They both damage the plugs - one's corrosive, the other's abrasive. If you use an acid like lemon juice, you must completely clean and dry the metal afterwards, if you leave even a small trace then you'll leave it in a worse state than it was before.
You're still missing the fact that frequency != bandwidth. You've forgotten little things like the fact that signals have an amplitude and there's noise on the channel.
You are not viewing things like an engineer at all.
I seem to remember 9/11 being the suicide of fewer than 20 whackjobs. Took 3000 with them. Encouraging whackjobs to commit suicide ain't always sensible.
Books will not support your view, or at least they won't support the calculation you performed in your earlier post. To view the bandwidth of an arbitrary audio signal to be numerically equal to the highest frequency you're interested in preserving is just plain wrong, which is what you first claimed. My initial sticking point was that you were talking about measuring bandwidth simply in hertz, and not in bits per second. If you had grasped the distinction between the two units, then it would have been immediately clear that the channel capacity (equivalently SNR, assuming worst-case gaussian noise) required to transmit an arbitrary audio signal would be related somehow to the number of bits that would required to represent the data digitally (even if you have no intention of ever representing it digitally).
You, sir, are a certified fuckwit, and apparently proud of it. Such results are already written up, for example by Russell, who is one of the canonical audiophilia debunkers. See the links upthread. For once in your life, please attempt to use your brain before spouting bollocks.
There's no point in hunting out the URL for you, as I get the feeling you'll completely fail to understand the report anyway.
Why do people like you keep brainlessly repeating that "as long as gauge is sufficient" mantra? Gauge *is an intrinsic property of the cable*, you can't change it. You can methodically compare cables, and you can easily detect that there's an audible difference between them. This is undisputed amongst scientists. You can't make 14-core bell wire 'of sufficent gauge', as it wouldn't be 14-core bell wire if you changed the guage. If you use 10 cords in parallel, then you're not testing 14-core bell wire, you're testing 10 cords of 14-core bell wire. And you _can_ tell the difference between 14-core bell wire and decent hifi cable on anything apart from the short runs. Even that audiophile-debunkers agree on that - see the links that have been posted elsewhere.
Mindlessly echoing "all speaker cables are equivalent as long as the guage is sufficient" is as vapid an arguement as saying "all cars are affordable as long as you're sufficently rich". Not exactly an earth shattering revelation.
Why on earth would you be more interested in reading a write-up by someone else when it's trivial to perform such an experiment yourself - all you need is a decent hifi with some low impedence speakers, and one friend? And don't bother writing it up - you don't need to write things up in order to make them a reality, you know.
It's not that weird. There have been examples of viruses and trojans installing P2P peering software in the past. Sometimes they are set up to only share their own exploit code (so rather than downloading the actual payload from a single blockable site in.hr, you could get it from any number of places, maybe thousands, which can't all be blocked), but there's nothing to stop them being used as more generic file-sharing peers.
You're just throwing buzz-words around without understanding them. There's absolutely no need for a double-blind test, as there's only a single party doing any evaluation or interpretation of the result - me. As long as I am blinded, and I make up my own mind, then single-blind is all it needs to be. It even says that explicitly on that wikipedia page if you could be bothered to read it.
And anyway. I could trivially tell the difference between the two in a double-blind test (being as it is identical to the single-blind experiment I took where the one doing the test did nothing that could introduce any bias, it was a purely mechanical role he took that a robot could have done), it was as clear as day.
Just for reference, if you're so clever, can you please tell me the impedence of the speaker units I was using and the length of the cables being used, and from make an estimate as to the impedence of the cables themselves?
Because you are aware that those factors make a very big difference, aren't you?
Copper oxide is not porous, and when the outer film of it is created, it doesn't spread. The part of the plug that's actually making contact will not corrode. That's the part I care about.
Bandwidths aren't measured in hertz. In your calculation you've neglected the fact that the transmitted audio signal is not digital. That accounts for over an order of magnitude difference. Of course, 3 orders of magnitude is still huge, but one shouldn't just carelessly ignore entire orders of magnitude.
