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James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables
elrond amandil writes "James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'"
Unless you happen to love debunking the falsely-claimed-paranormal, you're probably like me and had no idea who the hell James Randi is/was/will be. Here's his Wikipedia page, here is his standing $1,000,000 challenge for a demonstration of true paranormality, and here is his Education Foundation (on "the Paranormal, Pseudoscientific, and the Supernatural").
Also, here's a video of him in action.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Randi is a real character. If you don't know who he is, check out James Randi on Wikipedia or The James Randi Educational Foundation. One of his boosters is comedian and magician, Penn Jillette, whose TV show, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! he frequently appears on. He's ruffled quite a few feathers over the years by being the poster-boy for skepticism, especially with respect to "mystic" or "supernatural" claims, so don't expect there to be many objective takes on him out there.
All you need is an appropriate length of oxygen free copper cable/wire with sufficient shielding and appropriate gauge. All but the lowest of low end OEM cables meet these needs. Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding. Any perceived difference is in the listeners head.
Show those speaker cables are better than $0.49 a foot lamp cord.
I tried back when I worked in stereo showcase. double blind tests and even testing with high end equipment showed that the $100.00 a foot directional low-oxygen speaker cables were no different than the lamp cord.
Audiophiles typically are some of the stupidest people on the planet. they buy into the snake oil festering bull that any company comes along and pushes in any of the magazines.
Want an awesome example? Richard Gray power conditioners. They cost upwards of $5000.00 and do NOTHING a $49.00 one will. the sales people also make sure to tell you that you will not notice a change when you plug it in, it takes a few weeks for the capacitors and electronics in your equipment to re-learn how to run with clean power.
yes audiophiles fall for that kind of blatent crap!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This nutball spends thousands of dollars on SILVER POWER CABLES. http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue15/walkeraudio.htm Silver POWER CABLES. And he even uses one of these from the wall to his solid-oak-case brass-stool line conditioner. I suppose the Romex in his wall is silver too? I challenge any of these people to submit to a blind test without and with this $12,000 waste. I bet he wouldn't. Any amplifier worth its salt has an immense amount of isolation from its power input anyway. Silver audio cables are just as stupid. How cares about the .000000000003 watt you gain in the decreased resistance in the line!? Silver ain't gonna help against interference.
The interesting thing that I noticed in reading up on the cable was that Pear is local to me.
So I looked up their address listed, and it's residential. From the appearance, this appears to be a virtual company, in a nice Tony neighborhood, and all the owners have to do is sell a hundred cables and the house is paid for.
Oh, and the first and final word on speaker cable is from McIntosh's Rodger Russell.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I'm sorry, everyone agrees there's a difference in the distortion characteristics between tube and transistors. It's both measurable and audible. More likely you can prove that digitally modeled valve software sounds nothing like the analogue equipment it's emulating ;-)
> those black ebony (teak?) hockey puck things
Usually done with neoprene rubber and an acoustically inert material (marble, ceramic) - it works. Not sure about teak and for most listening environments the audible improvement will be negligible.
The real fun is with cables, try proving OFHC copper makes any significant electrical difference. Then look at cable capacitance; it's only relevant for passive guitar and Microphone cable (for long runs). Once you have an suitably amplified signal, cable capacitance audibly effects the signal by the same amount as the alignment of the planets or something.
The cable kooks are where it's at, if anyone deserves your scorn it's these guys.
Yeah but digital is digital... Monster also sells HDMI cables for insane prices ($100 for 6 feet). Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a digital cable is working at all, you're going to get the perfect signal from it. Basically, if the cheap $12 internet HDMI cable works at all, you aren't going to get a crisper image going to a fancier Monster cable. Any signal loss from the cheap cable would likely be pretty drastic and noticeable, given that the data is transferred in binary.
"The thing is, even the cheap drilled wire of your phone-line is good enough to transmit multi-mhz signals for DSL over a few km."
That's because the telephone system uses low-impedance balanced lines; without this technology, POTS would be largely impractical, and long-distance nearly impossible (at least in the days before satellite).
