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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.'"
... are listed here. Those wooden knobs are a real bargain! Only $485!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
I find the audiophile phenomenon to be mighty amusing, even though I'm guilty of throwing away a few extra dollars for an "oxygen free" guitar cable or two. But holy crap, that's quite a price difference -- and for what? If anybody ever gives me crap about getting a Cinema Display instead of a Dell monitor, I'll just think of the Pear Anjou cables. Getting a monitor to match your workstation's case at least has "interior decorating" to justify the difference in cost, but who's ever going to see your speaker cables? Yikes!
P.S. Did you know that if you mark around the edges of your CDs with a sharpie that the music sounds better? ;-)
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
So, the JREF Challenge has been upgraded to not jut paranormal psychic claims to ridiculous marketing claims? Well, he hasn't lost his money yet, so he's a pretty good gambler.
I love the concept, I just pray that it will change the marketing practices (Monster cables are HOW MUCH?... there isn't enough loss over 6' for me to not just buy some radio shack [also now overpriced, but not as much] cables instead)
Sadly, like the Music companies, I think ad-makers are set in their ways, and we won't see any change soon. I just hope it wakes people up to how much their ignorance can hurt their wallet.
Companies like monster cable rely on ignorance to stay in business.
As a long-time (+20 years) audiophile, I can tell you right now that many of the tweaks and products in the business has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with psychology. 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.
Ofcourse - the whole industry is based on me thinking that there's some better product out there that I still haven't bought... Just around the corner is Eternal Bliss ®
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
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.
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.
Blasphemy! The Martians are gonna eat your signal!
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
Randi's challenge is much harder than that -- you have to be able to HEAR the difference in a blind test. Delicate instruments can tell one cable from another pretty well, but the only way to prove that one sounds better is to do a listen. A blind listen, of course, to eliminate psychology.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
No sig today.
In other news, Pear Cable has been named the sole supplier of audio cables to the Department of Defense.
You know, you do not want your speaker cables to be resting on the floor. That results in distortion of the sound. Make sure you are using cable towers to hold the $900 per foot cables off the floor.
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.
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!
Well, the cables may be better according to measurements, but can you actually HEAR the difference, which is a totally seperate thing.
Ideally, you'd do a double blind study with a some audiophiles, playing tones and then music through speakers hooked up with one set of cables, and then the other.
Does the cable TRULY produce audiably different music?
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
No, he/she wouldn't. Nada. That's what this whole article is about.
c++;
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.
Even for Multi-Ghz coax cable for high-frequency applications, including gold-plated SMA connectors you dont really pay more than $100/m.
thats 5(!) orders of magnitude higher frequency than those cables operate at. Just to make the picture a bit more visual for the imagination impaired: the difference between the requirements of those cables, and audio cables, is bigger than the speed difference between a turtle and the voyager probes.
Audiophiles often use science to back their claims, but the mere fact that they dont unterstand anything about what they are talking about makes it pseudoscience/voodoo.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
Deleted
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...
Okay - hang on a minute now, there is quite a noticeable difference between analog tube amps and digital amps - if you take an oscilloscope to them you'd actually be able to see the difference. I think, primarily, the tube adds noise to the signal that some people prefer, but either way, that's a whole different discussion from the absurdity of $7000 speaker cables. I doubt even a tuned machine could tell the difference between a decent set of RadioShack speaker cables and these ridiculous Anjou cables, let alone a human ear.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
I've been a self described "audiophile" for quite a long time now, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much cash you can drop on upgrades for a sound or theater system. Speakers, woofers, tweeters, 2 way and 3 way setups, room design, cables, terminations, power cleaning... the list of products can go on and on forever. Some of these guys are really and truly nuts. I spent about 2 hours one day talking to an "expert" at a Tweeter and he firmly believed that due to the current flowing through the speaker wires you should have them elevated above the floor (on paper cups that are turned upside down and have a trench cut through them to support the wire) and leave them "at rest for at least a few days before pushing current through them to settle the magnetism radiating from them". The amount of money that can be spent on something as simple as speaker cables completely boggles the mind, and almost all of the marketing is spooky ghost stories about how this one works better than another one due to umpteen factors that nobody even really knows anything about. The problem is that it's difficult to scientifically PROVE that one cable isn't better than the other (at least as far as I'm aware), which is likely why he's put up this challenge. Proving the performance of a speaker cable beyond simply resistance, length and loss is hardly an exact science and often is open to the interpretation of the listener. Perhaps a blind test with a large amount of subjects would help but then you're still dealing with opinions which can hardly be substituted for fact.
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
We had a good laugh at work about this balanced headphone amp: http://www.headphone.com/products/headphone-amps/the-max-line/headroom-balanced-max-amp.php
We were thinking if there are really people paying $4k for this stuff, we're in the wrong business (Analog Integrated Circuits)
Audiophiles are idiots. The issue is they have more pretension than technical acumen... so they are easily taken.
Carl
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.
I never had cables with PRAT. I guess that's why I don't listen to music as much as I used to. Without PRAT, the joy of listening deminishes with time. I will go to the shop tonight and ask for cables with PRAT! PRAT is where it's at!
