[device manager]

vmajor, are you using the AD1852 or CS4398 module?

 

[Ori]

vmajor: I understand your thoughts regarding power amps, and they may be that different, but identifying them is a different issue... Anyway, pointwell taken. I still think that a system with good resolution would show major differences between cables. I can tell you of one Dartzeel amp I heard this week...
Regarding the Zhaolu as a preamp, I still have some reservations. I do hope you did the basic mods to the DAC.

 

[vmajor]

device manager: I am using the AD1852 module + blackgate upgrade - the Elna caps on the underside. I have not bridged the DC blocking caps yet. I am still uncertain of the safety of doing that. My next upgrade will be putting in another OPA2107 AP to make it 3 x OPA2107 AP. Currently it is 2 x OPA2107 AP + 1 x DY2000.

Ori: I agree. Unless the amp is terrible and driven into distortion or instabillity very easily, or the A/B is so blatant as in my NAD example due to clear electrical demands, identifying the amp would be difficult. Nevertheless, I never managed to identify (or for that matter, hear) the interconnect and I built and tested a fair few of them with varying geometries, materials, RLC parameters, lengths (30cm to 2m) etc.

And yes I still build cables, both speaker cables and interconnects - for fun and visual effect now.

Cheers,

Victor

 

[Audioexcels]

Every speaker has a relationship to how much power it can handle. For example, a low efficient speaker like the Maggies or the Acoustats "may" be able to take 5000 watts, but they are still never going to get as loud as a dynamic speaker and somewhere in that power that they are sucking up, they must only be using a clean small number of watts since their inefficiency will not allow them to play any louder than a given number of true/pure volts of power.

With respect to cabling, I think there "can be" some truth in it based on the fact that it has to do with the signal of the system. Since I have never had thousand dollar cables to play around with, my guess is that they have an equivalent "marking" on the system as an amplifier does. In other words, just like an amp will equalize or de-equalize a system's response (unless an amp is giving a pure signal that is not degraded or equalized in any manner, it is always acting to equalize a system. This is why people think they sound different=because their speakers to room interaction may be needing this amp or that amp to equalize the speaker/room to sound better). With respect to cabling, I would think a good cable can allow the transfer of signal to go through better, hence, providing a more neutral signal rather than one that has even further equalization/interference going on.

I won't know the answer to cabling since I likely will never have the money to afford it.

 

[vmajor]

Audioexcels: How will a length of copper/silver wire apply equalisation to the signal and yet not be measurable in any way using any equipment known to mankind (besides our ears where it becomes tricky, but far from objective).

I appreciate your post of course (this is a free open forum! and I am not picking on you.... I just feel like ranting), but its the pseudoscience that drives my two pet hates (again my opinion in an open forum - not merely trolling : super high end HiFi and alternative medicine (not traditional medicine that through centuries of trial and error on human subjects sometimes delivers an effective treatment, but the modern pseudo scientific variant).

Both esoteric HiFi and alternative medicine put forward a hypothesis and a positive result which is then explained and given credibility by use of supposedly scientific arguments. Unfortunately the mere use of these scientific arguments is enough for the vast amount of the population to satisfy their own needs for facts and information given their innate desire for progress, improvement, and increase in relative quality of life.

The trouble is that the supposedly scientific arguments that are given to support these hypotheses are complete nonsense - they are pseudoscience.

While there are certainly MANY aspects of our universe that are not yet well understood by science, the VAST amount of phenomena and laws that our daily lives are subjected to ARE well studied and understood when acting on the scale we exist in (their effects on the quantum level are a lot more esoteric, but again when expressed in a larger scale their effects are well understood and easily observable). Electromagnetism being one of them, and electromagnetism is the force that drives the electronic reproduction of sound.

Thus a straight wire does not equalise anything - a wire with crap RLC (high capacitance) does, shining a light on a wire does not make it sound better even if you do pay $10 000 for it, fitting a wooden knob on an amplifier will not make it sound warmer, placing wooden sticks/chips/small blocks around the room is just decoration, demagnetising a CD is nonsense, eating pineapple to resolve mucus in sinuses due to high content of bromelain in pineapple (bromelain is an enzyme that facilitates breakdown of proteins) is nonsense as the enzymes get digested and converted into amino acids, etc...

....I need to stop now...

Cheers,

Victor

 

[thislittlepiggy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by vmajor eating pineapple to resolve mucus in sinuses due to high content of bromelain in pineapple (bromelain is an enzyme that facilitates breakdown of proteins) is nonsense as the enzymes get digested and converted into amino acids, etc... Victor

maybe you should try snorting it. oh how that will burn.

 

[Audioexcels]

My post was off and maybe this one will be even more off

.

I was attempting to correlate cables with the signal, in which part there is an amplifier, preampifier, cdp, etc. etc. My point was and is this: Utilizing the amplifier as the premises of "the signal"...it is supposed to amplify the signal. This amplifier "should" produce a neutral signal, meaning, one that does not alter the frequency range. However, most amplifiers I have heard in subjective situations have "altered" some aspect of the fr. So lets take a person that writes reviews for a stereo magazine. He/She/It gets in tons of amps each year to test on their "reference" speakers in their "reference" acoustical environment. When they say how this amp sounds like this and that amp sounds like that...when they start to describe how an amp sounds, they are not describing the amp, but the "effect" the amp has on tweaking the speaker's fr which then tweaks the listening environment. It seems to me that after how many years? it has been that we have "perfected" so many designs of amplifier types that can supposedly give a flat frequency response, but yet "most" of these amplifiers are not giving a flat fr/neutral signal. Because a cable is in the same chain as the amplifier, I see no reason to feel that it cannot have an "effect" on the sound. But because a cable is MUCH simpler by default, it "should" not have any "affect" on the sound. Since I do not have my hands on any cabling that has been reviewed to have said to have this "effect" on the sound, I cannot say I have ever even bothered to sit and wonder if cable a/b/or c sounds the best when I am concerned with speaker placement, room treatment, etc. You are right about the wires inside a cable and how they cannot/should not equalize a stereo. But if they can alter the sound of a sytem, they must be equalizing it somehow...When I mention "equalize" in my writing, I refer specifically to a frequency graph, where in a perfect world, a flat frequency response should result in a perfectly neutral/balanced sound. Hence, if a cable alters sound in some way, it is altering frequency response=equalizer/equalization, etc...BTW, I don't believe fr can be measured accurately (we have tons of tools, but they can only give us so much information) and is why I don't think one could measure a cable accurately with respect to how it alters the signal, if indeed it does.

Cheerios!