For example in a 1-correct-2-detect code, it knows that: P(0 bits are wrong) = 0 P(bit X is wrong | only 1 bit is wrong) = 1 P(any other bit apart from X is wrong | only 1 bit is wrong) = 0 P(1 bit is wrong) = 1-eps P(2 bits are wrong) = 0 P(3 or more bits are wrong) = eps
It's chosing the most likely outcome from a probabilistic model. Otherwise known as guessing.
I'm astounded. I used to think I knew the audiophile world, but what I saw at the end of that URL was just mindblowing. I'm hoping that it's limited to the US (I grew up, and did all my hifi dabbling, in the UK half a decade back and there was nothing like that being sold so openly).
I've got what I consider to be great speaker cable (lots of copper in a relatively long thin arrangement), and I suspect in total between 2 hifis (lounge & bedroom), I've spent no more than $100 on cables. (Which includes a couple of >10m stretches, and half a dozen interconnects, and takes into account the current value of the dollar, and a decade's inflation.)
To a music lover such as myself, that site was the equivalent of scat porn.
The names the companies give to the cables too are laughable. Hmmm, just like porn-star names!
The funny thing is that there are often improvements that can be made to even quite decent hi-fi's. I 'upgraded' one of my amps by just sticking some honking great caps onto the power stage. It now takes 3 times as long for the LED to go out when I power it down. (I bi-amp with formerly identical amps, and so was trivially able to do side-by-side comparison of the one I upgraded against the one I left as is). Total cost of the upgrade? Less than 2 inches of Monster Cable, and about 20 minutes with a screwdriver and soldering iron. Will I do the upgrade to the other amp? Nope - only the bass needed the current-driving capability, there's simply no point doing it for the treble.
Of anybody in the world at a skeptics meeting, Randi should have been "a man who needs no introduction". What you describe sounds pitiful. But not Randi's fault.
If you are a US tax payer, then you don't want your money going to Puthoff and Targ. James Randi is one of the people debunking them, as they've already sucked millions of tax dollars with their S.R.I. experiments.
"There is no perceptible difference in the sound produced by a $50 player or a $500 player, none, zilch, nada. "
Utter nonsense.
All d2a converters in the world are identical - do you really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
In fact, _deliberately_, all 1st generation commercial CD players were designed to have a horribly tinny treble-heavy sound, as that was the single feature that made them contrast greatly against vinyl, and the mass market was told that this was "better", when in fact it was just plain horrible (I remember an early Phillips from the 80s which suffered from this design). Gradually the market matured, and vinyl became less of a threat, and again by design, CD player manufacturers started bringing out players with a much less harsh sound.
Note - the above applies much more to high-street brands than to quality brands.
Gold is less good if you're continually plugging and unplugging, as you'll get worse mechanical contact over time as it wears and the connectors become looser. (woh, odd to see that word used correctly!)
Gauge isn't as important as people think it is. Current flows at the outer surface, which means that if you quadruple the amount of copper, it only behaves as if you've doubled the amount.
That's why Litz cables are so good, there is no outer surface. I've done a blind (literally - your hearing improves dramatically if you close your eyes) test of ordinary £1/m 79-core against 200+-strand Litz (I was told I didn't want to know the price, this was an engineer who was showing off the kit, not a salesman), and the differences were astounding. (When connecting hand-built speakers (with 12" metal woofers, and tweeters with about +/-10mm throw, both by Bandor) to a hand-built amp.)
Of course you freeze them - who doesn't? But how do you get rid of the non-linear oxygen?
Simple - you centrefuge the cables. The non-linear oxygen flies right out of the ends of the cables, and hey presto - your cables are now ready to use without having any of that nasty 'bubbly' distortion.
Slashdot Mirror
They both damage the plugs - one's corrosive, the other's abrasive. If you use an acid like lemon juice, you must completely clean and dry the metal afterwards, if you leave even a small trace then you'll leave it in a worse state than it was before.
You're still missing the fact that frequency != bandwidth.
You've forgotten little things like the fact that signals have an amplitude and there's noise on the channel.
You are not viewing things like an engineer at all.