But I have one question for Dave Clark. I was told by my audiophilic colleagues in the late 1990's that as a true audiophile it is important to:
1. Check which way your amplifier is plugged in. Having the main power plug in the wrong way wreaks havoc on the sound,
2. Switch on your amplifier at least half an hour before even thinking about playing music, even if you have an amplifier that is devoid of any tubes whatsoever,
3. Put a second CD on top of the CD you want to play,
4. Keep your CD's in the freezer at all times.
This is all very very important for getting the best sound quality. Did you do all those things Dave? If not, I can't take your review seriously, sorry.
-- Cheers!
Frankly, the drug dealers were our best customers - they just wanted something loud and they didn't f**k you around by insisting you order the latest greatest cable as reviewed by their favourite HiFi magazine. Paid in cash too.
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.
All you need is an appropriate length of oxygen free copper cable/wire with sufficient shielding and appropriate gauge.
So that's 4 requirements:
- the right length
- the right composition
- the right amount of shielding
- the right gauge
And all of these requirements, except for length, are various degrees. There's a lot of room for optimization there.
Some high-end audio stuff makes sense and a lot is just emotional. The really expensive speakers sound better. Cables, on the other hand, probably only get better up to a certain point -- possibly in the 3-figure range.
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.
This statement is probably provably false, though it's true enough for consumer-level equipment. For expensive setups, a sound quality improvement is probably available using higher gauge, better shielding, and better composition than you get with cheap cables.
None of that justifies $7k.
Randi might lose this one, depending on how he defines "prove". The signal at the other end of the cable won't be identical between the 2 cables. They are analog cables. It's nearly impossible for them to be identical. "Better" would be a question of whether the difference is audible and a group of people decide it's better in a double-blind trial by a significant margin. I'm not sure what makes him thinks that's an impossible outcome.
Even more absurd than the speaker cables (where there are some minimal real issues such as gauge and quality of connectors), people shell out big bucks for "high end" power cables, presumably not thinking about the fact that the power company's wiring, and the wiring in their walls, is the cheapest basic copper wiring available.
I like to use mil-standard aircraft "Tefzel" wiring wherever I can for all my audio connections. It's a bit pricier than common hook-up wire if you buy it new, but I get lots of scraps for free (some very long "scraps" too!) from a friend who does avionics wiring in airplanes. Apparently whenever he re-wires an aircraft, they always remove the old wiring and use complete runs of brand new wires off the spool, and never splice or re-use old wire even if the old wire is in perfectly good shape.
Tefzil has a teflon insulation on it that is incredibly tough and resistant to abrasion, chemicals and oxidation from ozone or UV light deterioration. The stranded copper wire inside is oxygen-free and has a small percentage of silver alloyed in it to reduce the voltage drop per foot and it is tin-plated too, for corrosion protection and ease of soldering. This stuff lasts for over 50 years easily and retains like-new appearance and performance for decades.
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.
OK.
Maybe Randi's efforts don't truly matter in the grand scheme of things as one poster has mentioned.
But if there's one thing that website can do a very good job of, it's helping people understand the importance of and difficulty of crafting and executing proper double-blind tests.
I imagine I've been trolled. But your trivial snippets of "tests" of music or literature appreciation wouldn't in anyway shape or form qualify as double-blind tests. Goodness, I wouldn't even consider them anything other than cheap stunts providing no meaningful results whatsoever.
Please take the time to wander over to the JREF and especially the forums where you can read excruciatingly thorough discussions on the many audiophile type claims that are very similar to this. There is a great deal of information there provided by the claimants and forum members who have worked to hash out double-blind tests.
"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.
I've personally attended a "skeptics" meeting where he was giving a talk. One thing that struck me was how much hero-worshiping was going on. Some guy spent a good 20-25 minutes telling us about how well he knew James Randi, how close he was to James Randi, how he could pick up the phone and call James Randi, yadda yadda.
This was after waiting about 30 minutes for them to start- they had to get a laptop working with various videos of James Randi on (mostly asian) TV. Each video, of course, did not play properly, or they played the wrong ones (ie, the same thing over and over.)
His work is worthwhile and he's decent showman, but he's also grossly over-sold and over-hyped. The devotion (if not downright worshiping) is hilarious, given that it is being done by a bunch of people who call themselves "skeptics."
Please help metamoderate.
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.
The reason I'm asking is the "psychology" of an experience isn't just the consciously reportable part. Philosopher Ned Block has done some great work consolidating the research into experience and reportability, and concludes that what we're aware of phenomenologically is of far wider scope than what we're able to access in reportable form. A number of my friends are professional jazz critics. Even for the best of them, what they're able to report from a concert is far less than what they're able to consciously (and unconsciously) experience of it. This isn't just the subtle effects, but some of the most overt aspects of the experience - to the listener. But these aspects don't map into our spoken vocabulary - although another musician will often be able to describe them with more music. (A lot of music is musicians describing other music.)
So the blind test you'd need to do is of more than whether listeners can tell you about the difference. The test needs to be about whether the experience has been phenomenologically different for the listeners, perhaps - especially because it's music - in ways where words fail them. To do that you're going to have to do some sort of longer-term tracking and evaluations of outcomes. For instance, if it's music that fills the particular listener with joy, is there more joy at the end of an hour's listening? That would be the measure of a true psychological effect. It's not psycho-acoustics we need to measure, but different outcomes in the inward experience of mood and consciousness.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
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
What does that mean?
What the hell does that mean?
on second thought...
