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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...
Companies like monster cable rely on ignorance to stay in business.
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.
No sig today.
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.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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...
The interesting thing that I noticed in reading up on the cable was that Pear is local to me.
So I looked up their address listed, and it's residential. From the appearance, this appears to be a virtual company, in a nice Tony neighborhood, and all the owners have to do is sell a hundred cables and the house is paid for.
Oh, and the first and final word on speaker cable is from McIntosh's Rodger Russell.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I'm sorry, everyone agrees there's a difference in the distortion characteristics between tube and transistors. It's both measurable and audible. More likely you can prove that digitally modeled valve software sounds nothing like the analogue equipment it's emulating ;-)
> those black ebony (teak?) hockey puck things
Usually done with neoprene rubber and an acoustically inert material (marble, ceramic) - it works. Not sure about teak and for most listening environments the audible improvement will be negligible.
The real fun is with cables, try proving OFHC copper makes any significant electrical difference. Then look at cable capacitance; it's only relevant for passive guitar and Microphone cable (for long runs). Once you have an suitably amplified signal, cable capacitance audibly effects the signal by the same amount as the alignment of the planets or something.
The cable kooks are where it's at, if anyone deserves your scorn it's these guys.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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???
"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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This statement is probably provably false
Don't do that.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
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.
-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."
I find this whole audiophile thing to be absurd, but tubes are the real deal. Maybe not for stereo systems, but for guitar amps there is a noticeable different between those that are tube and transistor based. Tubes saturate differently than transistors. In many applications this is undesirable, but in the case of a guitar amp you will usually want some saturation. Tubes and transistors produce demonstrably different waveforms. Audiophile products (like the wooden knobs referenced earlier) often rely upon pseuso-scientific claims that are not demonstrable.
/. a few weeks ago.
Transistors do sound more harsh. That's why a lot of heavy metal guys prefer transistor amps (Dimebag Darrell really was the first guy I can think of who was vocal in his preference of tranny amps because of the harsh sound). I'd bet that most people could tell the difference between a transistor amp and a tube amp. It's subtle, but it's there. It's like the dynamic range compression that you find on newer recordings. You may not actively *notice* it, but the sound tends to fatigue your ear. There was a nice article on that here on
blah blah blah
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/
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!
I prefer an amp that doesn't clip at all. Then it doesn't matter whether it's a tube or a transistor. I'll add my own clipping and thermal noise for effect, thanks.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.
The Emperor's New Clothes was a hot story, what with the nakedness.
'course, it's always hotter when the story is pumped over Pear Anjou speaker cables...
(Dear god I'm sorry... Anonymous out of shame)
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!
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?
Transistors sound harsher because they don't have as much harmonic distortion.
Both tubes and transistors cause harmonic distortion when saturated. Its the nature of the distortion that causes the harshness.
When a solid state amp is saturated the result is a hard clipped waveform where there is a sharp edge at the point of clipping. This produces a lot of odd harmonics in the frequency spectrum. Odd harmonics over the fundamental tend to sound very harsh to the human ear.
When a tube amp saturates it tends to soft clip the waveform. This means that at the point where clipping occurs the waveform becomes slightly compressed giving a rounder edged waveform. This tends to produces more even harmonic distortion, which to the human ear is not perceived to be nearly as harsh.
dude
My primary reason for selecting larger cables is to reduce power loss, not safety... but larger cables have other benefits, however marginal they may be.
This is why I use sections of railroad track for speaker wires. A little heavy though. :-)