It's not hypothetical - there really was a case in the UK a few years ago where an A-Z brand street map was treated as such information.
I seem to remember 9/11 being the suicide of fewer than 20 whackjobs. Took 3000 with them.
Encouraging whackjobs to commit suicide ain't always sensible.
Books will not support your view, or at least they won't support the calculation you performed in your earlier post. To view the bandwidth of an arbitrary audio signal to be numerically equal to the highest frequency you're interested in preserving is just plain wrong, which is what you first claimed. My initial sticking point was that you were talking about measuring bandwidth simply in hertz, and not in bits per second. If you had grasped the distinction between the two units, then it would have been immediately clear that the channel capacity (equivalently SNR, assuming worst-case gaussian noise) required to transmit an arbitrary audio signal would be related somehow to the number of bits that would required to represent the data digitally (even if you have no intention of ever representing it digitally).
Re your first sentence - no, I am not arguing that. Read my freaking posts, I've been quite clear.
Stop pretending to be an illiterate fool, it's not big or clever.
Re the rest of your post - didn't even read it, as presumably it demonstrates an equal lack of reading comprehension.
I reiterate - bandwidth isn't measured in Hertz.
Please read Cover and Thomas, or _any_ book relevant to the field.
You, sir, are a certified fuckwit, and apparently proud of it. Such results are already written up, for example by Russell, who is one of the canonical audiophilia debunkers. See the links upthread. For once in your life, please attempt to use your brain before spouting bollocks.
There's no point in hunting out the URL for you, as I get the feeling you'll completely fail to understand the report anyway.
Why do people like you keep brainlessly repeating that "as long as gauge is sufficient" mantra? Gauge *is an intrinsic property of the cable*, you can't change it. You can methodically compare cables, and you can easily detect that there's an audible difference between them. This is undisputed amongst scientists. You can't make 14-core bell wire 'of sufficent gauge', as it wouldn't be 14-core bell wire if you changed the guage. If you use 10 cords in parallel, then you're not testing 14-core bell wire, you're testing 10 cords of 14-core bell wire. And you _can_ tell the difference between 14-core bell wire and decent hifi cable on anything apart from the short runs. Even that audiophile-debunkers agree on that - see the links that have been posted elsewhere.
Mindlessly echoing "all speaker cables are equivalent as long as the guage is sufficient" is as vapid an arguement as saying "all cars are affordable as long as you're sufficently rich". Not exactly an earth shattering revelation.
Why on earth would you be more interested in reading a write-up by someone else when it's trivial to perform such an experiment yourself - all you need is a decent hifi with some low impedence speakers, and one friend? And don't bother writing it up - you don't need to write things up in order to make them a reality, you know.
It's not that weird. There have been examples of viruses and trojans installing P2P peering software in the past. Sometimes they are set up to only share their own exploit code (so rather than downloading the actual payload from a single blockable site in .hr, you could get it from any number of places, maybe thousands, which can't all be blocked), but there's nothing to stop them being used as more generic file-sharing peers.
You're just throwing buzz-words around without understanding them. There's absolutely no need for a double-blind test, as there's only a single party doing any evaluation or interpretation of the result - me. As long as I am blinded, and I make up my own mind, then single-blind is all it needs to be. It even says that explicitly on that wikipedia page if you could be bothered to read it.
And anyway. I could trivially tell the difference between the two in a double-blind test (being as it is identical to the single-blind experiment I took where the one doing the test did nothing that could introduce any bias, it was a purely mechanical role he took that a robot could have done), it was as clear as day.
Just for reference, if you're so clever, can you please tell me the impedence of the speaker units I was using and the length of the cables being used, and from make an estimate as to the impedence of the cables themselves?
Because you are aware that those factors make a very big difference, aren't you?
Copper oxide is not porous, and when the outer film of it is created, it doesn't spread. The part of the plug that's actually making contact will not corrode. That's the part I care about.
Bandwidths aren't measured in hertz. In your calculation you've neglected the fact that the transmitted audio signal is not digital. That accounts for over an order of magnitude difference. Of course, 3 orders of magnitude is still huge, but one shouldn't just carelessly ignore entire orders of magnitude.
