[KeithEmo]

Since this is a popular topic.... I'll add a bit to it....

Standard cables have a few well understood electrical characteristics - resistance, inductance, and capacitance.
There are also a few more complex things:
- like how well they are shielded (which varies by frequency)
- and dielectric non-linearities (which tend to be blown way out of proportion by audiophiles as a factor - but do really exist)
- (and we won't get into the specifically odd characteristics of some "specialty cables")

However, cables are one area where the associated equipment you use is a major factor.
On thing that tends to vary considerably between cables is capacitance... some cables have much lower capacitance than others... (a 10x difference would be COMMON).
HOWEVER, in general, a typical modern solid state preamp is designed to be able to drive a relatively low impedance load.
Also, even though cables may vary considerably between wire types, all of them have "pretty low capacitance" by modern standards.
Because of that, it is unlikely that there will be an audible difference between most interconnects when tested with a modern solid state preamp.

HOWEVER, most older tube equipment, and a lot of modern tube equipment, has a rather high output impedance (it is NOT designed to drive a low impedance load).
So, if you connect various interconnects to a vintage tube preamp, there's a very good chance there will be audible - and measurable - differences.
(We're talking about a roll-off of several dB at 20 kHz with some particular combinations.... which is quite easily audible.)
This will be true of most but not all vintage tube preamps, some but not all modern tube preamps, and some very few other modern preamps (mostly passive ones).

So, in this case, we can say that "it's unlikely that there will be a significant difference with different interconnects and most modern equipment".
However, we also can't rule out the possibility that there will be a difference with certain combinations.
(And, yes, if you understand circuit design, and have the right information, you can predict which ones will and will not act in which way.)

In your first sentence you point out an issue with the discussion topics being taken to extremes, and then your last paragraph about cables seems to pull in some potentially pathological extremes to justify your position. I mean, maybe in some extreme situation would 2 cables change the sound enough to be audible while still measuring similarly.

 

[KeithEmo]

I disagree with your dismissal of "the what if people".

On the one hand, audiophiles are overly prone to believe totally outlandish things, and to believe them very fervently. On the other hand, science only advances when someone poses a theory, which in turn is tested and found to be true - or when their initial theory is found to be false, but that knowledge then leads to a new theory.

I'm imagining some scientist in 1945 joking about Russel's teapot.... and about how we could never tell whether there was a two-foot metal sphere orbiting the Earth either.... but, a mere ten years later, after Sputnik I was launched, there really WAS a two-foot metal beach ball orbiting the Earth, and, not entirely by chance, our technology had also advanced far enough to be able to see it. (And now there's so much junk in orbit you need a map to avoid it.)

I absolutely agree that we should do our best to evaluate claims based on our current levels of knowledge. However, I'm not at all willing to accept the degree of dogmatism I see from may people on this forum. (For example, I keep seeing certain studies being cited as "proof" that this or that is inaudible, when the flaws and limitations of those studies are what I would consider to be glaringly obvious, and render them clearly unworthy of being considered to prove the general case.)

There's a distinct difference between rejecting claims of fact and of rejecting theories and suppositions. There is a middle-ground, where we DO NOT accept such claims as facts, yet still consider the possibility that they might have some basis in fact. And, like it or not, investigating the silly claims that turn out not to be true is the price we pay for being sure not to miss the ones that DO turn out to be true that we find mixed in with them.

I DO seem to recall the title of this thread being "Audiophile Claims and Myths" and not "audiophile science that has been conclusively proven by at least 42 peer-reviewed studies".

I don't see the issue. acknowledging how it can be difficult to get conclusive evidence and reliable knowledge from controlled tests gives even more reasons to systematically reject uncontrolled tests and all ideas born from them. in short, reject typical audiophile wisdom as it comes almost entirely from casual listening which, while very enjoyable, is also a terrible audibility test.
there is no reason to bother with what doesn't come supported by evidence. I could, but I don't have to. and that includes all the funny ideas about stuff we can hear but can't measure, stuff we can hear but blind tests are too flawed to show, and of course Russel's teapot.
an open mind without clear rules and limits is no different from a crazy person. I'd rather focus on what I know to be significant, and on learning more about what has been proved, instead of spending time on maybes. more so when the maybe is born from malpractice and logical fallacy as is so often the case with audiophile "open minded" theories.

controlled testing can provide evidence, not testing never will. it's as simple as that. all the "what if?" people, coming without control experiment, we don't need them. better, we shouldn't have to suffer them and their claims. that's what I think.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

I also wanted to chime in about tube amps. I personally don't own or have access to any (I'm allergic), but isn't the whole point of putting a tube in the signal path (other than to look cool) to add an audible difference? Like tubes tend to add harmonic distortion - which is why they're so popular in both real and simulated form in music production.