I don't even want to know what the hell that means.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Oops. You're right - even ordered indeed. My nerdy preference for odd numbers colored my memory.
Sorry, this one has you beat by about 25AU
...
To Quote:
The Teleportation Tweak is the phenomenal new product from Machina Dynamica. The Teleportation Tweak is an advanced communications technique discovered and developed by Machina Dynamica for upgrading audio systems remotely -- even over very long distances. The Teleportation Tweak has a profound effect on the sound and is performed during a phone call to Machina Dynamica; the phone call can be made via landline or cell phone from any room in the house. The tweak itself takes about 30 seconds.
The effects of the Teleportation Tweak are instantaneous and the improvement to sound quality will be audible immediately. The Teleportation Tweak excels in 3-dimensionality, lushness, inner detail and air. Bonus: The picture quality of any video system in the house will also be improved - better color and contrast! Customer should pay via Paypal or check/MO (payable to Geoff Kait) prior to calling Machina Dynamica via landline or cell phone. Machina Dynamica's Teleportation Tweak $60.
Transation: They will call you, for the bargain price of $60, and not only make your entire audio system sound better, but it will improve the picture quality on your televisions!
ALL THROUGH A SINGLE 30-SECOND PHONE CALL
Science just jumped out the window, and took Logic and Reason with her.
How about predicting the future? The magic 8-ball has been predicting "Outlook not so good" since inception. Obviously it foresaw many of the issues that came to be with that horrible pretender to an email client.
I've always been amused by the cable thing. Even "high end" gear tends to use RCA phono jacks, which they gold plate, rather than BNC connectors, which are known to be flat to 50MHz and don't come loose.
Even Monster Cable for speaker cable is silly. All you need is heavy-gauge copper. Nothing else matters.
I was amused some years ago to find that Monster Cable didn't make VGA cables, where signal degradation is a real issue for long cables. That's a high bandwidth analog signal, and they'd have to actually work to make a good one. Eventually, they did get into VGA cables, which they overprice as usual. A high quality 5 meter VGA cable can be obtained for about $8, but Monster will charge you many times that.
The "tubes vs. transistors" amplifier thing is amusing. Back in 1990, Bob Carver, who designs amplifiers, challenged two high-end audio magazines to give him any audio amplifier at any price, and he'd duplicate its sound in one of his lower cost transistor amps. Two magazines took him up on the challenge. He won. Then, almost as a joke, he built the Carver Silver 7 amplifier, which is all tube and sold for $17,000/pair. Each amp has two chassis, one for the power supply, and the thing is chrome-plated. Audiophiles bought the things. Then he came out with a transistor amplifier with the same transfer function at 1/40th the price.
There are things that do matter, like read error counts on CDs, but they're usually hidden from consumers. Early CD players had error counters, but the industry agreed to hide that information when people started complaining. Now, most CD players reread and buffer, so it's less of an issue.
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
You must not have broken them in. While many prefer to break in their cables for a week or two using the preferred content, I find that the best uniform results occur with a volume-modulated version of pink noise for 10 days. Once that's done (and it only needs to be done once) you can sub-condition for yuor content. For example, if I'm going to listen to classical, I'll run some recordings by the same composer and orchestra for a day or two first. Afterwards, I'll cleanse the path with at least 4 hours of pink noise before either changing composer or orchestra. I prefer 12 hours or more of pink noise if I'm going to switch to jazz or rock.
You see, by not properly conditioning your cables, you made a mockery of the entire double blind test. These are sensitive, precision pieces of equipment, and can't simply be handled the way zip cord can.
You'll have to excuse me now, it seems my tongue has seriously bruised my left cheek.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
and no doubt you've done double blind ABX tests with this $300 cable to verify the differences that you believe are perceptible?
Dear Madam or Sir, I am contacting you in the strictest confidence, because I know you to be an honest and reliable person. I happen to have *SCIENTIFIC PROOF* that brand Pear Anjou speaker cables offer greater quality audio than ordinary speaker cable. This proof would win me US$1000 000, which I am prepared to share evenly with you. I only need a brand Pear Anjou speaker cable, but since my family's assets have been frozen by an evil, oppressive regime, I can't afford the cable or the necessary expenses. If you could can finance me with US$8000 I want to give you US$500 000. Thank you for your confidence! Cecil Rhodes, Nigerian Audiophile
Lemon curry???
reminds me of the penn and teller bullshit on bottled water. if you tell a sucker that he is getting an ultra fancy product, his ego makes him believe you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPAjUvvnIc
Retro-tube data drivers with shaped-anode 12AT7s in a balanced push-pull configuration yields a more pleasing data stream. The rounded bitshapes harken back to a time when mobile data was delivered to your '57 Chevy by pretty girls on roller-skates.
Data today is just too harsh.
'Nuff said.
Stan the Man
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The effect can be produced using a pretty simple inline filter. You can even use a digital one if you like.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"People are hungry for this kind of thing," Randi said. "Knowledge of the future represents power, and people are looking for power, so they pay money to astrologers and 1-900 numbers, not realizing that if the astrologers and operators of the 1-900 service really had all this power, they'd use it for themselves and not have to do all this marketing to others."
Not sure what kind of speakers Nostradamus may have been using, tho.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
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?
There are a huge number of threads I could reply to on this topic, but I'm doing so via an iPod Touch in a McDonald's.
