Do cables make a difference ?

Mike, the new price is a little over £200 for a 3m pair. 50% of new is a fair s/h price. If others (eg Markus Sauer who's sale you're referring to) are prepared to accept less that's their business. I've already said it's hardly worth the hassle of changing the cables so if I'm going to do it it'll be on my terms as I've got nothing to lose.

 

Hi,

I have seen a number of measurements of "spectral contamination" on cables, among them in HFN and one set I did myself a long time ago during the microphone cable affair in 86 which suggest that by whatever mechanisms (Allen Wright proposed "microvolt copper oxide diodes", not sure he is right, nice model though untill we find a better one) somewhere between -70 ... -100db signal dependent noisefloor (the same sort as can be found in Electrolytic Capacitors) for certain specific types of conductors.

It is hard to say if we have problems with the measurement setup itself there or if there real problems with these cables (BTW, unsurprisingly the cables in question are multistranded copper) but I consider the subject "open".

http://zerogain.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10775

The mod felt it had nothing to do with HiFi and promptly choked it off before it actually could get interresting by moving it.

Which proves absolutely nothing in general terms, except that certain High End cables are as bad (or good) as Bell Wire. Or maybe that Mr Self's summing amp has too much TIM, PIM and noise modulation to allow cable effects to be measurable.

THERE WE GO AGAIN.

Please stop muddeling up the issue.

Please start a thread about the prices of cables if you must. The price is irelevant to the questions if there are 1) reasons for potentially audible differences between cables other than mass delusion and 2) how we can "engineer out" these differences to make sure cables do not pose a "bottleneck" within the system context.

And as it so happens these two have about as much relation to commercial issues as the price of tea in china, literally!

If you are running out of arguments, don't switch the subject.

Ciao T

 

Wadia / SM - I havent turned my argument around - you turned it around and I have now re-explained it for your benefit. You are confused between my assertions and those of the cable company - which have nothing to do with lcr - thats my point. I never claimed cable companies say lcr has an over riding effect - in fact I claimed the exact opposite. Please note again my ref to fukuwara and the skin effect as well as well as Selfs paper on high end versus base cable as assessed via a summing amp. I can provide page numbers for H&H if necessary .



3d - my points are all moot and I am not yet running out of steam (I can hear you all groaning!). My contention is that all these claims for cables are devised purely for the purpose of justifying an escalating tiered system of outrageous cables costs and therefore specious. i.e. my argument is not that cables are pricy but that these claims are fantasy used to sell very highly priced cables and that this is the reason for their postulation rather than any basis in fact. It is in fact very much like the church.

Please define "spectral contamination" - are we describing distortion here or is it really emc? If you take two cable runs and use the summing amp approach what you are left with is the difference which is essentially the thermal noise floor with no structure. That seems to be a very persuasive objective argument that doesnt seem to involve any points you have raised in objection. I feel I should make a closer examination of selfs paper again and write something a bit more solid on this topic.

I will check out the philosophy thread and stick my oar in the water if appropriate I must admit "warning: contentious and wordy" has already whetted my appetite. I should slap such a sticker on my forehead.

 

Nick, Please note again, I'm not agruing over the skin effect, I agree its B/S
You stated manufactures on their websites use the LRC thereom to justify this, I asked you to show me 3 examples NOTHING more
so stop pissing in the wind and jump to it boy!!!

 

First of all, I am not the mod, just one of several. I moved the thread because it was a thread more about philosophy than hifi and therefore belongs in the chat section. I left a re-direct. I don't see how moving a thread to the chat section is in any way "choking it off". The chat section is often more active than the hifi section! I think people were pretty much satisfied that you'd been put in your place by sideshowbob and that there wasn't much more entertainment to be had there

Michael.

 

WM - no I didnt state that. I keep telling you. Stop setting up straw men!

 

BEST STUPID THREAD EVER!!!!

This one will run and run I'm sure. Here's another tuppence from me. I have a number of free cables that I got from richer sounds when I bought my DVD player they chucked in 3 sets so I could use the component outputs. Anyway last evening I did a little experiment with a couple of hifi savvy mates. I have a Clearaudio interconnect that I found on ebay for 12 quid, retail was 80 odd so I bought it a couple of years back thinking as many do that it would improve the sound or at least get more out of what I have. ( I've always been sceptical but I had a few quid spare and thought why not. It's purple and has big gold plugs and certainly looks the part.

Anyway largely due to this thread I set up a cable test using them between my phono stage and my amp. I never changed the cables once I used the bog standard cambridge stuff from richer sounds but on the 4 occassions I said I'd put in the clearaudio it was remarkable how the sound "improved".

To be fair this was a sighted completely un scientifc test but it was good enough for me.

 

Nick,

with respect, you made some wild and widespread accusations questioning the ethics of cable manufacturers in general. All I am asking you to do is to validate those claims, but you seem to want to turn the thing around and have so far failed to back up your earlier posts.

I gather there is a very interesting AES paper presented by Jon Risch, in which he explains a system for measuring cable distortion using a TEF-20 and a PHI series of tones (AES Preprint #4803, A New Class of In-Band Multitone Test Signals, AES website, www.aes.org). It clearly shows differences between cable and cabling systems, such as bi-wiring. His system plots harmonic distortion in cable current transfer apparently.

