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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.'"
Companies like monster cable rely on ignorance to stay in business.
Except, after some point, even those "audiophiles" cannot tell the difference. Human hearing has its limits, but gullibility has not.
Did you ever wonder why virtually no one makes double-blind tests of this kind of gear? Because if enough unbiased reviews are posted, no one will buy the most expensive stuff. It's the same reason why winemakers attack double-blind tests so fiercely.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Those speaker cables look analog.
I'm not saying that it's at all possible for any human to detect the difference, but I suppose it's theoretically possible that if they are simply audio cables, there might be some measurable difference in the sound, even if no one could tell.
HDMI is where it's truly insane -- yeah, let's gold-plate a cable that transmit a digital signal. Digital is different -- either it worked or it didn't. HDMI even moreso -- if it didn't work, your entire audio/video is likely to cut out all at once, probably for a second or two, until it can be reestablished. If the video works at all, you have a good enough HDMI cable.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you sell an idiot $5 cables, you only get $5 from him.
If you sell an idiot $7,000 cable, you get $7000 from him.
This proves that $7,000 cables are superior to $5 cables.
Where is my million?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The only reliable way to test matters of subtle perception (be it food or sound or whatever) is the ABX test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test. It works like this: present two known different samples -- call them A and B. Then present an unknown sample -- call it X that's either identical to A or to B. Can the listener or taster or whatever reliably classify X? If so, you have evidence of a perceptible difference. If no one beats chance over a reasonable number of trials, you have evidence that there is no perceptible difference between A and B.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Whoa. Let's not equate the tube vs. solid-state debate with cable voodoo. You can look at the waveform of a tube amp's output and compare it to a solid-state amp's output and see the difference yourself, if you know what to look for. Tubes color the sound (essentially, distort it, but in a way that many people prefer) by emphasisizing the odd-ordered harmonics of a given tone.
The ability to spend $5k on a cable indicates to females that you have higher social status than the rest of the ordinary spuds who only spend $5.
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There's an old(ish) saying - music fans listen to music, whereas audiophiles listen to stereos.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I know a few audiophiles, I know a lot of Windows evangelists, I know open source evangelists and I know quite a few evangelical Christians and all of them sound the exact same to me.
It all comes down to faith and the feeling that "I'm better than you."
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I wouldn't feel guilty about the guitar cables, that's a completely different thing...
There, the reason for buying expensive cables isn't usually much one of sound quality.
Since the cable of an electric guitar is constantly bent,flexed and stepped on, it is more one about reliability.
There are few things more irritating than crappy, stiff and badly soldered guitar cables that break after five sessions.
Baboons are cute.
By offering 1 million to hoaxers to prove their claims true, he has debunked more scams than anyone else with effectively a budget of $0.
But that's ok. If Speaker Cable A sounds better than Speaker Cable B to me, why souldn't I buy it? It makes me think I've bought the better product.
Because you'd do the world a lot more good if you bought a set of radio shack speaker cables (which sound the same), and donated $7000 to some variety of charitable organization (which would help those of us without a lot of money out -- a lot!).
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
There are physical reasons why vaccuum tube amplifiers sound DIFFERENT than solid state amplifiers. I don't, however, subscribe to the philosophy that they're better inherently, as I've heard some terrible-sounding tube amps.
Actually, there is a difference in HDMI cables, even though they are digital. Digital signals are not sharp 1's and 0's. When you start sending 1's and 0's very fast, they begin to look like waves. At a certain point, the digital signal will degrade and digital error artifacts will appear in your image. Look at this test that Gizmodo posted, where some HDMI digital cables are shown to fail at real world resolutions. Monster's cables actually transmitted the digital data better* and performed beyond their specs. *Better: steeper transitions between 1's and 0's... poor cables had more gradual and smooth transitions between 1's and 0's. Ideal case would be a vertical transition between 1's and 0's. Article here: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hdmi-cable-battlemodo/the-truth-about-monster-cable-part-2-268788.php
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
Here is all the audiophile needs to get 100% perfectly clear listening:
http://www.philorch.org/styles/poa02e/www/index2.html
http://www.cso.org/
http://nyphil.org/
http://www.lpo.co.uk/
http://www.bostonpops.org/
etc.
With the money spent on your audiophile addiction, you could get a life's worth of concerts with 100% clarity and still save a lot of money.
Support real music, not processed music.
IME, Audiophiles only hear the flaws. What a sad, sad, world they must live in.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
May I remind you that you are living on a planet where countless hordes torture, maim and murder each other to prove that their omnipotent invisible man in the sky has a longer dick then the other guys', where vast masses prostate themselves before some random idiot because he has pretended to be someone else in a series of moving pictures, where the supposed leaders of various tribes promise the sun and the moon while consistently delivering manure instead, only for themselves or their ideological twins be re-elected, over and over and over, etc and so on.