I bet (I would not bet much) I could hear the difference between a cheap (hence probably full of cut corners) tube amp and a solidly designed solid-state amp with otherwise similar specs on the package. Mostly because I imagine the tube amp would be specifically designed to add quite a bit of distortion and color.

I guess that doesn't really satisfy the real quest, which is nearly tautological - properly designed amps don't color the sound, so you can't find two properly designed amps that sound different. But I agree with amrim on this, there are undoubtedly plenty of amps out there that don't fit the "properly designed" criterion.

For example the headphone amp in my (brand redacted) laptop has some insane distortion in the sub-bass region, it's impossible to ignore, let alone hard to hear.

 

[KeithEmo]

I absolutely agree with you.... but I'm also going to take this opportunity to build on something I mentioned in another post.
IN MANY TECHNICAL QUESTIONS CONTEXT IS CRITICAL.

I tell people every day that, with most modern equipment, and certainly with our Emotiva gear, all cables sound pretty much the same.
(And, if tiny differences exist and can be measured, they will almost certainly be both random and insignificant.)

HOWEVER, if they have a vintage tube preamp, or a modern tube preamp without an output buffer, or a passive preamp, then the opposite is true.
All of those products tend to have a high output impedance compared to most modern "active" solid state preamps...
And, because of this, they WILL often interact with the amount of capacitance in a typical cable to produce an alteration in frequency response of up to several dB.
And, yes, it will be both audible and easily measured.

I can comfortably rule it out. Then again, I don't buy lottery tickets either, and I'm sure my chances of winning are significantly more likely than some misunderstood properties causing 2 otherwise identical cables to sound different from one another in any meaningful way that mattered with regards to their intended purpose.

 

[sonitus mirus]

I absolutely agree with you.... but I'm also going to take this opportunity to build on something I mentioned in another post.
IN MANY TECHNICAL QUESTIONS CONTEXT IS CRITICAL.

I tell people every day that, with most modern equipment, and certainly with our Emotiva gear, all cables sound pretty much the same.
(And, if tiny differences exist and can be measured, they will almost certainly be both random and insignificant.)

HOWEVER, if they have a vintage tube preamp, or a modern tube preamp without an output buffer, or a passive preamp, then the opposite is true.
All of those products tend to have a high output impedance compared to most modern "active" solid state preamps...
And, because of this, they WILL often interact with the amount of capacitance in a typical cable to produce an alteration in frequency response of up to several dB.
And, yes, it will be both audible and easily measured.

I get it, but I thought this was already covered a few posts earlier when I made this statement:

Though, I put very little credence on cables, DACs, and amps creating any meaningful audible difference in normal situations where the equipment is used appropriately and it adheres to generally acceptable parameters with regards to impedance matching and power requirements.

When I talk about "appropriate usage", I am referring to technical parameters that you are discussing. These situations are what I consider to be extreme, in the context that I was intending.

Hope this clears up my position a bit.

 

[gregorio]

You missed my points, and I think you’ll continue to miss them, so I won’t continue to repeat them.

You've repeated your points probably a dozen times or more. Each time you get an answer you simply ignore it and repeat your point. What is that going to achieve? If you think your points have been missed then change how you are explaining them, don't just keep repeating the same thing over and over until you get an answer that makes you look like a fool if you try to refute it and then say "you missed my point". That just indicates you realise you've backed yourself into a logical corner and need to escape by either simply leaving the discussion or moving the goal posts!!

G

EDIT: "I'm amazed that people believe that a finite set of standard measurements is guaranteed to tell you everything about a physical system that could ever possibly be known about it." And I'm amazed you don't even know the fundamental principles of digital audio and yet are so willing to argue yourself into the ground about it with those who do!

 

[colonelkernel8]

I'm amazed that people believe that a finite set of standard measurements is guaranteed to tell you everything about a physical system that could ever possibly be known about it. That's incredibly naïve.