Low-Z balanced lines are also used in many hi-end audio systems, for the same reasons; they offer a material advantage. In fact, an inexpensive low-z balanced line cable can easily better very high-priced single-ended cables. It's the primary reason that all of the equipment I build and work with uses balanced line technology.. better performance without fancy cables = value for the customer.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
before the marketing dollars took over, most folks recommended standard Radio Shack lamp cord as speaker cable. It a heavy gauge, has polarity markings, and is generally dirt cheap because its marketed to cheapskates fixing broken lamps instead of people who don't understand electricity who want a new sound system
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
EVEN ORDER, not odd order harmonics... TRANSISTOR gear has a higher ratio of odd harmonics to even, comparatively. Especially a triode vacuum tube in a single ended circuit design will have almost no 3rd harmonic signal compared to the second one.
Except in that case, the Cinema Display has a consistent screen supply and quality, vs. Dell's infamous screen lotteries, where the first versions that hit the market and get reviewed use higher quality LCDs, and as the production lines go on, the QA and supply drops. (see S-IPS vs. S-PVA)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Fross,
First off, I wasn't implying that high-quality headphones aren't valuable. I have $80 Sony headphones that have good frequency response. As to your question about balanced headphones...
Most high-performance analog signal processing these days is balanced. For example, the analog data path in a communications transceiver is almost certainly balanced, as are the data converters. There are a couple of key benefits of balanced (called differential in the industry) signal processing. The key one is rejection of interference that appears the same on both wires (since the signal is the difference of current or voltage on the wires). Also important lately is an increase of 3dB in SNR by using a differential signal path. This is simply because the signal on the two wires is perfectly correlated, while the noise on the two wires is uncorrelated. That said, differential signal processing sounds like a good idea for headphones, right? Well... it COULD be.
The problem is for a signal to accrue the benefits of balance it has to balanced everywhere there could be interference. Remember the point here is to have the absolutely cleanest signal possible (this is for audiophiles after all). The problem is that the signal IS NOT REALLY BALANCED. Look at the FAQ I posted the link to, refer to Art. III (Balanced Sources). If you look at the handsome diagrams you will see some problems. Now, to be a differential or balanced signal you need to have a signal that is equal and opposite. In the case of a vinyl source they get a single-ended source from the Phono and put it through two op-amp circuits, one inverting and one non-inverting, and they are depending on the outputs of the two circuits to have exactly the same phase relationship. True, they will be close because the audio is much lower in frequency that the bandwidths of the amplifiers, but it isn't truly balanced here. And the mismatch between the two halves is most likely MORE than the distortion/interference you would expect from a good quality single-ended headphone. Ouch!
For the digital source, it is a train wreck! That is NOT the way DACs are supposed to be used! I have designed quite a few data converters and they in no-way-shape-or-form match each other well. (In digital audio we are talking about supreme precision, so the matching isn't even close) If they could match that well, it would be possible to put a bunch in parallel and create SUPER FAST data converters. You can't do that easily in practice due to all kinds of DISTORTION due to mismatches between channels. There is no way that the overall signal path would be limited in performance by anything here than the mismatch of the DACs themselves. I would guess if you looked at the spectrum of the "balanced" signal it would be full of tones due to the DACs. OUCH!
That said, it is quite possible that subjectively this sounds good, because the ear finds certain kinds of distortion pleasing. For example, overdriven vacuum tubes sound good to a lot of people. However, from a technical standpoint, this is a supreme waste of money, and probably sounds worse than a good quality $100 - $200 set of single-ended headphones.
Carl
Folks, you have to understand the audiophile mentality to realise why these things are out there. There are a lot of things going on in the signal chain from source to brain, and a lot of places where the signal could get degraded. Unfortunately, that leads to a lot of potential for snake oil, something that seems to be worse in high end audio than any other field of which I'm aware.
First of all, there's the science. Cables can be engineered to push all of their flaws several orders of magnitude beyond the limits of human hearing, fairly trivially. Both speaker cables and interconnects have their own challenges, but can be overcome. With decent cables, any audible degradation is the result of bad equipment design. It is, for instance, possible to design gear so badly that cables make a difference--this is not a desirable goal, unless you're in the snake oil business.
How can you prove the audibility (or not) of cables? There are essentially four ways:
1) Rigorous double-blind ABX testing.
2) Measuring signal loss/distortion across the cable.
3) Subtract the post-cable signal from pre-cable signal and study the residual signal.
4) Listen to a system and make arbitrary comments about the cables.
One of these is not a valid proof, but is the one that gets promoted aggressively over the other three. Can you guess what it is?