Oh and it is also a place where one can "buy", "sell" and "steal" large integer numbers.
The unfortunate truth is that most of humanity does not really qualify for the "sapiens" label in "homo sapiens".
Audiophiles are in the same class of idiot as people who believe in homeopathy and copper bracelets. The only difference is that the audiophile isn't harming anything but his own obsessive-compulsiveness, and creates an efficient money transfer conduit from the stupid to the clever, namely the people who market this overpriced junk.
Audiophiles are also the ultimate disproof of the idea that "wealth equals intelligence", so when your dad asks why you why you aren't rich if you're so smart, you can tell him that at least you didn't spend $7,000 on speaker cable and the two of you can laugh about it over a beer. Just don't let him bring up the neon tubes and Arctic Silver conductive paste and water-cooled RAM in your own bedroom.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's really too bad that even if we bought proper stereo equipment, that most of the music available is mastered terribly. It's hard to find albums that aren't classical music that aren't mastered at such a high level as to completely remove all the dynamic range available. So, what's the point of buying a proper setup if none of the music you actually like to listen to is recorded well enough to take advantage of the system. I'm not going to change the kind of music I happen to like, just because of bad recording quality though.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think the most prevalant example of irrationality in modern western society is advertising. Make people feel good while saying the name of your product and they will buy it, whether or not they need it. The fact is we just aren't wired quite right.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Once, someone who was in my studio laughed at my directional cables. (3.5mm TRS patch cables with arrows indicating the signal direction.)
However, when I showed him the patchbay with, on the order of 250 cables, the reason sunk in. When you are dealing with something like this,
and when a single lost signal can represent thousands of dollars of financial loss, it makes sense to really test every cable and to make them with care and consistency.
Ideas like this that make sense in a production environment are often taken straight out of context and put into the "audiophile" world. And then you get things like directional cables where someone tries to claim that the electrical signal itself is directional. Or you get extreme amounts of quality control. Or you get people who *claim* they apply extreme amounts of quality control when all they are really doing is rebranding some industrial product.
Know what works really well for speaker wire in permanent installations? Romex 12 gauge copper house wiring. Incredibly durable, solid wire, lays flat, tends to be very pure copper (costs more to make alloys), easy to fish, and it's hard to pay more than $.50 a meter.
Line signal cables have different issues from speaker cables of course, but the $7500 wires in the article are speaker wires.
In the blind test, one control I'd want to do is to have the subject hook up the system with the really expensive wires (play up the whole packaging angle, use really fancy connectors, etc.) but the signal they actually listen to is going through $0.29/meter lamp cord.
If these were signal routing lines for a mastering studio, the cost per foot would still be extreme, but the idea that quality matters this much would be a little more reasonable. You typical studio probably has a kilometer of cables, mostly on the hard to reach side of patch panels. You want to get these right the first time. This can be expensive. For an IT analogy think "fiber interconnects where a downtime incident costs millions and you get fired." There are plenty of situations like that in audio production and broadcast. Other examples of really high cost items, lamps for stage lighting where it would be a real nightmare if one lamp failed without warning.
Anyway I rant. I realize there are thousands of audio and broadcast engineers on slashdot, pro musicians, people with home studios, people who work in pro studios, lighting and camera folks, etc. I think they know where I'm coming from on this. I just hate seeing these things, because if one thing is insanely overpriced and has ridiculous claims, the response tends to be applied to all kinds of other things. (You *can* have a preference among $3000 microphones; minute individual variations in signal impedance or shielding *can* mean a ruined production; tube circuits and solid state circuits *do* have different coloration effects on a signal, etc.)
But will there be a double blind test on the speaker wires in the article? Don't hold your breath.
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Not at all, if you RTFA you will find that he was pretty skeptical about the monster cable as well.
But a bake off between a $80 pair of speaker cables and a pair at $10 would simply be another product test. The difference in price could easily be justified by factors that are not audible. Gold plated connectors will not sound any better in a one week lab test. They will however be much less likely to corrode which could lead to a scratching connection, overheating etc over several years.
A bake off between a $80 cable and a $8000 cable on the other hand is far more amusing. The person who buys monster cables is at worst out the price of a meal out for two. The person who buys the Anjou cables on the other hand could buy a two week vacation in Hawaii for two with the same money.
Audiophiles are an obnoxious bunch. They whine on about how CD is not as good as vinyl but what they really despise is not the quality of CD vs scratchy vinyl rubbish, its the deomocratization of quality sound that CD brought. There is no perceptible difference in the sound produced by a $50 player or a $500 player, none, zilch, nada. That really gets up audiophile people's noses because the resonse they get whey they show off their gear is not 'woot want one' but 'can't tell the difference'.
