[jnjn]

Quote:

Audibility is the only thing that matters. The rest is all hot air.

No, no, no.   That is a terribly wrong attitude.  Fix the problem, don't ignore it.
 
Interconnects absolutely do affect the equipment by virtue of the design of the equipment.
 
Power cords also do the same, for the exact same reason.
 
When people find differences and ask for answers, they get the standard "it's in your head", or wire is wire, or miles and miles, or links to silly things by pseudoexperts proclaiming mythbuster quips..
 
Fix the equipment.  Get rid of the sensitivity.
 
Unless of course, you prefer another 25 years of back and forth..
 
Me, if I read another one of those pseudoscience explanations as to why the metallurgy of my power cable makes a world of difference, I'm gonna puke..I swear it..
 
jnjn

 

[scud80]

it's funny (to me) that i basically agree with both bigshot and jnjn here.  audibility *is* the only thing that matters, but electronics should also be designed to keep unwanted elements as far from audibility as possible.  there's no audible difference if noise introduced by your equipment is -80dB vs. -90dB compared to your signal, but it is a very real difference and if two options are otherwise identical i'm certainly opting for -90dB.
 
cables that are designed and constructed well *should not* affect the sound that comes out the transducer at the end.  i haven't seen any measurements which show that they do to a level at which the difference is noticeable.  if they change a frequency response by .001dB i don't really care, but .0001dB would certainly be better.  if anybody can point me towards a paper that shows otherwise i'd be very interested to read it.

 

[liamstrain]

Quote:

Me, if I read another one of those pseudoscience explanations as to why the metallurgy of my power cable makes a world of difference, I'm gonna puke..I swear it..
 

 
This we certainly agree on. 

 

[bigshot]

Wire *is* wire. Fix the things that count.

Imagine if you hired a cleaning lady to clean your house and she started by taking a toothbrush and scrubbing the back corners of your closet. Wouldn't you want to tell her to mop the floors and clean the bathrooms instead?

 

[bigshot]

there's no audible difference if noise introduced by your equipment is -80dB vs. -90dB compared to your signal, but it is a very real difference and if two options are otherwise identical i'm certainly opting for -90dB.

How much more are you willing to pay for that theoretical peace of mind? Some people pay tens of thousands of dollars for incremental inaudible improvements.

I'm not in this to satisfy my OCD or for the sheer joy of buying little black boxes with tiny little lights and nice big shiny dials. I'm in it for the music. I want to spend money on things I can hear. Because honestly, if my audio issues are dealt with, I can get on to the real purpose... appreciating music.

 

[Magick Man]

Audibility is the only thing that matters. The rest is all hot air.

This. I've seen many papers detailing electrical differences between various cables and interconnects, but no one has been able to determine if there is an audible difference. As you said before, if there is it's likely so very small that it makes no difference.

 

[jnjn]

Quote:

it's funny (to me) that i basically agree with both bigshot and jnjn here.  audibility *is* the only thing that matters, but electronics should also be designed to keep unwanted elements as far from audibility as possible.  there's no audible difference if noise introduced by your equipment is -80dB vs. -90dB compared to your signal, but it is a very real difference and if two options are otherwise identical i'm certainly opting for -90dB.
 
cables that are designed and constructed well *should not* affect the sound that comes out the transducer at the end.  i haven't seen any measurements which show that they do to a level at which the difference is noticeable.  if they change a frequency response by .001dB i don't really care, but .0001dB would certainly be better.  if anybody can point me towards a paper that shows otherwise i'd be very interested to read it.

Welcome to my world.  Do you hear the voices also??  I usually ignore them.

 
A cable tested on the bench using normal test equipment will show absolutely nothing significantly different from any other cable on the same bench.  Other than really crappy cables of course...
 
The problem is when the cable is put in the field.  That's when parameters which should not make a difference do.  Things like geometry of construction, contact resistance, characteristic impedance (yah, line cords as well).
 
It's a rediculous state of affairs.  Line cords and interconnects are not supposed to change the sound.  Period...
 
jnjn
 
.

 

[scud80]

not a lot, which is why i said if the options are otherwise identical.  that means in cost as well, though i suppose the amount i'd pay for such a difference is more than zero.
Quote:

How much more are you willing to pay for that theoretical peace of mind? Some people pay tens of thousands of dollars for incremental inaudible improvements.
I'm not in this to satisfy my OCD or for the sheer joy of buying little black boxes with tiny little lights and nice big shiny dials. I'm in it for the music. I want to spend money on things I can hear. Because honestly, if my audio issues are dealt with, I can get on to the real purpose... appreciating music.

 

[bigshot]

People spend vast amounts of time in this forum debating and discussing the technical minutiae of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Folks vomit out cut and paste from scientific studies and doctoral thesises, and none of it means a tinker's damn.

The things that *really* matter... speaker design, equalization and room treatment seldom get discussed, and when they do, it's either with vomiting out scientific cut and paste, or in general vagueries that don't help anyone.