In my mind, there are essentially two schools of audiophile: There are the 'absolute signal purity' geeks who want a perfect reproduction of the signal from source to speaker, and are willing to buy overengineered equipment to do it. These are the folks who buy Rotel, Bryston, Krell, and the like. Then there are the 'absolute musical purity' folks, who don't care about the signal per se, so much as the music in it. They're the ones who buy 3-watt triode amps (like the insane but gorgeous Moth S2A3) and the (new) Magnum-Dynalab tube tuners, and shun CDs. This group tends to fall into the audiophile 'tweaker' mentality more readily, but both groups have their extremes. The one thing about the extremists from either school is an absolute refusal to consider things rationally. It is the love of the irrational that keeps them happily tweaking, and keeps the snake oil salesmen in business.
The problem that leads to the endless search for audio nirvana is partly that audio is a perception issue, and one that is chronologically linear. You can't listen to two sounds simultaneously and decide which is better, or whether they're the same. (ABX testing is the closest you can get, but most hardcore audiophiles won't participate.) Worse, you can get into endless discussions about what constitutes hearing. If you put something in the chain that makes no change to the signal, but you believe that it sounds different, are you hearing something different or not?
As a final note, I highly recommend finding a copy of two articles in Audio Ideas Guide (an audiophile tweak-happy publication) by James Hayward, a retired engineer from Canada's National Research Council. In them, he discusses the actual physics behind audio cables, and points out what actually CAN lead to audible degradation by cables. (Hint: It isn't easy, but there are some on the market which qualify.)
1. Making The Connection: A Closer Look At The Role Of Interconnect Cables, J.H. Hayward, Audio Ideas Guide, Summer/Fall 1994
2. Making The Connection, Part Deux: A Closer Look At The Role Of Loudspeaker Cables, J.H. Hayward, Audio Ideas Guide, Winter/Spring 1995
You can read a short summary of the articles on Bryston's website.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Oh, shit, I'm sorry. I just went and read the article. I didn't know that they would actually spend over two weeks running content on the speakers to "break them in." It was a joke - I swear - and was based on some goofy audio nut I read on a newsgroup over a decade ago.
FTFA:
I was sent a 4-foot single run pair and after a short break-in (Adam suggested that the break-in is minimal, but even so I gave them 48 hours on the Cable Cooker and good two-weeks 24/7 of music prior to the audition)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I disagree. I'm not an audiophile; my conventional amp and speakers are some 20 year old hunk of junk. Guitar cable quality is important however. It boils mainly down to capacitance, the more of which a cable has, the more it has the effect of making the cable act like a low pass filter. If you put a guitar on the neck pickup with all the controls turned up, and feed it through a bright amp, there is a noticeable and obvious difference between a short cable (low capacitance) and a long cable (higher capacitance) of the same type.
$100 speaker cables?... yeah.. right. Guitar cables? Worth spending a little bit extra. Obviously build quality is also of importance as you point out, but it's worth paying attention to electrical properties too.
[quote]More importantly, are the connectors gold, platinum or silver plated. That makes all the difference in sound quality. You don't want your "Down on the Corner" played by Creedence Clearwater sounding like a busker in a subway station.[/quote] Technically speaking the gold-plated connectors do have some benefit over extended periods of time, since they don't corrode.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Not necessarily true. If what they're in contact with isn't also gold, then bimetallism can occur over time, actually creating higher resistances.
True, but up to a point.
There IS a difference in the quality of cable. Really, it is just the "quality of construction" type stuff. Cheap connectors will eventually start to corrode, and maybe even corrode itself to the device so that you break something when you unplug it (been there, done that). Getting a good quality of construction is important: nice strong strain relief, quality crimping/soldering, gold plating is sure nice to have to prevent corrosion. Also, for speaker wire, bigger is always better. This helps reduce I^2/R losses. Monster does seem to provide pretty good quality. However, with that being said, unless you find an absolute steal of a bargain, Monster is overpriced for what you get.
I am not an audiophile, but I am an engineer. Here is my shopping list:
Line-level cables (RCA cables): Nice thick jacket. You want your cables strong. Sometimes you get a rat's nest of wires and you need to pull on a cable. Get one strong enough to survive a good tugging. Gold-plated connectors are very nice to have. Make sure that the connectors look like quality stuff.
Super-video (mini-DIN) cables: This, to me, is harder to tell because they all look the same. Gold plating is nice to have.