There isn't very much difference in amplifiers either. 5.1 speakers vs two makes a huge difference when listening to a movie but the idea that one amplifier sounds 'better' than another is just silly. There is certainly still something of a difference in the quality of loudspeakers but even that is not that great.
The only feature I have found to have a real effect on sound is the feedback system some of the mid range systems now offer. I recently bought an Onkyo system for about $500 which came with a microphone that you plug in and can use to calibrate all the speakers for the seating position. I strongly suspect that the $500 system is essentially identical to the $900 THX certified system.
Calibrating the signal delays for the seating position and balancing the sound to the room acoustics definitely has a real effect. Its not an effect that I would pay more than a few bucks for but it did have an effect. Once you have feedback in the system it simply does not matter much what the quality of any of your hifi components is, the balance can be made up using CPU power.
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Make people feel good while saying the name of your product and they will buy it, whether or not they need it.
Are you sure you aren't talking about religion?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Ah neat, eye diagrams. People like to say that high-speed digital design is really analog design. It's quite true. What matters here is the cable loss and dispersion, which will be finite for anything except a perfect transmission line. Better cable = better transmission line.
To relate this to the topic, consider that HDMI cables need bandwidth of over 3 GHZ (cat 2), while audio signals only go to 20 kHz. Even if we generously extend the audio bandwidth to 100KHz, there's over 4 orders of magnitude difference. So it's not surprising that a cable for gigabit speeds needs tighter specs.
Except that different wines actually taste different.
I just wanted to point out to Slashdotters that the lesson here isn't that cables don't make any difference to sound systems. There's a reason Randi choose the already high-end Monster cable as the reference point for this comparison rather than the cheapest piece of crap cabling anyone could find anywhere.
In fact, I have a rather sad story about that exact same bias. My father was generally very conservative in his spending, but around 1963, he decided to splurge and buy a receiver and two stereo speakers from Acoustic Research. (yes, their well-known AR-3's.) Anyone buying Acoustic Research back in '63 was someone who'd done their homework and cared about sound, these were very well-regarded and expensive speakers.
My Dad was in vision research and taught introductory classes in sensory perception for experimental psychology majors, so he knew a thing or two about acoustics and what matters, and he designed and soldered up his own circuits for his experimental apparatus, so he knew a thing or two about electronics, too.
When he went to the store to buy the AR system, they tried to sell him very expensive cables, and he laughed and said it was a huge waste of money, and proceeded to go home and hook the system up with 24 AWG telephone cable, because the wires "don't make any difference." So he just used whatever was cheap that he already had around.
Anyone who knows much about stereos and electronics is probably already groaning at reading that. Good stereos push a high amperage current, and a 24 AWG wire is going to create a high resistance to that current, which is going to change the impedance the receiver is going to see trying to drive the speakers it was built specifically to be matched with. I don't know how to describe the specifics of the nasty effects on the signal that the speakers receive versus what was intended, but the effect on sound quality was tremendous. The system never sounded very good at all.
By the 90's that system was sitting in the basement, and my brother ended up taking the speakers and hooking them up to an inexpensive Sony receiver, and I ended up taking the receiver and hooking it up to some Linaum speakers. My dad ended up hearing the speakers and commenting on how amazing the improvement in receivers has been that those old speakers could sound so good when they never sounded anywhere near that good before. Then separately he heard my speakers being driven off the old receiver, and commented how amazing advances in speakers were, that they could sound so good being driven off that old tube receiver that never sounded any good...
Of course, really the whole thing came down to the fact that my Dad spent more than he has ever spent on a car on that stereo system, the reduced the sound quality to about that of a $20 clock radio by refusing to spend an extra $10 on cables. No, he didn't need gold Monster cables (not that they existed back then anyway), and it's quite possibly true that it would have been impossible to tell the difference between the expensive cables the guy at the store was selling and NM 14-2 household electrical cable from the local hardware store. But running telephone wire for speaker cables destroyed the sound quality. There is a difference in cables, if you don't know what you're doing, don't assume any old wire will be as good as any other. The basic point that I think loony millionaire audiophiles and conservative skeptical engineers can all agree on is that having a large enough gauge cable to easily handle the current is the most important aspect of the system's cables.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
I went to the Monster Cable factory once. Like, it was just ladies hand crimping ends to wire that came from giant spools. Just like cables you'd make yourself. But with way better packaging. I suppose the cable may have been better, but it was surprisingly low-tech (as most manufacturing is). (Which is still surprising, even though I know it.)
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.