The "truth" about different speaker cables - Page 15

Duplicate post.

It is Schrödinger's joke. You won't know if it is funny until you laugh, or don't.

Didn't he play for the Padres in '04?

If he did, then they must have won. Or lost. I can't tell until we open the box.

I haven't read all the posts but I think the one very pertinent point in the article was this, in my own words: if electricity from the power station still arrives at exactly 50Hz, why should audio cables be any different?

Good reasoning

My power arrives at 60hz, maybe that is why my cables sound different!

Wire, Dire Wire

I have not read all the posts in this thread yet, but I will still inflict my useless take on it anyway. All I have to back it up is fifty plus years of listening experience, and being raised by a DIY father who was an engineer at Shure Bros.

I will preface by stating that I have never been a fan of meter men who pay attention to readouts instead of music, and that I think Julian Hirsch was an ass and deaf to boot. But snake oil is snake oil and the wire debate seems to be awash with it. Don’t get me started on power conditioners.

I will also say that I am an atypical listener in that I listen at night and without distractions, so this stuff matters to me. For some reason unknown to me I am incapable of casual listening. If I don't like it enough to pay attention to it, I don't want to hear it at all. (After giving it several fair tries, of course, usually over several years.)

Crossovers are indeed an evil source of distortion and especially phase problems. One of the big advantages of headphones is their lack of crossovers. When not using headphones, go Stax, I use different kinds of speakers, but for attentive listening I use a single driver augmented, crossover less design. Hammer Dynamics Super 12s, if you care to know. But the fact that crossovers can do many times more signal damage than speaker wire does not change the fact that wire could matter. But does it matter?

I have currently settled on magnet wire for speaker use. I do not use large conductors. For many years it has been supposed by users of high efficiency, crossover less speakers that wire more closely related to voice coil diameter than the wire industry’s recommendations is appropriate. They have observed that too much wire adversely affects the mids and highs, and my personal experience agrees with this. Things simply sound less clear, given a system with enough resolving power to render the difference. I admit that most systems do not resolve the differences, but that does not change the experience of owners of systems that do.

If you are not familiar with magnet wire, it is high quality drawn solid wire coated once or twice with a thin dielectric designed to resist extreme thermal and mechanical conditions (those found in transformer windings and electric motors for instance). On good magnet wire the two coatings are different. The coatings are also mechanically very tough, as scraping the stuff off to make a connection will demonstrate. Those not up for that challenge can spend a lot of money and buy a solder pot. Magnet wire is very inexpensive. Being an industrial item it is not oxygen free, so if that instills O2 paranoia too bad for you! It is just high quality, reasonably priced wire that works in boiling temperatures and conditions of extreme magnetic and electrical flux without any leakage from insulation shortcomings. I order one or two pound spools of the sizes I need for a few dollars each. I have never paid more than twenty dollars for such a spool of double insulated magnet wire.

If you wish to have a mental illustration of how senseless fire hose cables are, picture one connected directly to a voice coil wire. How much of the conductor do you suppose is overkill?

I think that interconnect wire for low level signals suffers from a different set of misinformation. While balanced is superior in theory there is seldom if ever any audible advantage in the short runs typically found in home music reproduction. Sound reinforcement is another but unrelated matter, where small signal wires run a great distance over terrain littered with AC and speaker lines. If you don’t live under a high tension power line or next to a radar station, forget it. Some use long lines to amps because they are concerned with losses in speaker cable runs. It is your rig, do as you like. It is still obvious that small signal interconnects are more prone to distortion and loss than speaker lines, and by several orders of magnitude. So keep interconnects short and run speaker wire where you need to go with it. Even when using balanced for the long runs to the amps, it is a wrongheaded approach that puts the cart before the horse. In a world of expensive speaker cables keeping the runs short at the expense of interconnect length becomes more an economic than audio quality decision. It is like cutting down the dosage of a life saving drug you need because it is expensive.