First, the three most profitable items we sold were:
1: Extended service contracts
2: Cables
3: Speakers
At the yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Monster would put onthe best parties - open bar, great food and top entertainment.
Someone made the claim that HDMI "just either works or doesn't". I've had bad ones. But a broken one shows up as missing bit planes in the digital signal. Not a subtle difference.
99% of the power conditioning market is indeed bullshit. But 1% is not. In pro audio we use balanced power for some applications. 2 60 volt sources, 180 degrees different in phase to the normal "hot" and "neutral". The same system is used in submarines to reduce the electromagnetic signnature. This can reduce the noise floor of the connected equipment as much as 20 db. Measurable, not snake oil.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Think of all the Audiophiles who will go and purchase these $7000 cables to try to claim Randi's $1,000,000 prize. Randi may have actually increased the number of people who will hear about and purchase these overpriced monstrosities.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
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This statement is probably provably false
Don't do that.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
When asked by a customer, I generally suggest a certain brand of speaker cable that sells in the $300 range. IBHEAE - I build hi-end audio electronics
Good to know. I'll never get closer than 10 feet to the door of your shop.
20 years ago, it was the gold-plated phono plug that made all the difference, when US$100 was nothing to get a better brilliance. And the cable from the record player to the (pre-)amp, it could be had at US$100/foot. Before I disgress, I was also in the business, 30 years ago, and absolutely enjoyed to see the cables within the record player as well as in the amp / pre-amp. You'd easily hit a meter of 30-sen shielded cable here and there, with another meter of 100-$ cable inbetween. Now make the calculations, if you still want to: How did the one meter 100-$ cable improve the sound ?! Compared to just another meter at 30 sen, that is. In case you don't happen to be an electrical engineer, these are just serial black boxes.
In order to disgress further, 20 years ago I was acceptance engineer of classical recording equipment for millions. I used to walk around the places and stages, seeing the drums of 1-$ cables, of easily 100 m in length, standing about, through which those very signals travelled before being recorded. And then, speaking engineering-wise, adding maybe a meter of gold-plated cable for some astronomic price, will make all the difference ?! From, instead, adding another one meter to the already existing 100 m ? Holy crap !
RTFA, this magician puts 4 feet of that super-super-cable between power amp and speakers. Through how many more feet will that signal run in the interior of both power amp and speaker until it reaches the coils (which are also made from cheapo solid copper) ? And often being sent through meters of more cheapo solid copper as crossover ? And none of those internal cables have any special quality.
Second, if the cable between power amp and speakers was that important, or, better, was any important, we'd much better do away with it altogether, and assemble the power amp within the speakers ! Pah, there you have it ! Even less loss than the one on the 4 feet of 7200 $ cable ! Meaning, no expenses at all for cable, no interferences at all; and you save 7200 $ !
Oh, sorry, not you in particular. Because you are manufacturer of such stuff, and if everyone had a good common sense, you wouldn't be able to put food on your family (R), at least not from cable sales.
Feedback?
That's when you hold the mic too close to the speakers. Happens no matter the gauge of the cable.
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Bending a spoon helps who? Not many other than the spoon-benders own pockets. I agree.
;)
So-called psychics, who make people depend on _them_, and not their own judgement? Not in the longer run.
But the teacher needs ignorant pupils.
The doctor needs sick people.
The world is full of diversity and "exploitation". It is indeed necessary for the world to function, so nothing to fret about.
Nevertheless, it doesn't help _us_ to get disturbed all the time thinking about all the problems.
It actally hinders our _own_ objective investigation and proper judgements...!
I have no doubt it is possible to bend a spoon, with our without physical force, but it is just a trick nonetheless. Wether it is by warmth, by some exotic particles, by quantum potentiality or brute-force and trickery, I know still that what happened is perfectly natural.
I also know that debunking one, does nothing to debunk every claim. It is a hopeless crusade based on flawed logic and knee-jerk reactions to the world.
The way Randi goes about science, if you are interested in the scientific method, you should condemn such practice. The means doens't justify the ends. It is a scam, and too many here are swallowing it and crying for blood, in much the same flawed way people swallow religious dogmas or try to use the Bible in scientific schoolclasses. It actually hinders real investigation by making a circus out of it. You can never test something having already decided on the result. How many scientists have falled in this pit, and still do? The man is a perfect example who should NOT represent science.
The man who is open for the result, is a _real_ scientist, that deserves praise and respect. Most important discoveries have been accidents with bieffects caught by the acute awareness of the discoverer.
If you're REALLY interested in science, DON'T be on _anyone's_ side.., or be on _everyone's_ side! Keep your mind open.
Btw, sceptics never ever came up with a new discovery. Only free-thinkers ever managed that (per definition you can even say
Sorry, for such a long OT note above, I just got inspired. I hope it can inspire someone to investigate that there really is more to life than what they're being told. I also write this because there seems to be a herd mentality here about the subject, which is also quite unhealthy for scientific progress.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
The taste of wine is less, though still quite, subjective. More importantly, you get wine snob idiots who made up this whole ridiculous vocabulary to explain all these fancy subtleties of wine. The funny thing about wine double blind tests is when these same wine snobs can't tell the difference between a $30 bottle of wine and a $200 bottle of wine. So double-blind wine tests performed by random people? Not extremely useful, though still interesting. Double blind wine tests performed by wine snobs? Priceless.