Maybe this forum should be called Sound Ideology instead of Sound Science.

No one is making that claim. But there exists no element of signal transmission through a cable at audible frequencies that cannot be measured. We can never measure anything perfectly, but we can measure this signal far, far beyond what could be ever considered audible.

 

[Phronesis]

You've repeated your points probably a dozen times or more. Each time you get an answer you simply ignore it and repeat your point. What is that going to achieve? If you think your points have been missed then change how you are explaining them, don't just keep repeating the same thing over and over until you get an answer that makes you look like a fool if you try to refute it and then say "you missed my point". That just indicates you realise you've backed yourself into a logical corner and need to escape by either simply leaving the discussion or moving the goal posts!!

G

Spoken like someone who believes they have all the answers and is interested in debating and 'winning', rather than in discussing in good faith with an open mind and possibly learning something. I don't waste time on such debates.

Just because you missed my points, that doesn't mean everyone else did, and that's good enough for me.

 

[Phronesis]

No one is making that claim. But there exists no element of signal transmission through a cable at audible frequencies that cannot be measured. We can never measure anything perfectly, but we can measure this signal far, far beyond what could be ever considered audible.

I believe that you're sincere in your view rather than simply trying to debate, but I think you're still missing the point. There's no disagreement that what's physical can be measured, the issue is that the particular measurements which are actually performed may not detect something which was physically there. This has already been stated many times (not just by me), so forgive me if I discontinue repeating it.

 

[KeithEmo]

You've picked out the single biggest problem... there AREN'T enough people doing enough WELL DESIGNED AND PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED TESTS.

The reason is pretty obvious.... money.

Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars performing clinical trials.... but they stand to make a lot of money on the results.
(And they also have both legal and practical issues with selling drugs that they CAN'T prove actually work).

The exact opposite is true of the audio industry.
Your local audio club doesn't have the funds to perform a large-scale test with rigorous protocols in place.... and neither do you or I.

As it sits now, a significant number of people believe that different brands and models of amplifiers sound quite different.
And, all claims to the contrary aside, a lot of amplifiers are in fact specifically designed to sound different to appeal to specific audiences.
(This is particular true of tube amplifiers. After all, tube amps are more expensive and harder to build than solid state ones, so why would anyone buy one if it didn't sound different?)

Now... thinking logically... what possible incentive would an amplifier manufacturer have to pay millions of dollars to fund a study?
- if it showed that their amplifiers were clearly better than lower cost alternatives it would simply confirm what their customers already believe to be true.
- if it FAILED to show that their amplifiers were better, it would hurt their business
- and, if it showed that their amplifiers were in fact better, but that the difference was small, it would STILL hurt their business
- (and the people who are convinced that no such differences exist either wouldn't read the study, or would claim that "it was fixed" anyway)

Likewise, most of the few remaining audio magazines make their money on product reviews and articles debating the issue.... and mostly on advertising.
For them, funding a proper test would be prohibitively expensive and also unlikely to deliver any benefit.
While it's true that their readers would become more informed, it would also actually reduce the amount of discussion on the subject, and reduce the options for articles about it.
It would also offend many of the advertisers who support them (most of whom buy ads in their magazine to sell expensive audio products).

The situation is even more clear when it comes to things like cables....
- A company like Audioquest has a lot of incentive to pay for advertising to convince you that their $500 cable will make your system sound better.
- Yet they have little incentive to fund a study that might prove the opposite (or even that the difference is real but insignificant)
- And a company like Amazon, who sells a $9 cable, has little incentive to spend a lot of money proving that their cable is equal to the $500 one
(Amazon probably makes a few bucks on each of their cables; and very few of their customers would even consider a $500 cable; so they'd have to sell an awful lot more $9 cables to justify the cost of a study.)

The test is provided to counter the assertion that no such results have ever appeared in controlled testing.

As to statistics, this test's authors are the ones that popularized ABX testing. Here is David's profile: http://www.aes.org/aes/davidcarlstrom

The other author is Arny whom I have known for years and asked him about the test. He will tell you for sure there were audible problems with one amp.

So I would not bet against this one being an accidental success seeing how the total pool of such tests is so small to begin with. There are NOT "enough people doing enough tests." Nothing close.

