[Clarkmc2]

Rather than picturing blissful listeners relaxing on comfortable furniture, this brings to mind ostriches with their heads in the sand. Out on the lawn, flamingos are being used as croquet mallets.

 

[nanaholic]

Quote:

Astroid,
I've mentioned this few times in my vast and storied Head Fi epic adventures.....................why not pick on tubes?
Some folks claim there is a difference between this 6SN7 tube and that 6SN7 tube, if you can say this, then may as well say cables sound different while you are at it?
Hmmmm, maybe start a "Pick on Tubes" thread?

C-Dawg
.

 
Tubes are an active components in an electric circuit - meaning they can inject energy into the circuit (scientific and engineering fact), thus this puts them in a totally different category to passive components like cables.  The possibility that tubes will alter a signal is orders of magnitudes higher than cables.  While I won't go so far as to claim there must be an audible difference in sound between same models of tubes by different manufacturers/time/batch etc, I certainly won't say just because one who claims tubes can be different would lead credibility to that cables will be different by extension.

 

[Shike]

Quote:

Coolio , some measurements that show the technical superiority of the HD800.
 
a more accurate bass response - what is the target for this ?
 
lower distortion - can distortion on HD600 be heard ?
 
faster decay and less ringing - good, again could you ABX it?
 
Better matched - Again , has anyone returned the HD600 because of the poor matching.
 
My point is , does any of the above translate into a better listening experience , has anyone ever posted "wow the drivers are so well matched on this 800" or "the decay on the guitar disappears so much faster on the 800".
 
Can you hear it?

 
I've asked this a few times myself, especially in relation to decay/ringing.  Unfortunately I have yet to find any real studies on the audibility of it which is a shame.  Everything else one can likely find is cheaper headphones, such as the HD600, AKG K601, etc.

 

[OJNeg]

The mark-up on "high-end" cables is what turns me off. When I see a vacuum tube amplifier that goes for a couple grand, I'm ok with it. I know the parts cost is high for that stuff, and the manufacturer and designer will have to get their fair share as well. When I see "high-end" cables that are ridiculously expensive, it's a different story. The fact that it's handmade doesn't justify that sort of markup. Especially when I can build the same exact cable myself (sans the logo) and be 100% sure of it's quality.
 
And then there's the myth that these brands perpetrate about cable "technology" and other wild sonic claims. As someone who pays attention to measurements, it insults my intelligence. If you don't believe in the placebo in the first place, you'll have no need to indulge yourself.

 

[kwkarth]

As an engineer who pays attention to measurements, you must realize measurements don't come close to telling the whole story of a sound profile. I'm sure that to all of you consummate engineering types, it would gall you to know how much markup is in a Rembrandt. How about a Rockwell? Eh, just paint your own and be done with it...you could actually even buy better quality paints and copy famous paintings using those better paints! What an improvement!
Who the heck cares if the artist's kids starve? How dare an artist mark up their art more than 35%!
Funny how we all choose different hobby horses to become passionate about. Our individual unique passions are, after all, the only ones that matter, everyone else's are bunk.

 

[firev1]

Quote:

As an engineer who pays attention to measurements, you must realize measurements don't come close to telling the whole story of a sound profile. I'm sure that to all of you consummate engineering types, it would gall you to know how much markup is in a Rembrandt. How about a Rockwell? Eh, just paint your own and be done with it...you could actually even buy better quality paints and copy famous paintings using those better paints! What an improvement!
Who the heck cares if the artist's kids starve? How dare an artist mark up their art more than 35%!
Funny how we all choose different hobby horses to become passionate about. Our individual unique passions are, after all, the only ones that matter, everyone else's are bunk.

The problem with some manufacturers is that all of them make very wild sonic claims on how their cable is rejects evil spirits, is made up of extremely rare metals you only see in the periodic  table and how their 7 or 9N cable processing technique relates to better sound when for most of the part, no listening test of any sort was done. Of course, if they only state how they build their cables it would be totally cool, but wild sonic claims are ridiculous.
 
Buying for art you say? What is art if its hidden behind your receiver? And with all these claims, it looks like they are selling engineering more than art to me.

 

[JadeEast]

Quote:

As an engineer who pays attention to measurements, you must realize measurements don't come close to telling the whole story of a sound profile. I'm sure that to all of you consummate engineering types, it would gall you to know how much markup is in a Rembrandt. How about a Rockwell? Eh, just paint your own and be done with it...you could actually even buy better quality paints and copy famous paintings using those better paints! What an improvement!
Who the heck cares if the artist's kids starve? How dare an artist mark up their art more than 35%!
Funny how we all choose different hobby horses to become passionate about. Our individual unique passions are, after all, the only ones that matter, everyone else's are bunk.

I don't understand what your point is. Are you trying to equivocate a Rembrandt with an audio cable?

 

[bigshot]

I've asked this a few times myself, especially in relation to decay/ringing.  Unfortunately I have yet to find any real studies on the audibility of it which is a shame.  Everything else one can likely find is cheaper headphones, such as the HD600, AKG K601, etc.

If you think about the way sounds occur, wth an attack and slow decay out, and picture that offset and overlayed back on the sound again, you can easily visualize that post ringing needs to persist for a relatively long time to be audible at all. Pre ringing is much more serious than post ringing.

Speakers take a while to recover from big excursions, and they sound fine. With headphones it's the same except on a microscopic scale. It shouldn't be any problem at all.

I can see art existing in industrial design. Raymond Lowey and his streamlined toasters for example. There isn't a lot of that in our modern world, I'm afraid.

 

[mikeaj]

Quote:

I don't understand what your point is. Are you trying to equivocate a Rembrandt with an audio cable?

 
I am likewise puzzled.
 