What does seem to make sense is braided wire at low signal levels. Not at all necessary, but a cheap and engineering backed precaution. I sometimes use Kimber’s least expensive line of interconnects, and I really should be making my own from ordinary wire but I need to support my local audio shop with a high profit item now and then.

What about skin effect? A simple engineering table from a reliable source (that would be the IEEE) will show when skin effect is a factor. It ends up interconnect wires can be pretty small, and speaker wire need not be large to negate the possibility of audible effects. Unless of course you use low efficiency speakers (never a good idea if you want the best sound) and need an audio bandwidth down to 5HZ.

How about all those differences heard in A/B listening tests that seem unlikely or make no sense but are heard anyway? I had those put to rest for me when an amp was changed over from pentode to triode in an audio shop. Most present commented, at length no less, on the differences, quantifying and qualifying them with the usual audiophile terms. Then it was discovered that the switches had not been toggled after all. The amp was still in pentode. I rest my case.

Clark

Thanks for the great work Bullseye.
I have to admit that I didn't read the article from beginning to the end (yet!) but it basically just supports my opinion - spending money on expensive cables equals throwing money out of the window.

Very good old engineering common sense thread

I am posting just to subscribe to your thread.

I did not read all of it yet (neither the thread nor the article)

but being an Electrical Engineer with an interest in psychology as soon as I saw the amount by which the values of Resistance, Capacitance and Inductance are affected by wire length, type,cross section, insulation and geometry configuration, I realized the significance of your findings in the article you translated.

Clarkmc2's post has also been a great contribution along the same lines.

For your information there have been many true double blind tests that were conducted in Greece on audiophile audiences with the most expensive and exotic equipment available by recording industry's companies that have shown that "snake-oil" is just placebo effect.

Yes I know, it still is a lot of work to translate all of this imo.

Back to the cables, I think that it's just a psychological trick used by cable manufacturers to make you buy their stuff. They overwhelm their customers with claims/facts about the miraculous properties of their ultra high fidelity pro audio cables. Of course, some things they say have to be true (like the higher quality of their cables compared to others), else they would be out and out liars.

So Joe Audiohpile buys a bunch of them, replaces his old cables and: wow, these cables sound great; I mean they have to, don't they? Because they were so expensive. And just take a look at them, they are all golden and so shiny.

This is what others call placebo-effect. But I don't think thats the right word to describe it, because a placebo usually is something that has the same effect on the user as the "real thing". But one cable sounds like another anyway so there is no "real thing".

The problem with sound is that you cannot see it, so you cannot compare it easily. But you can see the cables, compare them, and choose the "better" one. And a much better looking cable creates an illusion of a better audio experience - and maybe it really is an improvement for Joe, but not for his ears.

And that's what I think, people don't listen to music with their ear. They feel, see and smell it (as weird as that sounds), thus being sucked into a vortex of illusions and ... OK, I should stop right here.

Well I hope you know what I'm trying to say here. Enjoy your music and equip .

Was this article written by the same nerds who when the CD player was first introduced said it was "perfect sound forever" and could not be improved on?

Meyer and Moran's 2007 JAES paper suggests that 16/44.1 may be indistinguishable from high res under normal listening conditions, they conducted over 500 tests and using 50+ subjects were unable to find anyone who could reliably tell them apart without using extraordinary volume levels...

Sorry could not resist this one... how many of the 500 50+ subjects had hearing aids?

As on the original paper - translated by the OP (a big Thank YOU !): I resent only one aspect, and that is the notion that everything over 20Khz is to be forgotten. It kind of reminds me of the Yamaha SACDP I returned to the shop because I could hear a high pitched whine. It turned out to be a known issue - but I could not possibly have heared that according to the vendor. Because the whine was "out of the range humans can hear". (I got my money back just the same).

On interconnects there is one thing I think more important than the cable itself and that is the contact. If it is loose in any way, I can hear a hum. So goldplated and adjustable contacts (screw to increase or decrease the diameter) do it for me. Goldplated so I don't have to worry to much about corrosion.