[The Monkey]

An alliance among cable companies, huh? No competition concerns there.

 

[linuxworks]

make the tests open so we can verify they DO real things.

somehow, I doubt that the methods in the tests will be really revealed.

a lot of magazines tried to measure jitter, too, btw; and it seems many got it wrong.

just having a test means nothing; the test has to actually WORK. and be provable by those in the field.

the high end industry is not about transparency (oddly enough!). I would not expect real data from this, to be honest. I'd expect marketing spin to continue as usual.

 

[Uncle Erik]

Quote:

Originally Posted by upstateguy /img/forum/go_quote.gif I hate crow!!!! I'm not sure what you mean about signal processing equipment not being used 10 or 20 years ago??? <shrug> USG

That such equipment has existed for decades yet has never been applied to cable "research" before.

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Koyaan I. Sqatsi /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm afraid that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has absolutely nothing to do with listening to reproduced music. There is no observation of electrons going on when we are listening to reproduced music. k

Hey, Sqatsi, nice hair dude!

USG

 

[JaZZ]

Fascinating! I'm interested in the development of this project.

Let's not forget that it's not realized by a research institute, but by commercial companies, so don't expect full transparency! That doesn't necessarily mean the result can't be taken seriously, but it serves a purpose, and some procedures may be subject to privacy, at least until they're protected by patent.
.

 

[Cheap Wire]

Hasn't this been beat to death. This is another way to justify their product. I would suspect the measurements to be those that would prove these companies wires to be the best.

 

[Sherwood]

^^
Neither company makes speakers.


Also, Nordost exhibits at RMAF every year, and conducts an interesting demo. They wire up an entire system with their top-of-the-line cables (currently Odin, IIRC) and connect the CDP to the preamp with a stock cable. They then play a 1 minute-or-so sample of music, and swap the cable with the next higher in their line. They work their way through the entire line this way, one cable at a time, repeating the same selection.

It's not a blind test, in any sense, and listeners are coached for what they should hear ahead of time, but it's ballsy nonetheless.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sherwood /img/forum/go_quote.gif Also, Nordost exhibits at RMAF every year, and conducts an interesting demo. They wire up an entire system with their top-of-the-line cables (currently Odin, IIRC) and connect the CDP to the preamp with a stock cable. They then play a 1 minute-or-so sample of music, and swap the cable with the next higher in their line. They work their way through the entire line this way, one cable at a time, repeating the same selection.

Wasn't there a loudspeaker manufacturer some years ago who demoed their speakers at one of the shows making it seem as if they were being powered but some very expensive, high end amps, only to later reveal they were just using some relatively inexpensive receiver?

k

 

[Sherwood]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Koyaan I. Sqatsi /img/forum/go_quote.gif Wasn't there a loudspeaker manufacturer some years ago who demoed their speakers at one of the shows making it seem as if they were being powered but some very expensive, high end amps, only to later reveal they were just using some relatively inexpensive receiver? k

I remember hearing about that, but I couldn't name the company. Fantastic idea, though -- nowhere in Colorado is ever so stuck up as the RMAF hotel three days a year. It blew some wind up some skirts, to say the least.

On an unrelated note, Ray Kimber also used to give a demo at RMAF that was superior to everything else -- four HUGE soundlab E-stat panels driven by massive Pass amps and EMM gear playing Kimber's "IsoMike" recordings. Kimber sold the Soundlabs, much to my dismay, but that demo was something else.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sherwood /img/forum/go_quote.gif I remember hearing about that, but I couldn't name the company. Fantastic idea, though -- nowhere in Colorado is ever so stuck up as the RMAF hotel three days a year. It blew some wind up some skirts, to say the least.

Heheh. I can imagine.

Quote:

On an unrelated note, Ray Kimber also used to give a demo at RMAF that was superior to everything else -- four HUGE soundlab E-stat panels driven by massive Pass amps and EMM gear playing Kimber's "IsoMike" recordings. Kimber sold the Soundlabs, much to my dismay, but that demo was something else.

Yeah, I remember that.

I think he was trying to outdo Vladimir Lamm who showed those big-ass Klangfilms (shown here with Stereophile's Art Dudley) the year before I believe.

k

 

[fzman]

Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, argued that for a theory to have merit, it must, among other things, have falsifiability conditions. It seems like many people subscribe to a theory something like:

if it has the right kind of connectors, has the right number of conductors, and those conductors are insulated from each other, then it's as good a cable as any other that satisfies the same criteria.****

when confronted by anything that would actually falsify that claim, they simply rule it out, by any means necessary, as if there are no criteria or conditions under which, even in principle, their theory could be shown to be false--

while this may seem like a straw man, the "wire is wire" view does not seem far off from my characterization of it. None of this speakers to pricing issues or profit, just whether there are differences, and whether the differences matter in terms of performance.

****I think it was Peter Walker from Quad, who quipped that the most important criterion for a speaker cable to satisfy was that it was long enough to reach from the amplifier to the speaker(s)!

 

[Happy Camper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dane /img/forum/go_quote.gif Exactly. There are no arguments on this forum about whether differences between cables exits, of course they do. What is being debated however is whether audible differences exists - somehow I suspect that these efforts will not shed any light on this central question.

"Audible" needs better definition. Where exactly in the physics of sound and hearing can we look for this definition? Is it in the usual LRC/magnitude/timing domains? The professionals that can discern a difference has to help with this. Us folks that just listen to music don't have the language to explain what we hear in a way that can be subjected to review.

 

[TheAttorney]

As an update to the OP, the two cable companies were planning to demo this at the UK hifi show (this weekend) and RMAF next month. I’ve since read somewhere that, the for the UK show at least, this is being downgraded to a presentation only. If so, that would be less interesting for me – just as well I can’t attend the show anyway.

I saw a VertexAQ ad in a recent hifi magazine. It showed a before/after graph “independently” produced by Acuity. Acuity created a synthetic ‘ting’, much like the sound of a finger bell, with decreasing level tones at 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 Khz. This resulted in a graph with a series of sharp peaks, with “noise skirts” in between and around. The Before graph was the output of a CD player on the test bench with standard leads. The After graph was with the CDP on a Vertex equipment platform, with their mains cable and interconnect cable.

The After graph had -2.5db less noise before the group of peaks, -5.0db less noise after the group, a general noise reduction in between the peaks, and the peaks themselves were 0.4db higher. The advert equated this noise reduction to the usual sound improvements claimed by believers.

There was no way a couple of tiny graphs and a few words in an advert were ever going to give any meaningful results and, for me, it just raised many more questions than answers. Such as which of the 3 components made which difference? But it is an indication of where they are heading with this programme.

 

[markw51]

Every since engineers said that when the CD player was first introduced it was "perfect sound forever" and could not be improved upon, I knew that measurements cannot account for every nuance of human hearing, which is the same thing an ENT doctor told me recently.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by markw51 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Every since engineers said that when the CD player was first introduced it was "perfect sound forever" and could not be improved upon...

Stop confusing engineering with the marketing department.

k