acoustic zen or chord indigo?

Hi,

I used a version of this kit when I used to work at the university. Nice stuff.

SCIDB

 

This might be more in the budget and (only) slightly less tittersome.

Anyway simplest is just to measure the FR somewhere nearer the speakers for each interconnect cable.

Paul

(He said 'Peak', huh huh huh huh)

 

I just bought one of those Peak LCR gadgets, but is it really going to be accurate enough to measure the inductance of a single bit of IC? It only goes down to 1uH.

 

I didn't look at the ranges. Never mind.

I think that inductance is unlikely to be significant for an interconnect, but the simplest way to demonstrate that the cables are sufficiently electrically similar is to measure the FR of the system and show it's the same for both options.

Paul

 

If you are hoping to change peoples viewpoint and cable please can someone explain why is a LCR test needed? Cant a cheap cable and and expensive cable be blind tested? After all this is what the belivers view is.

I think the hypothesis we are going to test should be
"do interconnects sound different?" rather than do interconnects with a similar LCR value sound different?"

regards
Andy

 

It is well known that a small frequency response change is audible, so cables that produce a small change in FR due to their bulk electrical parameters may sound different. This isn't the 'believers' belief though, otherwise they wouldn't buy expensive cables. So for a test to be interesting it has to be between cables that should sound the same but are claimed not to.

Paul

 

I've got one of THESE

 

Subjective tests are not easy to make sensitive and reliable enough, even if there is a real difference.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you have two types of cable with a real audio difference. Your assistant presents pairs in a comparison and asks: difference or no difference? Your assistant runs 100 trials where the pair is the same 50% of the time, in random order.
Let's say you are good at hi-fi and you detect a difference when there really is one on 80% of occasions.
You say no difference when there really is a lack of difference on 70% of occasions. That'd be pretty good, one might think?

So in 100 trials
you detect 40 true positives (80% of 50) and 15 false positives (30% of 50).
you detect 35 true negatives and 10 false negatives.

In other words, the odds of a true vs false positive are 40:15 - pretty poor looking odds. So even if I can in the long run detect differences between cables as good as this, and 50% of the cables on the market are worth it audio-wise, I will waste my money 27% of the time. And the frequency of worth-it cables might well be a lot lower than 50%, making my discrimination performance a lot worse and my waste of money even more probable.

 

Guys,
Its a moot point. Cable "A" will sound different in every system. Its all about synergy you know. To date I have never heard a cable give equal results in two different systems.
All we can do is keep trying cables until we find the one that synergizes with our components.

rollo