more conservative
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post #27 of 309
3/3/09 at 4:25pm
Hi Nick - AFAIK, the most obvious place for jitter to occur is in the ADC process. I didn't mean to specifically refer to music from a CD, I just meant digital source music. Again, AFAIK, this jitter is effectively encoded into the music during the conversion process and cannot be removed later and of course every digital conversion processor used in the music creation process is likely to cause it's own amount and frequency of jitter. This is before the test even begins. I have to say, I'm on the borderline of my knowledge here, so I can't be certain that my understanding is accurate. It's over a decade since I looked seriously into jitter and it's effects.

G
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post #28 of 309
3/3/09 at 4:39pm

The Earth is indeed FLAT!

Many thanks to the effort put in by the translator. As for it proving something......well, let's just say the earth is indeed flat.

Why we continue to pull out ohms law and use frequency rewponse as the onlly thing that could account for differences in cables sound I will never understand. Is it because we have only a two dimensional oscilliscope as our tool?
Maybe other things are at work here like phase and stuff we don't even know about yet.

If physics stopped progressing where this does in the audio world, we would have never discovered quarks, nano technology, and the like.

I don't care one iota if parasitic inductance and ohms law is all one has to make one's case. I still hear a difference and my memory is just fine thank you.

Nothing new here, same old audioholics science, because that is all we have at the moment. But just because the earth looked flat doesn't mean it is!
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post #29 of 309
3/4/09 at 3:00am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bullseye View Post
In that site, matrixhifi, they have loads of blind tests between different apparatus -amps, cd players, cables- The problem is that they are in Spanish...
At the moment i do not feel like translating more texts for a while, however I will read them again and choose one or two most relevant tests that some people like you might want to read.
I had come across this site before, it's a lot of fun. Some of the DBT test results are so insane that it's almost impossible to believe them. Such as an Oracle CD2500 cd player offering the same performance as a Pioneer DV-575 dvd player (at 1/60th of the price of the Oracle).

It would actually be nice if the authors of that site could provide an English translation themselves. Failing that, I guess Google Translate will have to do for now.
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post #30 of 309
3/4/09 at 5:31am
Thread Starter 
Yeah, drosera, they have some DBT tests like that, however I do not see that being impossible.

It is not like there are "super resistances", or "super circuitry" made in a way that sky rockets the prices of the players. More than half of the price you pay in some of them is for the name too. As an example of that sort of thing, the amplifier from grado RA-1 actually has a very cheap circuitry, but it is sold very expensive.

Then it would be good they translated the majority of the articles to english, however I think it will not happen in a very long time. They got angry at me too for not being happy with the webmaster's work. I had my reasons, as it took him more than a week to upload it, he did everything on the day before and I did not know it was that way, I had put a lot of effort in making a good translation, and he put it not as good as I had done it, i had checked it in order to be as perfect as possible...

Well guess Google translate or Yahoo's Babelfish will have to make the job...
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