Cable directionality & cables

Tone - allthough your "blind test" results are interesting they are not statistically significant - that is to say, you could have got the same results just by chance. It would be worth following up with a proper DBT with enough listeners and tests to be able to reach statistically meaningful results.

btw, I'm not questioning that you do R&D and take the whole thing seriously, clearly you do. However, if we're not dealing with known science and measurable electrical parameters then what does your R&D involve? If listening is the acid test then it would seem that trial and error is the only R&D that can be involved. It's one thing to start with the idea, for example, that lower capacitance equals better sound and therefore strive to reduce capacitance but if you don't even know what makes a cable sound better or worse then R&D has to be just "suck it and see". As far as I know no one has ever been able to correlate a particular electrical property of a cable (inductance, capacitance, resistance) to differences in sound so I don't see how cable R&D can be anything more than throwing darts in the dark and seeing where they land.

Chris (bottleneck) - I agree with you that I think that cables should not be regarded as components in their own right. They should be there to connect your components in the most transparent way possible. When people start using cables as "tone controls" it's a short route to madness. OTOH the same argument could be used for preamps. In theory they should be to connect your selected source to your power amp in as transparent a way as possible so by that argument they shouldn't be regarded as components either. In that sense passive pres meet that criteria much more closely than active ones (in theory at least). Did I mention I just got a passive pre?

Michael.

 

Surely the extent to which changes in cabling will be audible depends on the detail and transparency of the amps and speakers.

Clearly we should first select the cables that we think are best and then choose source components, speakers and amps that work best with those cables.

 

Michael,

trial and error is a very expensive business, hence the cost of many cables. R&D, if done properly will neccessarily be costly.

My take is that there IS something out there, it's just we don't understand it. Companies that pretend they do are charlatans. Stumbling on something that sounds good however is, I believe feasible. It just takes time.

Simply because whatever it is cannot currently be measured does not mean it does not exist. I'm sure the planets in the solar system were around for a long time before man was able to fully understand them, as was infra red light, ultra violet, and ultrasound. But hey, those of a scientific bent can simply ignore things and choose not to purchase anyway. Or of course they can waste their time making people imagine they are imagining things

 

WM,
If you go back to page 4 of this thread, which is reprint below for
quick reference it does gives the impression that you do believe that cables has directionality. My apology if I misunderstond you.

I do admire you for at least trying to indulging some of us, like Michealab who has lost faith in claims that hifi manufacturers are actually doing any real R&D. Some seems to repackage Japanese electronics in fancy box, put an expensive sounding label and sale it for 4x more. Or some just simply repackage some off the shelf cables and repackage it as audiophile cables after months of pseudo R&D.

 

Nothing wrong with trial and error method. However, what is prove they have found the breakthough. Seems like it is more to do with getting the marketing exercise correctly. Sweeten some gullible magazines journalists and some costumers will buy it. Most of them are unlikely to challenge the believe and repeat the favourable pseudo improvement.

My interest is to try to find which are the manufacturers that actually take R&D seriously and understood how to separate real from imagined improvements.

 

I suspect that many smaller companies take R & D seriously and generally spend a great deal of time listening to their products, testing and experimenting. They have to sell on sound quality, not on reputation.

As for the larger companies, some do, some don't.

 

you know, in many ways Im the worst of hypocrites.

I choose Goertz speaker cable which I know sounds different to many other speaker cables. I know that it is probably less ?neutral? (if thats the word).. but I like it so I use it.

If Im using a speaker cable as a tone control, arent I being a little hypocritical?

maybe! oh I dunno.

perhaps it would help us all if manufacturers decided on which measurements would be most applicable to the cabling industry, and stamped it on the packaging a little like the ingredients on a can of food.

An agreement of standards, followed by public education sounds good to me.

I dont like the idea of badly measuring products hiding hidden nasties without me knowing. If aerospace boffins did produce all audio cables, at least maybe we would have some rationality to it

Ive always wondered if there is a very very good cable out there for audio applications that is used in another industry, costing, say, 10 quid a metre... that would set a new reference etc.. ?

Theres a question for WM!!.... whats the best alternative youve found off the reel for the budget conscious tone? .. and did it measure well, or just sound right (or both?)

Hope everyones having a good w/end.