I read person after person saying, "room treatment is important" (myself included) but I have yet to see anyone post that has a general grasp of the subject (myself included again). People love to put on white coats and goggles and say, "Trust me, I'm a doctor!" but they don't seem to be able to sit down and discuss things that really matter with clarity and directness.

I don't have a lot of patience with people who make things unduely complicated. Just now, I saw a thread that asked if CDs were lossless or were they made from MP3s. The answer is simple. "Yes! CDs are lossless." But instead the answer was "I don't know. They're normally downsamples from 24 bit..." and links to articles on hot mastering,

Sometimes I think people are deliberately trying to confuse things.

"If I buy fancy cables, will my headphones sound better?"
"What about expensive power cords?"
"Do amps and CD players have an individual sound signature?"
"Do vinyl records sound better than CDs?"
"Does lossless sound better than high bitrate MP3s?"
"Do standalone DACs sound better than the ones built into in iPods and CD players?"
"Do I need to mod my equipment to replace op amps?"

Now, I'm sure a legion of boy geniuses could spend days debating those seven questions, but if your intent is to listen to great sounding music, I can cut to the chase with two letters.

no

 

[jnjn]

Quote:

How much more are you willing to pay for that theoretical peace of mind? Some people pay tens of thousands of dollars for incremental inaudible improvements.
I'm not in this to satisfy my OCD or for the sheer joy of buying little black boxes with tiny little lights and nice big shiny dials. I'm in it for the music. I want to spend money on things I can hear. Because honestly, if my audio issues are dealt with, I can get on to the real purpose... appreciating music.

Zero.
Quote:

This. I've seen many papers detailing electrical differences between various cables and interconnects, but no one has been able to determine if there is an audible difference. As you said before, if there is it's likely so very small that it makes no difference.

As I told scud.  There is no difference in the cables that can be measured on the bench.  It's the darn equipment in the field that is sensitive to the various cables.
 
jnjn

 

[Tilpo]

As I told scud.  There is no difference in the cables that can be measured on the bench.  It's the darn equipment in the field that is sensitive to the various cables.

jnjn

It's a fact that differences under ideal circumstances (that is, on the bench) tend to be smaller than under actual application. But if absolutely no difference, or only very teeny tiny ones are measured, why would be expect there to suddenly be a huge difference in the real world?

I say get a speaker setup and place microphone at the normal listening position. Secure it in such a way that it absolutely cannot move the slightest (for control).
In theory the microphone + ADC should be more precise than the human ear, and I think this is a reasonable assumption to make.

Then get a couple different interconnects and do detailed measurements with each. Then switch back to the first one and run the measurement procedure a second time to get some idea of the accuracy of the measurement.
Compare results, and see how big the differences are.

This would give measurements of the cable's real life performance. If differences detected are well below audible thresholds, then I it has been proven that under real-life circumstances cables do not make a difference.

 

[nick_charles]

Quote:

I believe it is because I am an equal opportunity skeptic.  Despite the nature of the claim presented, I believe it important to question the validity of it.  To me, it is even more important to question technical claims, as that is where I come from.
It's trivial to provide the electrical tests, I've done that over the years.  It is more difficult explaining those tests and why they are important.
 
For audibility, that is far more difficult.  Nature of the beast is one thing.  Human adaptation to localization cues is not clearly defined with respect to timeframe, integrated exposure, or even the time constant for the adaptation.  Greisinger has done some good work, some others are doing some really interesting work on time dependency of localization vs sweep speed through the listener's field..  But given the methodology of level only pan pot image location, I see many hurdles which are not going to be easy to solve.
 
For interconnects, the most important thing we need to do is understand why the equipment is sensitive to them, and fix the equipment...now that's something to take a bite of.
 
cheers, jnjn

I fear you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. The basic question being addressed is "is cable X in a given circuit audibly different from cable Y in an otherwise identical circuit" - the precise nature of how the cables differ in topoplogy is not important to the listener, if there is something really amiss in the deisgn of either cable it may or may not show up in listener testing but the listener and the experimenter do not care as that is not the question they are asking. When you get to the point where you can reliably show audible differences then you can worry about why. The core of the experiment is to change one variable only, in the case the cable, and see what difference it makes, the precise cable interactions with both ends can be disregarded (black box) for now. To worry excessively about other variables means you will never be able to do any experiment as there is always potentially something different between two tests such as the time of day, temperature, humidity, listener state of attention/relaxation, primacy/recency, test # and so on. You get round these objections as best you can by repetition, big numbers and variations, such as Cable X and Y in Circuit A,B,C......
 
The real problems arise with humans , humans are relatively crap at distinguishing small differences in signals and the human short term audio memory is very short compared to visual memory. Echoic memory is a few 100 ms and short term store is a few seconds, the longer term auditory storage (which allows us to recognize our mothers voice on the phone or Von Karajan vs Solti) does not have the same characteristics, though it is capable of storing quite fine discriminations for voices , a useful evolutionary thing. Consequently a 5 minute gap for a cable swap is going to hide all but the grossest of differences.
 