 

[bigshot]

I'm amazed that people believe that a finite set of standard measurements is guaranteed to tell you everything about a physical system that could ever possibly be known about it. That's incredibly naïve.

You take a signal going into one end of a system and compare it to the signal coming out of the other end and look for differences.

It's good to try to raise your own level of knowledge up to the accumulated knowledge of science. It's not a good idea to try to drag science down to your level of ignorance. Personally, I find all the "science doesn't know everything" blather to be tiresome. If science doesn't know what you want to know about, go out and start doing some tests and make some measurements and get the ball rolling yourself. Don't just point at a gap in knowledge and say "SEE! I TOLD YOU!" Especially if the gap in knowledge is your own!

 

[colonelkernel8]

I believe that you're sincere in your view rather than simply trying to debate, but I think you're still missing the point. There's no disagreement that what's physical can be measured, the issue is that the particular measurements which are actually performed may not detect something which was physically there. This has already been stated many times (not just by me), so forgive me if I discontinue repeating it.

I'll be more direct then. There is nothing being missed. A transducer connected to an amplifier can only be manipulated by current flowing through the voice coil (assuming a dynamic driver, but the same notion applied to effectively every other transducer mechanism). There is no other missing element to this that amounts to anything. This current can be, as I stated, measured virtually perfectly, given the frequency constraints I stated.

Since I doubt this will satisfy you, I want you to name one phenomena that is transmitted through a wire that can in any way affect sound but cannot be measured or observed by an oscilloscope.

 

[bigshot]

I agree with amrim on this, there are undoubtedly plenty of amps out there that don't fit the "properly designed" criterion.

If you run across any that are improperly designed to the point of sounding different to human ears, please let me know. I'm making a list of them and I don't have any for my list yet. Amirm gave me one a long time ago, but the poor design didn't extend anywhere near audibility when using the amp for its intended purpose (listening to music in the home).

---

Colonel, I'm seeing an interesting thing in the comments here. It seems that people will vigorously defend things that *seem* true to them, even if they have no evidence or even personal anecdotal experience to back up their belief. "There must be amps that sound different out there, so I believe there are." "There must be sounds that science can't measure, so I believe there are." It's a slip in logic. Generally one would make an observation and then make a theory based on that, but in these cases, they're skipping over the first step and jumping straight to the theory. Since there is no evidence that the theory is based on, there's no way to disprove it other than to check every amp in the world or just take his word that there must be some sound that can't be measured. You can't prove the negative (who can test every amp in the world?) and they can't prove the positive with evidence, so it goes in circles. Interesting aspect of human nature here.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Right, it can't be emphasized enough that if you're talking recorded sound, the performance of equipment relative to the signal can be characterized exhaustively, because the signal itself is *created* using similar equipment. To put it another way - if measurement equipment misses some potentially audible phenomenon - so does the recording equipment. They're basically two names for the same thing. So if it's audible but not measurable, it's also not record-able. Oh well.

There's a lot of uncertainty about the exact amount of water in the solar system, there is some uncertainty about the exact amount of water on earth, but there is no uncertainty about how much water is in your glass, because you put it there. It's like that.

If you run across any that are improperly designed to the point of sounding different to human ears, please let me know. I'm making a list of them and I don't have any for my list yet. Amirm gave me one a long time ago, but the poor design didn't extend anywhere near audibility when using the amp for its intended purpose (listening to music in the home).

Not that it counts as "an amp" but I'm sure you could hear what's wrong with the headphone output on my laptop. It's pretty shockingly bad. Run a 50hz sine through it and see if you can keep your lunch down. I can PM you the model if you want.

And I still agree that tube amps *ought* to sound markedly different, like Keithemo said, otherwise what's the point? Maybe they don't, but that would be pretty disappointing.

Also, I just remembered, I had an old Radio Shack amp that was rated for about 50 watts or something. It sounded like hell. I am not sure if it was even meant for normal listening. But it clearly exhibited a lot ( A LOT) more distortion than the other amp I used for the application. Quite possibly not a 'properly designed' amp, and definitely not from this century. Oh well.

 

[skwoodwiva]

I'm amazed that people believe that a finite set of standard measurements is guaranteed to tell you everything about a physical system that could ever possibly be known about it. That's incredibly naïve.

Maybe this forum should be called Sound Ideology instead of Sound Science.

Bingo.
I am back. ...