Same with audiophile double blinds. These assholes make the most ridiculous claims full of complete crap nonsense terms they've made up. If they can't pass a double-blind test and prove that their silly theories can defy science, they deserve to be laughed at.
This is speaker cable we're talking about here. Speaker cable is unshielded. In fact, shielded speaker cable would result in much higher capacitance, which interacts very badly with many power amplifier designs. There is never a good reason to use shielded speaker cable from the perspective of avoiding noise in your speaker signal. The only valid reason to use shielded speaker cable is to keep the speaker cable's signal from causing inductive noise in some other signal cable nearby, and even that is dubious since such a thin layer of foil won't really have much impact on low frequency EMI anyway at the power levels involved.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
There is a certain amount of techical validity in doing that, since CAT5 is twisted pair, and so long as the signals running through twisted pair is truly differential then common-mode noise is rejected.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that HDMI is totally immune to signal loss, but there should be a limit in how much you need to spend on them. I paid $50 for a 50ft HDMI cable from Monoprice.com and it has worked flawlessly so far, and this is for 1080p video signal to a 1080p video projector. $60 6ft HDMI cables are simply, flat-out absurd. For runs 2 meters or less, I'd suggest buying the cheapest or next-to-cheapest ones you can get, and if you see glitching, then return them and pay a little more.
It does not make much sense to pay several dollars a foot for "future proofing" your cables. That's money spent on something that depreciates anyway, it's better to save the difference spend that money 5 years from now if you need it and not get cables now that might be replaced by different connector standard anyway. I'm very skeptical of the future for 1440p, when even the ProjectorCentral people swear that they can't tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p.
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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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."
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
That's the point. You want thick wires - that is the most important attribute (low resistance). Any random power cable will actually work quite well for speaker wiring. That WILL make a difference, especially if the original cables are crappy. Spending $Xk on the wiring won't.
"My twin-lead is working just fine - and with the same frequency response as the monster cable at 20Khz."
Try this with your system - set the input to something that's not on or something you don't have hooked up, then crank the volume all the way to 10. Listen carefully. Then turn lights on and off, the TV on and off, make a cellphone call, turn the ceiling fan on and off.
If you hear any noise at all during this test then your interconnects have room for improvement. Most everyday systems can't get all the way to 10 without major distress. I know this because I used to have an everyday system. My new and expensive system is completely silent during this exercise, but it took a set of expensive interconnects to get it that way (expensive = 5% of system cost). The difference is testable and repeatable.
As always with sound systems, if you can't hear the difference, don't pay for it. Before I got my latest system the one I had before simply wouldn't have justified the expensive interconnects -- whatever problems they cured were too small to matter when compared to the distortion coming from the equipment itself.
Note however that lamp cord is not shielded therefore it actually can be worse sounding than a shielded cable.
For speaker cable, that is not the problem. The signal induced into an unshielded speaker wire is in the micro or picowatt range in the audible frequency range. It is not enough amplitude to be heard over the background noise present in a room with a breathing person in it, or more often it is much less than the thermal noise(hiss) of the amplifier. At inaudible frequencies such as RF, the wire makes a fine radio antenna. Add in a little non-linear detection in the output stages of a cheap stereo and you can plainly hear "Breaker 19" as the guy goes by outside.
For the rest of us, the problem is not related to unshielded verses shielded. It has to do with dielectric loss. The cable was designed for 60 HZ power, not high frequencies. Some cable had quite a bit of loss at higher frequencies (I swept a lot of RF cable and power cord). Most people wouldn't notice as the cable length was too short to have much effect (small room, speakers only 6 feet or less from the receiver) and the cheap speakers provided much more response flaws to the fidelity by several orders of magnitude. Did you know the loss was great enough in the clear lamp cord that it could be used as a very inefficient EL wire? A high voltage high frequency signal made these babies glow violet. (Discovered from my Tesla coil days)
These very real high frequency losses is why the wire dielectric is such a big deal in the manufacture of cable for high frequency use. The twist and dielectric is the big differences in Cat 3 Cat 5 and Cat5e cable. The copper in all three is the same gauge and quality.
When an engineer designs cable and knows what he is doing, they design the audio cable just like they would an RF cable. Low loss, and match the load impedance. At one time we needed to run a long signal wire over 500 feet. We used RF coax. We terminated it and added a small inductance to compensate for the end equipment's input capacitance of 47 pF. Then we sweep tested it. (audiophiles rarely do this with test equipment). We managed to get flat response to 500 Kilocycles with only a half db loss at the high end. Loss and distortion in 20HZ to 20KHZ wasn't measurable unlike it was in our unterminated cable.
This is why network cable has a design impedance and it is required to terminate the cable with it's impedance. T connections is not permitted. (Unlike stereo where a Y cable is often used either external to the equipment or internally. Coax network cable required external terminations (Network old timers will remember the 50 ohm terminations) while utp cable forbids T connectors and the end equipment provides the termination.
More HF engineering goes into most network cable than goes into most audiophile cable. Audiophile speaker cable is almost never engineered to match the load impedance. Due to the complex impedance of a speaker, the best cable is either none or as short as possible. This is the reason for powered speakers and sub woofers. The signal wire can then be a better match to the load impedance of the speaker amplifier. Now if they would just stop using cheap amplifiers and speakers for powered speakers..