And it does that reconstruction by guessing.
For example in a 1-correct-2-detect code, it knows that:
P(0 bits are wrong) = 0
P(bit X is wrong | only 1 bit is wrong) = 1
P(any other bit apart from X is wrong | only 1 bit is wrong) = 0
P(1 bit is wrong) = 1-eps
P(2 bits are wrong) = 0
P(3 or more bits are wrong) = eps
It's chosing the most likely outcome from a probabilistic model. Otherwise known as guessing.
I'm astounded. I used to think I knew the audiophile world, but what I saw at the end of that URL was just mindblowing. I'm hoping that it's limited to the US (I grew up, and did all my hifi dabbling, in the UK half a decade back and there was nothing like that being sold so openly).
I've got what I consider to be great speaker cable (lots of copper in a relatively long thin arrangement), and I suspect in total between 2 hifis (lounge & bedroom), I've spent no more than $100 on cables. (Which includes a couple of >10m stretches, and half a dozen interconnects, and takes into account the current value of the dollar, and a decade's inflation.)
To a music lover such as myself, that site was the equivalent of scat porn.
The names the companies give to the cables too are laughable. Hmmm, just like porn-star names!
The funny thing is that there are often improvements that can be made to even quite decent hi-fi's. I 'upgraded' one of my amps by just sticking some honking great caps onto the power stage. It now takes 3 times as long for the LED to go out when I power it down. (I bi-amp with formerly identical amps, and so was trivially able to do side-by-side comparison of the one I upgraded against the one I left as is). Total cost of the upgrade? Less than 2 inches of Monster Cable, and about 20 minutes with a screwdriver and soldering iron. Will I do the upgrade to the other amp? Nope - only the bass needed the current-driving capability, there's simply no point doing it for the treble.
He's half right. The cone must stay stiff, it's the soft bits which you theoretically want softer.
I've never done a listening test though.
Of anybody in the world at a skeptics meeting, Randi should have been "a man who needs no introduction". What you describe sounds pitiful. But not Randi's fault.
If you are a US tax payer, then you don't want your money going to Puthoff and Targ. James Randi is one of the people debunking them, as they've already sucked millions of tax dollars with their S.R.I. experiments.
"There is no perceptible difference in the sound produced by a $50 player or a $500 player, none, zilch, nada. "
Utter nonsense.
All d2a converters in the world are identical - do you really believe that? Wanna buy a bridge?
In fact, _deliberately_, all 1st generation commercial CD players were designed to have a horribly tinny treble-heavy sound, as that was the single feature that made them contrast greatly against vinyl, and the mass market was told that this was "better", when in fact it was just plain horrible (I remember an early Phillips from the 80s which suffered from this design). Gradually the market matured, and vinyl became less of a threat, and again by design, CD player manufacturers started bringing out players with a much less harsh sound.
Note - the above applies much more to high-street brands than to quality brands.
Gold is less good if you're continually plugging and unplugging, as you'll get worse mechanical contact over time as it wears and the connectors become looser. (woh, odd to see that word used correctly!)
Gauge isn't as important as people think it is. Current flows at the outer surface, which means that if you quadruple the amount of copper, it only behaves as if you've doubled the amount.
That's why Litz cables are so good, there is no outer surface. I've done a blind (literally - your hearing improves dramatically if you close your eyes) test of ordinary £1/m 79-core against 200+-strand Litz (I was told I didn't want to know the price, this was an engineer who was showing off the kit, not a salesman), and the differences were astounding. (When connecting hand-built speakers (with 12" metal woofers, and tweeters with about +/-10mm throw, both by Bandor) to a hand-built amp.)
Of course you freeze them - who doesn't? But how do you get rid of the non-linear oxygen?
Simple - you centrefuge the cables. The non-linear oxygen flies right out of the ends of the cables, and hey presto - your cables are now ready to use without having any of that nasty 'bubbly' distortion.
Above you claimed you charged millions for the source.
"We DID distribute source to all our recipients of the combined work, some half-dozen of them, for millions of dollars each."
That's not in accordance with the license. What company was this?