Speaker Cable: This may be raw cable with cut-n-soldered ends, or it may have a special pin on the end. The main thing for speaker cable is that it is thick (more important for high power levels & huge amps). This cuts resistive losses. As always, if it has a pin on the end, get gold-plated. For raw cable, if you get corrosion, you can just chop an inch and re-solder.
Anybody who tells you to worry about impedance matching or termination on a stereo system is full of bull. When I design digital systems, I have to worry about this sort of stuff when the lengh of the transmission line get to be about 1/4 the wavelength of the highest frequency that I care about. In digital systems, this number is typically about an inch or two. For audio, I would not worry as long as my cables are shorter than 1/4 mile or so.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Of all audio gear, speaker cables and power cables are probably the ones that have the least effect, if any, on sound quality. I'll grant right off the bat that any difference probably won't be audible. But before everyone gets all comfy in their religous prejudices, consider the history of absolutism - it usually fails in the long run.
We saw it with CD players. 25 years ago it was easy to find hordes and hordes of scientifically-minded folks who proclaimed that CD players were all identical and perfect. They reproduced as high a frequency as the ear could hear. They did so with perfect digital repeatability. They were perfect and identical. That was an unassailable scientific fact. It was even a marketing slogan for Phillips; "Perfect Sound Forever" was their first ad campaign for CDs.
Audiophiles said different. They said they heard differences. When challenged to do double blind, ABX testing, they often failed. They offered up only feeble excuses about how such tests are never structured properly, always being too short and normally using switchboxes that degraded sound. The skeptics and scientists had a field day exposing audiophiles as frauds and hucksters, as (at best) deluded simpletons.
Eventually, though, a funny thing happened. Research got done by audiophiles who were also engineers. They discovered various CD player problems (like jitter) that could be measured and fixed. When those problems were fixed, the audiophiles said the players sounded better. The audiophiles still failed ABX tests and still held to the same excuses, but changes were made, anyway.
Nowadays, anyone who knows what music sounds like (and, yes, that eliminates 98% of the populace right there) can easily tell the difference between a first-gen Sony CDP-101 and a current high-end CD player. There really are differences. Those people who absolutely knew that it was scientifically impossible for any difference to exist turned out to be painfully, embarrassingly wrong. (Nowadays, they tend to fall back on revisionist history: "Oh, we never really said you guys were wrong, just that testing didn't bear you out...etc., etc.")
My point is not to construct an elaborate straw man. My point is that keeping an open mind is a good thing. We have previously seen lots of folks loudly and authoritatively proclaim that a given phenomena does not exist and cannot possibly exist. They cite scientific reasoning (as they spout it) as unquestionable. But that is nothing more than a religous devotion to a position and I reject it.
Sure, the burden of proof is on the people who make claims that cable A sounds better than cable B. I doubt they'll ever succeed. But the vituperative, out-of-hand rejection of alternate views is more than just unseemly; it argues against (indeed, belittles) an inquisitive spirit.
Perhaps some Carl Sagan would be in order. His essay The Dragon in My Garage is right on point. When considering unverifiable and seemingly insane assertions, his advice is that: "...the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the ... hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion."
We've seen the mocking, "scientific" approach to audiophile claims turn out to be wrong in the past. We might do well to be a little less sure of ourselves when considering audiophile issues in the future.
Side note: Just to show that there's blame to go all around, note that the offer of the James Randi Educational Foundation folks is, as I have stated elsewhere, disingenuous as all hell. (See Rule 12, a proviso that makes it clear that the offer is only open to whoever they want to make it open to and gives the JREF multiple, too-easy excuses to reject any attempt to claim the reward.) The rules are set up so that the test will never happen. This is little more than a minor publicity stunt that's gotten picked up by too many 'net outlets and given far too much virtual ink, already.
And now: The Physics! Most modern hi-fi systems are designed for 8 ohm speakers. Loudspeakers are inductive, so at higher frequencies they have a higher impedance. At UHF, a loudspeaker is practically an open-circuit -- so the cable makes quite a good antenna. Most amplifiers employ negative feedback, so there is a connection from the output to the input. The idea is that as long as the feedback circuit behaves linearly, which it ought to do since it consists of only passive components, then the system consisting of the amplifier and its feedback circuit will behave more linearly than the amplifier -- at the expense of gain. Since we can build amplifiers with gain to spare nowadays, this isn't even a trade-off.