Other than just having all the heat in one spot in the dash, this is the reason premium car stereos have amplified speakers. No speaker wire while driving a complex impedance. You can't make a speaker wire to match the impedance of a speaker. An amplified speaker or amplifier at the speaker with very short wires is a better solution than any $7000 long speaker cable. Anyone who does RF engineering understands this.
The truth shall set you free!
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!
Your comment has given me an excellent product idea. I'm going to build audiophile gear that does in fact skew the output in some noticeable way. I'll declare this skew to be better, sell the gear to audiophiles for millions, and then they can legitimately pass double-blind tests that show they hear a difference with my gear.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
most of the expensive guitar cables have pretty darn good warranties too; it's well worth spending the extra $20 or so on the cable and being basically guaranteed to be able to exchange it if/when it breaks.
Monster instrument cables are definitely dripping with hype mojo but they're still pretty affordable and have the great warranty. Mogami cables are even more ridiculous but I'm pretty sure they exchange too...
ìì!
No, we're not.
Compare a Remington rifle to a Merkel. If you think that's comparing a mass-production item to a boutique item try comparing a Kimber to a Merkel. Compare the Remington to a Blaser or a Sako.
Compare a Smith and Wesson M41 target pistol to a Unique (out of business and French to boot, but still better than anything you can get from the U.S.), a Hammerli, or a Walter target pistol.
Compare the best revolver to ever come out of the S&W Performance Center to a Korth.
Compare the best semi-custom 1911-pattern target pistol you can get from a low-volume specialty manufacurer in the U.S. to a Pardini centerfire target pistol. Of all these comparisons, this one will be the closest, but only if the U.S. maker didn't have a bad day when they built your pistol.
No, the sad truth is that American gun makers don't take quality as seriously as the Europeans. It's true that you can't beat the bang-for-the-buck of the American brands. The Ruger .22 target auto is more pistol for less money than you can get anywhere. Unfortunately, it also looks like an industrial tool compared to the products of Europe.
For purely custom, incredibly expensive, one of a kind guns, you're as likely to find a suitable artist in the U.S. as elsewhere. But for combining mass production and high quality, no U.S. gun manufacturer can hold a candle to the best Europeans.
I use multiple strands of CAT5e adding up to 12 guage as my speaker cables and a double twisted pair with floating ground for my interconnects. I add $15/pr gold-plated RCA ends for the best sounding $30 interconnects on the face of planet earth. No seriously. They sound notably better (subjective I know, but I used to write high-end music reviews for a magazine some of you may remember called (are you ready?) Ultimate Audio. So I've spent *A LOT* of time listening to high end systems...) than anything else I've used excepting that time a borrowed a set of $1000/meter 99.9% pure silver cables from an audio-nut friend of mine. Insanity. CAT5e makes excellent audio cable :)
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
In 1988, Philip Greenspun and I did a study of audiophile cables, as part of a Psychoacoustics laboratory course at MIT. Our paper was published in The Absolute Sound and the MIT Computer Music Journal (first page). The MIT version published several paragraphs and pages out of order, so you have to put the puzzle back together.
At the time, CD players were just out, and many audiophiles derided them, so we used 33RPM LP recordings, purchased new and played on a high-end turntable, and used expensive electrostatic speakers and a typical audiophile listening room, not an anechoic chamber, as audiophiles again had in the past not accepted such tests.
Rather than testing speaker cables, we decided to test the tonearm-to-preamp connection, where the signal as the weakest, reasoning that any effects would show up more profoundly there.
We tested a 1-meter long cable from Straight Wire (provided to us free, but costing about $100) and 24-feet of zip cord from Radio Shack (which we purchased).
To avoid any interference from switches or relays, I went into a closet with the equipment and the door closed, and Philip waited with the test subjects in the listening room. (This formally made our test single-blind, though it answered previous concerns from previous tests about signal depredation from switches. Still, we made sure that there was no way for subjects to find out during the test.)
Each run consisted of either AAAA or ABAB, with A or B being a one-minute passage played with cable A or cable B. AAAA or ABAB was etermined by coin toss. Before each minute passage, I unplugged the cables and plugged the cable back in, so there was no way for the subjects to tell which cable was used. We asked for each 4-minute run if the subjects thought it was A or B, and we asked after each 1-minute, if they preferred it.
We ran several groups of 5 subjects each, and did 6 runs with each. Our tests included audiophiles, musicians, and other random test subjects. We found no statistically significant ability for subjects either in preference or in ability to distinguish 1 meter long audiophile cable from 24 feet of Radio Shack zip cord.
If we discarded the first run for each group of subjects as a training run, we found an 80% confidence for ability to distinguish, which was still not significant. However, we did find a 95% confidence on preference, for the Radio Shack 24' zip cord!
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.
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?
Because unlike Klipsch, you may be aiming at low colouration instead of just high efficiency. Cable inductance has a measurable (though in most cases imperceptible) impact on high frequency signals. Also, it has the advantage of being measurable. Is it important? No. A hi-fi nut won't care about that, though, will he? I'm just pointing out that it's one of the aspects you actually can control, cheaply, if you want to look into your speaker wiring.
Or did you at all read what I wrote, in the thing you so eloquently quoted?