Chris

 

Ah then you won't be buying any valve amps then

 

One thing that i would like to add to this discussion is that most of my cables have the directional arrows on them , either printed on the jacket or applied as a sticker by the manufacturer. I always make sure that i put the 'from end' at the source. I don't know why , i seem to remember doing my own little mini, lo-tech experiment many years ago ( listen , swap, listen , swap.....) and couldn't hear any differences, old habits die hard though and although i might not be able to detect any difference in sound i figured it doesn't hurt to fit them the 'right way around'.
There have been many times when I've gone to change a component only to discover the cable fitted 'incorrectly' though, and often for many months, .

 

I didn't say that! I think that in general the hifi industry does do a lot of worthwhile R&D. I also know that Tony does a lot of R&D for his cables - I was just questioning what form that R&D takes.

There is no doubt some "rebranding" of cheap stuff with a load of marketing hype to sell it for a fortune but I think that on the whole it's reasonably honest.

However, when Nordost themselves say they have no idea how their latest power cords work you start to wonder what you're paying for. On the one hand it's refreshingly honest of them to admit it but on the other, how did they get the product they have? Surely they must have started out with some idea of what they wanted to do? If so, what? Based on what?

Michael.

 

cheeky cheeky!

NB
I wont be buying any valve amps, cos Ive got em already

 

Sorry to misquote you. On the whole it seems we are share similar sentiment that there is a segment of hifi industry who have no idea what they are doing and only fuel by pure hype. Maybe WM is right. Why should it be my concern. I will let others be the voice of reasoning.

 

Many seem to be of the view that there are a lot of people out there who are easily influenced and persuaded to part with large amounts of their cash for various pieces of over-priced, over-hyped and under-R&D'd rubbish.

Of course no one reading this will recognize themselves as being amongst these people. I wonder who they are?

 

I'm one of them . Steve, you've hit on another good point which is that once people have been taken in by the cable myth and have spent hundreds of pounds (or more) on cables (or supports :torkmada: ) then it's ever so hard to admit that you were conned so your belief in them is self-perpetuating.

Fortunately I never got in very deep before seeing the light.

Michael.

 

Michael, next time you're in England let's see if we can persuade Tone to come down to my place with some cables. I currently have some silver ICs, silver speaker cable and cheap mains leads. I also have a supply of inexpensive ICs we can try.

We could have a play and see what we see (hear what we hear). We could invite others around and have a cable bake-off.

Anyone up for this?

 

Unfortunately (for you) this uninformed opinion is leading you to miss out on a wealth of clarity, detail and dynamics which your system would otherwise exhibit. Your blind prejudice is extraordinary. But when you have never heard anything better, then you will never know...



P.S. I have a non-wanky interconnect which is a fair bit better than the Naim standard-issue item. But I don't think that it is directional.

 

It's so sad that many audiopiles are now waking up to the GREAT CABLE scam, but there not much that can be done legally (yet) to sue the arses off the charlatans who are promoting the scam.

The great thing about US law is that you can still get them 20 years after they have fleeced the public .... Bruce Brisson/ MIT etc .... take your money and run to offshore drug dealer havens. You still have time.

 

but the rack makers are OK then?

 

What a great thread.
Just admit it guys ... the whole cable/interconnect thing is a load of horse shit .

..... whoops, Oh God, no we can't do that .... it may lead to the he idea that all CDP's and Amps sound much the same and that we are all idiots spending megabucks getting what the punters get for bugger-all.

No .... let's leave it here. $5,000 per meter cables are good, $1 per meter cables are bad ....... $20,000 CDP's are good .... $800 CDP's are bad.

Ohh, that's better isn't it guys. We, the tiny minority who trouble to go on forums and anguish about cable dirtectionality, get so much more pleasure from our systems than the billions of people who party up in night clubs, and their homes and enjoy the music unreservedly without a goddamn care who made the amps or what direction the cables are connected.

What a pathetic bunch of wankers we all are, pretending that we enjoy music more than the "Conservatory Of Music" student who saved for 5 years to buy a GBP3,000 Cello but has no hope of buying a GBP60,000 Naim system.

Let's get real. ..... We are "Boys with Toys" because we can afford it and we like it.
Bugger all of us can actually "play" music in any meaningfull sense .... if we could, we'd be worth "truckloads" and would buy any damn system we wanted ...... but of course if we could play .... we wouldn't have any need to spend GBP60,00 on a replay system.

 

ill count myself out of the wanker clique, you do as you want