 
 

If you think about the way sounds occur, wth an attack and slow decay out, and picture that offset and overlayed back on the sound again, you can easily visualize that post ringing needs to persist for a relatively long time to be audible at all. Pre ringing is much more serious than post ringing.
Speakers take a while to recover from big excursions, and they sound fine. With headphones it's the same except on a microscopic scale. It shouldn't be any problem at all.
I can see art existing in industrial design. Raymond Lowey and his streamlined toasters for example. There isn't a lot of that in our modern world, I'm afraid.

 
I don't want to go too far off into the deep end here, but imagine this (worst-case?) scenario:
 
Music at 120 bpm, an instrument is playing eighth note tenutos repeatedly, with a long tone but audible space between the notes.  Let's say that the note (including the brief decay) lasts 95% of the length of the note.  There would be 4 eighth notes per second at 120 bpm, so 250ms duration.  So with a rest or silence of 5% of the note duration, that's 12.5ms.
 
12.5ms or so is on the order of headphone ringing after an impulse response, though at most higher frequencies it should be tens of dB down in magnitude by that point (except in bad cases of resonance).
 
However, the important point is that any ringing should be following the decay of the original signal.  That's not to mention there often being other concurrent sounds that could mask most decays.  So the ringing in practice would be of something already at a lower magnitude, unless you're looking at some kind of synthesized sound that stops abruptly (one sample is high, the next is zero).

 

[bigshot]

Just to add a bit of context to your figures there... 12 ms is about one cycle at 100Hz. It's the amount of time delay you experience because of the speed of sound sitting about ten feet away. 12 ms isn't perceptable as an echo. It takes you 200 ms just to read the expression on a person's face.

This is a very tiny sliver of time.

One of the things I learned in sound editing for TV was how oblivious we are to edits that take place in the blink of an eye. I would be editing sound effects for cartoons, and I'd have a big hit to put an effect to. I could take a crash effect or a bass drum hit or a bang on a drawer full of silverware and snip out the middle of the sound and just leave the impact and decay and you would never notice the edit. It just sounded like a quicker hit. I could even take the attack from one hit and graft it onto the decay of an entirely different sound and get a totally different sort of effect than either of them. I made compound sound effects that were cobbled together from bits of a dozen different effects, all happening in less than a half second. No one could hear those edits at all. I could even go into a music cue and snip bits out and shorten it by a full second or more.

The cuts I was making were probably in the hundreds and thousands of milliseconds. The ear is VERY forgiving to tiny bits of time.

 

[Argo Duck]

^ Interesting. When I first started post-grad I was a demonstrator for a psycholinguistics course (not my field). One of the demonstrations was of single words that had been edited out of a spoken sentence.
 
Not one of us could recognize a single word. The point was how context is part of the brain's decoding. A weak example of this is how the sounds for "I scream" and "Ice cream" are the same, but we know which is meant from the social or linguistic context.
 
This would seem to suggest some parts of the sound-stream - maybe not music though? - are vulnerable to small time edits.
 
Did you ever try this or experience it in any way?

 

[dvw]

Quote:

I don't understand what your point is. Are you trying to equivocate a Rembrandt with an audio cable?

Yes he is. If you see his previous post, he is equating a cable as a piece of art and that's how you justify the high price. Personally I have no problem with that if indeed the cable is positioned as a piece of art. Except they're not. I have seen inquiry on people with ground loop and people are recommeding power cable for it. Or advertising their cable can solve standing wave.
 
I own work of art but mostly in form of affordable replicas like posters and lithograph. Maybe I should get some cables instead. When the cable maker died, they could appreciate significantly..

 

[OJNeg]

Quote:

As an engineer who pays attention to measurements, you must realize measurements don't come close to telling the whole story of a sound profile. I'm sure that to all of you consummate engineering types, it would gall you to know how much markup is in a Rembrandt. How about a Rockwell? Eh, just paint your own and be done with it...you could actually even buy better quality paints and copy famous paintings using those better paints! What an improvement!
Who the heck cares if the artist's kids starve? How dare an artist mark up their art more than 35%!
Funny how we all choose different hobby horses to become passionate about. Our individual unique passions are, after all, the only ones that matter, everyone else's are bunk.

 
Are you of the opinion that cable makers are artists? I'm not trying to sound demeaning, I'm just curious. Aesthetics are important certainly, but I don't consider cable design "art" personally.

 

[bigshot]

One of the demonstrations was of single words that had been edited out of a spoken sentence. Not one of us could recognize a single word.

This would seem to suggest some parts of the sound-stream - maybe not music though? - are vulnerable to small time edits.

The Tim Conway Jr show on talk radio in LA has a game every Thursday evening based on that. It's called What the Hell Did Rev Jesse Jackson Say?. It's been running every week for 12 years. Very popular. They take single sentences and phrases from speeches and sermons by Rev Jesse Jackson and people call in and try to guess what he's saying. It's really tough because of his particular enunciation, the inflection of his oratory, and his accent. I heard Jesse Jackson himself has listened to the show and has trouble figuring it out himself.

Try it yourself...
http://www.kfiam640.com/pages/jessejackson/

With music, editing is dictated by rhythm. You can make almost any sort of edit you want as long as it maintains the beat. When you hear underscore on TV, you'd be amazed at how many edits are being made. There can be as many as a dozen in just a single minute. Musical phrases can be repeated, verses extended or delayed, beats shifted so on screen action lines up with accents in the music... Music editing is quite a specialized skill. You get a feel for what works and what doesn't and you can operate largely on instinct. Kind of like improvisation.

 

[Argo Duck]

Cheers bigshot - always interesting and educational hearing from people expert at what they do, as opposed to just opinions - but the latter is what forums are all about I guess