Does anyone have access to this? I suspect Michael does as he seems to regularly quote blind test results from this publication. Could you shed some light on this for me Michael?

 

Or, just maybe, you secretly are worried of the sonic difference

 

So here we have a cable manufacturer explicitly stating that the LCR parameters of their range of cables are similar, yet making substantial claims for a sound difference. I think that supports Nick's point?

Paul

 

where did WM make 'substantial claims'?
I only saw him suggest we ask his customers.

 

Hi,

And my contention remains that the presence of the church, the fact that it demands money for it's services (questionable as they are), it's idolatry, it's fraud, it's suppresion of truth and so many other things have absolutely nothing to do with the existence (or not) of the divine.

I am not interrested in what the church does. I am not interrested in what others criticise in the church. In fact, to me the church is one of the many things that are and are of not particular interest to me.

Now the divine, that is a very different question and one that intensly interrestes me. But there is nothing that I can learn about the divine by observing the church, but I can learn much about the divine (or it's absence) by looking at creation or nature, depending on viewpoint.

The term "Spectral Contamination" was coined by Deane Jensen and Gary Sokolich in their 1988 AES Paper titled "SPECTRAL CONTAMINATION MEASUREMENT".

It is applied to signals that create additional intermodulation distortion products when amplified by (or passed through) succeeding stages. These signals are folded back into the audible frequency range, generating an audio modulated, non-harmonically related noise floor. This type of noise is characterized by listeners as a "veil" in front of the music.

(mostly adapted from the Jensen Transformers website)

In many ways we do not neccesarily know where the source for spectral contamination, it may EMI rectified and folded back into the audio range, it may be high order, low level nonlinearity, one of the key featuers is that spectral contamination appears not with single tone measurements but only with a sufficient complex input signal.

Here some spectral contamination measurements from a (exemplary low distortion) speaker:



It is measured in this case with 20 single tones and illustrates around -40db for the midrange and worst spikes of contamination, around -50db for the average higher up and -30db for the worst case at low freqencies.

A speaker is an excellent example of illustrating low order, high level spectral contamination, low level high order looks more like a uniform noisefloor, but one that is signal dependent.

Is that so. I mean have you actually done the test yourself? And have you (for arggunets sake) com pared some well rotted stranded copper and new solid silver?

Ciao T

 

I still don't see Nick backing up his claims. Indeed, I have just been looking through some sites, and cannot find any claims that fit the description given. Still I'm sure he will come up with something. Simply selectively quoting a small manufacturer Paul? Surely there's more out there?

 

Hi,

This a sentiment open to doubt. In the thread I contended that peoples individual worldview had a significant and determining effect in how they percieved "extreme" HiFi. I would think this extremely important to any discussion about HiFi.

Yet as soon as it was moved it basically died, yet it was extremely active while it remained in the right context.

But as noted, the moderators do have the right to arbitrarily enforce their own views on others, that is what is they are moderators for.

Ciao T

 

Whilst we're used to taking rather unfair criticism from time to time, this is just plain silly. We do not arbitrarily enforce our views on others. Don't forget we are posters in our own right.

I agree with Michael (now, there's a surprise I hear you say), moving a thread and leaving a link should not cause a thread to die. It probably died because Ian lost interest in the topic or was too busy to partcipate (IMO).

Regarding this thread. I have already expressed my views a number of times. I believe cables can make a difference but these differences are subtle.

 

SM - its hardly widespread and wild to see no evidence exists and that a fool and their money are soon parted. In the absence of a theoretical framework for these beliefs it is up to the proponents to proove the effect exists. My earlier posts as you and WM willfully misinterpreted them, along with general scientific procedure. You remind me on nelson putting the scope to his blind eye for some reason

3ds - no but it does provide evidence for why the catholic church exists and why it makes the claims it does for quite obvious non spiritual dividends, such that its divine mandate is no longer required. Which is eactly my point here. No scientific proof exists for these cables exists but a scientific explanantion for why cable manufacturers make those claims does. This is relevent and admissible evidence. Thanks for your definition - I wanted to make sure exactly what you meant. I think I might have one of d selfs papers on the topic of the summing amp so will dig it out and scan a few plots if I actually do have it.

 

All over his web site. I take it you haven't read it?

Paul

 

Paul,

A bit hit miss my old uni grad, I made no substanical claims in the slightest, I merely stated 'Ask the users' Nothing more.
Think you blew that up a bit out of proportion my old china
Still waiting for an answer Nick?
Again Paul, Where do it state that LRC claims are used to force an issue.
The potential customer decides where the items are for them or not, in their own surroundings and time. Nothing more, Nothing Less.
Verbaitum

 

I didn't 'selectively quote'. Tony makes no reference to the technical specifications of his cables in his web site, but here he specifically said that they were all the same. Yet he claims they sound different, and they are priced differently. A data point is a data point.

Turn it around. Are you aware of any audiophile cable manufacturer who states that their cables measure differently in their bulk parameters and that this is the reason they sound different?

Paul

 

Yes, I assume you made what you wanted from it?