It's not "I'm better than you" -- those people are cool with being better than you. The problem is fear and envy: the problem is that if you have made a different choice than someone insecure, it casts doubt on that person's choice, and the person has to defend the choice and attack your choice as being wrong, in what amounts to self-defence.
People with superiority complexes are easy to deal with, in comparison to people with inferiority complexes who are compensating by attacking you and trying to drag you to their level.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
You obviously know more about this than I do, so I'm asking because I don't understand:
If you use powered amplifiers, then you're running the signal through wire to the amp. Any noise the wire picks up gets amplified.
If you're running a big amp, then running heavy wires out to the unpowered speakers, the noise you pick up appears 1:1 in the speakers.
Doesn't the latter situation seem innately better, from a noise-fighting standpoint?
When I lay out power-correction circuitry, I put all my effort into minimizing the loop area in front of the amplifiers, the high-impedance region, and downstream of the amp, I just make sure nothing's overtly stupid. It seems like the same would hold for audio amplifiers, wouldn't it? Or are you saying that the wire type does actually matter a lot, that shielded wire to powered amps is a much better solution than unshielded wire for either unpowered or powered speakers?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That appears to be a Christian sex-toy site. No really, I think that's what it is. Ok then ... I think that's all I had to say on the subject.
I'm going to go spend some time off the tubes for a while, my brain hurts.
Unshielded Twisted Pair is not the same as Z-balanced cabling. UTP contains two conductors to form an electrical circuit. Balanced cabling does not form a circuit and is not analogous to UTP except in the sense that both transmit voltage oscillations that are converted into sound.
However, the PRIMARY advantage of balanced audio cabling is this... There's a hot lead and a cold lead. The hot lead carries the audio signal. The cold lead carries a copy of the audio signal, but phase shifted 180 degrees. That is to say the two signals, if combined in this way, would cancel each other out.
RF/EMI disturbance introduces noise into the signal along the line. In an unbalanced cable this noise travels all the way to the other end. However, in a balanced cable system what happens is that the noise is picked up by both the hot and cold leads. At this point the noise is in phase while the original signal is out of phase. Then, at the other end the cold lead's signal is flipped back in phase with the hot lead. Now the signal is in phase and the noise is out of phase! Voila... efficient noise cancellation.
Also I should note that POTS is assisted by coils that act as signal repeaters to amplify transmissions over long distances, but these repeater coils must be removed on lines supporting DSL as they interfere with the much higher bandwidth DSL signal. Consequently, DSL signals become severely attenuated at distances approaching 18,000 feet. In the case of Rate Adaptive DSL, the most common DSL around today, this translates into reduced bandwidth because the number of frequency-spread channels across which downstream traffic is transmitted start dropping out. This has nothing to do with the cable being balanced or not... because technically it's not a balanced cable, and it can't be because balanced cabling involves a phase shift where the two separate leads should not succumb to RF crosstalk. In the case of UTP, crosstalk is beneficial because the twists in the unshielded pair actually serve to increase the signal power (measurable in decibel-milliwatts, or dBm) and consequently improve SNR over rated distances. The higher the category rating of the UTP, the more twists per meter, and the higher the bandwidth capacity.
Also, it should be noted that structured cabling systems like SYSTIMAX are an implementation of UTP where not one pair but all four pairs are used simultaneously for transmit/receive, thus increasing the available bandwidth (e.g. CAT 5 UTP single pair would support up to 155Mbps whereas CAT 5 SYSTIMAX supported up to 655Mbps over rated distances).
Ok, so this topic is just up my alley. As a former editor for an unnamed Primedia publication I can let you in on a few secrets and also tell you why this article does not suprise me in the least. Now I don't know the "editor" of this audiophile mag, but I do use the term "editor" loosely as it infers some type of integrity. Here is the low down. Primedia is all about the bottom line and that generally leaves no room for the reader. The reader of a magazine is simply to boost numbers so the publication can show a potential advertiser how many readers they have and what the potential exposure for said company is, if they advertise. When I worked for one of their "magazines", I also use this term loosely since they are more like catalogs, I was often told to do a review of the product. When said review didn't live up to it's claims we either had to twist the truth and create enough hype that the shortcomming gets overlooked, or you call the advertiser and ask them if they want the article to run. The fact is the truth was obfusicated. In any case it is very easy to skew the results of any test. Also unless there is any test data they will usually just spit out manufacturer specs. I was actually fired because I pissed off some advertisers and published an article without checking to see if it was "ok" with the advertiser. This advertiser demanded my head for this and Primedia gave it to them. The $5000 full page ad was saved, praise be to Jesus. here is the deal and it is just like everything else, so get out the tin foil hats. Primedia doesn't care about it's readers. It cares about it's advertisers.
Speaker cable should be short and fat. Some would argue short and fat and twisted. The resistance of a wire is proportional to its length and inversely proportional to its cross section. so twice the length = twice the resistance, twice the cross sectional area = half the resistance unless you are dealing with extreme frequencies or extreme powers and that doesn't apply to speaker cable.
The reason is that a loud speaker is a reactive load, when the amp drives the speaker, the speaker drives it back or tries too. The amp combats this by having a low output impedance and negative feedback. The problem is that the speaker wire and the speaker are not part of the feedback loop.