You make an issue of the problems of creating transparent i.e non intefering ABX boxes. I am a bit skeptical that they would make that much difference to the final audio signal. I did a number of crude experiments where I lashed together two 3' cables with $1.50 connectors or used a switch box to connect two 3' cables or a single 6' cable (same grade/manufacturer/model)  or one of the 3' cables alone and recorded samples using the analog output of a my CD player into a recording device. I was unable to find any combination that was markedly different from any other in FR terms. I had the same results measuring a number of very different 3' cables but that is another story. Granted my experiments were very crude but if the differences were so small that they were occluded by a 16 bit A/D process I am inclined to think that someone can probably engineer an ABX box that is largely non-intrusive in terms of audio parameters(volume,frequency etc) 

 

[jnjn]

Quote:

It's a fact that differences under ideal circumstances (that is, on the bench) tend to be smaller than under actual application. But if absolutely no difference, or only very teeny tiny ones are measured, why would be expect there to suddenly be a huge difference in the real world?.

Consider edit: (four) shielded cables, one with a shield resistance of 5 milliohms, another with a shield resistance of 50 milliohms, the third with 500 millohms, the fourth 5 ohms. Assume they've all been optimized for very low capacitance such that the cable impedance is 300 ohms.  Identical core wire and dielectric.
 
Using class two equipment, at what frequency will 90% of the return current travel through the same cable as the signal being fed to the amp.  Remember, the break frequency for ground return  will vary based on the shield loop resistance in comparison to the characteristic impedance of the cable.  And, how effective the cable is as a shield is ABSOLUTELY dependent on ALL the signal current returning via the shield of the source current.
 
It will also depend on how the amplifier deals with it's star ground topology.  Star grounding techniques are not directly applicable to low impedance circuits, it's a vacuum tube technology that's been stolen for use..
 
For the first three, I don't think even I could find any real difference, the test is not an easy one.  I might be able to find the hf loss of the distributed shield resistance on the last one, but I'm not a gambling man..
 
The problem gets significantly worse when the equipment has a 3 pin IEC power cord, because for the higher resistance shield, most of the return current will be via the darn duplex outlet.  And that is not something that can be measured on the bench for all the various types of equipment out there.
 
jnjn

 

[jnjn]

Quote:

I fear you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. The basic question being addressed is "is cable X in a given circuit audibly different from cable Y in an otherwise identical circuit" - the precise nature of how the cables differ in topoplogy is not important to the listener, if there is something really amiss in the deisgn of either cable it may or may not show up in listener testing but the listener and the experimenter do not care as that is not the question they are asking. When you get to the point where you can reliably show audible differences then you can worry about why. The core of the experiment is to change one variable only, in the case the cable, and see what difference it makes, the precise cable interactions with both ends can be disregarded (black box) for now. To worry excessively about other variables means you will never be able to do any experiment as there is always potentially something different between two tests such as the time of day, temperature, humidity, listener state of attention/relaxation, primacy/recency, test # and so on. You get round these objections as best you can by repetition, big numbers and variations, such as Cable X and Y in Circuit A,B,C......
 
The real problems arise with humans , humans are relatively crap at distinguishing small differences in signals and the human short term audio memory is very short compared to visual memory. Echoic memory is a few 100 ms and short term store is a few seconds, the longer term auditory storage (which allows us to recognize our mothers voice on the phone or Von Karajan vs Solti) does not have the same characteristics, though it is capable of storing quite fine discriminations for voices , a useful evolutionary thing. Consequently a 5 minute gap for a cable swap is going to hide all but the grossest of differences.
 
You make an issue of the problems of creating transparent i.e non intefering ABX boxes. I am a bit skeptical that they would make that much difference to the final audio signal. I did a number of crude experiments where I lashed together two 3' cables with $1.50 connectors or used a switch box to connect two 3' cables or a single 6' cable (same grade/manufacturer/model)  or one of the 3' cables alone and recorded samples using the analog output of a my CD player into a recording device. I was unable to find any combination that was markedly different from any other in FR terms. I had the same results measuring a number of very different 3' cables but that is another story. Granted my experiments were very crude but if the differences were so small that they were occluded by a 16 bit A/D process I am inclined to think that someone can probably engineer an ABX box that is largely non-intrusive in terms of audio parameters(volume,frequency etc) 

Actually, I'm guilty of trying to keep it too simple.
 
The mechanism described is totally keboshed with an ABX box.  Where do the shield/return current go once an ABX box is included?
 
Don't forget.  I am not saying that all interconnects and line cords sound different.  I'm saying the equipment being connected is responsible for the sensitivities to cable, and that the cables may alter sound as a result.
 
A negative result as you report does not mean it doesn't happen, unfortunately.  Just that it didn't.
 
The real crux of my argument is simple..  Cables can make a difference, but only because the equipment designers did not take into account the concept of current control.   EMC engineering, consistent with the Tom Van Doren link I provided.
 
ps...I am not Tom Van Doren.
 
cheers, jnjn

 

[bigshot]

You make an issue of the problems of creating transparent i.e non intefering ABX boxes.

I have yet to see a stereo system that doesn't include a switching preamp.