Unfortunately, while the feedback circuit may be linear at audio frequencies, it's not linear at UHF. Everything looks like an inductor, solder joints look like leaky diodes and P-N junctions can't change from conducting to not-conducting quickly enough to rectify. So you get some grossly-distorted and partially rectified (mostly by parasitic junctions in the soldering) version of the RF signal coupled back from the speaker cables to the amplifier input. And mobile telephony is digital, so the signals have lots of sharp edges.
For a cure, stick the biggest ceramic capacitor you can find (it'll probably be 100nF) across the amplifier's output terminals -- and add more like it on the power lines of the output amplifier ICs (or between the collector and emitter of the output transistors).
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The first six sentences of that are reasonably true. The rest is utter nonsense.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Transistors sound harsher because they don't have as much harmonic distortion.
Both tubes and transistors cause harmonic distortion when saturated. Its the nature of the distortion that causes the harshness.
When a solid state amp is saturated the result is a hard clipped waveform where there is a sharp edge at the point of clipping. This produces a lot of odd harmonics in the frequency spectrum. Odd harmonics over the fundamental tend to sound very harsh to the human ear.
When a tube amp saturates it tends to soft clip the waveform. This means that at the point where clipping occurs the waveform becomes slightly compressed giving a rounder edged waveform. This tends to produces more even harmonic distortion, which to the human ear is not perceived to be nearly as harsh.
dude
It doesn't matter what happens when the amplifier is overdriven, because anyone that cares the least bit about sound quality, lifetime of speakers and their own hearing will never drive a transistor amp to clipping.
Tube amps are usually terrible underpowered so they are routinely overdriven, so the soft clipping matters more.
Tube amps aren't really usable as anything other than an effect box.
While we are at it any competent power amplifier will sound exactly the same as any other, given that they are both driven to the same level and not overdriven.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Most tube Marshalls, and all Music Man heads (among others) use diode clipping, so a lot of the time when people think they're hearing tube distortion, part of what they are hearing is solid-state distortion. These amps do use tube power sections (and while the Marshalls also use preamp tubes, the Music Man preamp is all solid-state) so the other part of the sound comes from the smoothness of the power tubes. I personally believe it's more important to have power tubes then preamp tubes (compare a Music Man with SS preamp and tube power amp to a Marshall Valvestate with tube preamp and SS power amp, for example) and I find nothing wrong with solid-state components in a preamp.
For years, Steve Vai has used a Boss DS-1 solid-state distortion pedal in front of his tube amps; I've done this as well with good results. Jimi Hendrix used a solid-state Fuzz Face in front of his Marshalls, as another example. Part of the "tube mystique" is hype. Use your ears, try every piece of gear you can get your hands on, and use what sounds good with your guitar. In some cases, that might even mean a modeling processor.
The main problem with modelers is the crap you'll get from purists about using a "digital-sounding" device, even if in a blind listening test, they couldn't tell a modeled Marshall from a real Marshall (and if you're going through a good power amp and a good speaker cabinet, that is quite possible.) Also, keep in mind that there is a lot of variation among tube amps. A modeled Marshall might not sound just like your Marshall, but then someone else's Marshall might not, either. I leave decisions on what to use to my ears, and I've done a lot of shows with a Boss GT-6 where my guitar sounded great (and my back thanked me for leaving the big, heavy tube head at home.) I am also sure that a GT-6 run through a crappy amp and crappy speakers would be unbearable, so it's important to make sure your entire signal chain is good enough. If used properly, I'm convinced that modern modeling gear can be up to the task.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
Parent is right on thing or two.
Thicker cables sound better because most speaker crossovers are crap, and adding small resistance in series with crossover does weird things to the phase of sound.
Just about anything high-class audiophile stuff is controversial.
You are wrong on one thing. Music is, or at least had been made on superb studio-class equipment. It's a shame to listen it on low quality equipment including the bad cables.
Speaker cables need to have low resistance. This is needed to keep sound quality. A good cables have resistance less than 1/30 of the speakers they power. The connectors add some resistance, so the common way to compensate is to use the overkill cables. #12 is quite common and usable up to 5 meters for 8 ohm speakers, for 4 ohm thicker wire is needed.
There is the other way to compensate for the cable resistance and other problems. Negative feedback point can be moved away from the power amplifier output terminals to the speaker terminals. This however makes more problems, this time much worse from an audiophile view on subject.