An analogy might be to imagine that you have lost the remote control for your tv. Being lazy you get a long cane from the garden shed and tape a pencil eraser to the end and use this to sit in your chair and prod at the buttons on the telly with your cane. Dont knock this, I've seen it done. Clearly the longer, thiner and more springy the cane the more difficult this will be to do. You will keep overshooting and over correcting and the end will bounce up and down. not an exact analogy as you can see the end of the cane, but close.
Loud speakers often have an impedance of about 8 ohms so a 1 ohm resistance in the cable and connectors is getting on for significant.
As for twisted, twisting a cable improves its performance at higher frequencies. I don't know if this is significant in the audio spectrum.
According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen-free_copper oxygen free copper has a lower resistance than ordinary copper, a whole 1% lower. It is probably cheaper to add 1% more copper to the cable (to the thickness, not the length) than it is to use a more expensive material. If you are rich you could use gold or silver for the wires both are better conductors than copper.
If you look at the frequency plot for a loudspeaker eg www.jblpro.com/pages/components/maxout.htm you will see a very jagged line and wonder why they work as well as they do. I would think that imperfections in the mechanical bit of the system are going to overwhelm imperfections in the electronic/electrical part of the setup.
Anyway, after twenty odd years playing with loud PA systems I doubt if I could tell the difference between a $7000 set of speaker leads and a bit 1.5mm^2 mains wire. Just don't use woolworths bell wire and you should be ok.
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 ][
In sum, we are not making progress. A hundred years ago, they would laugh at an Oxford professor who went around attacking other academics for thinking that religion is better than science at revealing the truth about the world. But that's because the only people who thought this in 1907 were considered fringe loonies, not worth bothering with. Now, attacking the same loonie position is ... ooh, controversial. And Dawkins is what, brave for doing so? You call that progress?
Ok lets take a couple things one at a time.
Any noise the wire picks up gets amplified.
True. Instead of using unshielded speaker wire, the best thing to use is shielded twisted pair. Most home stereo stuff does not accept balanced inputs, so the next best thing is 100% shielded coax. The selection of dielectric is important. Look up cable rustle. Dielectric with an embeded charge can be microphonic and pick up mechanical noises of things bumping the cable. This is a problem mostly with amplifiers with high input impedance. (>20K Ohm) The current generated is often too low to be significant in low impedance circuits. (Doesn't the latter situation seem innately better, from a noise-fighting standpoint?
Yes. Long signal wire is a noise pick-up if unshielded.
When I lay out power-correction circuitry, I put all my effort into minimizing the loop area in front of the amplifiers, the high-impedance region, and downstream of the amp
Good plan
Or are you saying that the wire type does actually matter a lot, that shielded wire to powered amps is a much better solution than unshielded wire for either unpowered or powered speakers?
What I am saying is when laying out a system, you have to deal with real resistance of a speaker wire. Part of the distortion in an amplifier speaker setup is the ability for the amplifier to control the movement of the speaker cone. The figure often thrown out is call Damping Factor. For an example of this, take a speaker not connected to anything and drum the cone lightly with your fingers. Now repeat the test with a short length of wire shorting the speaker terminals. Notice anything different? Now repeat the test a third time with cheap 24 gauge speaker wire connected. 25 feet should do nicely, and short the far end of the wire. The resistance of the cheap wire reduced the ability of the amplifier to damp the unwanted speaker cone resonances.
Not only is there resistance in wire, there is capacitance and resistance. All these are factors in how power is delivered to the speakers and unwanted reflected power is returned back to the amplifier.
For the answer to your question.. It's a trade-off. Knowing how much noise you gain and how much reduction in fidelity loss should be what affect your decision. Trade noise pick-up for speaker damping and frequency response. Noise pick-up can be managed. Eliminating speaker cable resistance, inductance, and capacitance is as easy as removing gravity which is why there is $7000 speaker cable for the fools to buy. All the expensive speaker cable attempt to eliminate the problems created by using speaker cable. The proper solution is to eliminate the speaker cable or keep them as short as physically possible. Resistance, inductance and capacitance all add up over the length of the cable. Cut the cable length in half, the problem is also cut in half. It is easy to figure as well as measure the improvement going from a 20 foot cable to a 6 inch cable. Measuring the change in a 20 foot 12 AWG zip cord and a 20 foot 12 AWG monster oxygen free cable is much harder.
The truth shall set you free!
You are absolutely correct about resistance. Fatter cables = less resistive loss in copper. After a point, though, you reach dimishing returns. For a 20 watt power level, is it worth it to drop your losses from 0.1 to 0.05 watts? There are two approaches here:
1) Engineer way: determine desires power level, speaker resistance, cable length & cross section, and select based on calculations.
2) Common-sense way: buy the thickest thing that is reasonable priced and call it good enough (easiest, and good enough)
What you are talking about is most likely the skin effect and, unless you are running 100 W and using gigantic cables, the "skin" still extends to the center of the cable for audio frequencies. Forget about it.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
The problem is that the speaker wire separates the speaker from the feedback loop.
That is why speakers sound better on cables with lower resistance.
Anyway, after twenty odd years playing with loud PA systems I doubt if I could tell the difference between a $7000 set of speaker leads and a bit 1.5mm^2 mains wire. Right on target. What is the point in using super-expensive super-fat cables if the power supply or internal wiring is done bad.