new scientist

Hi,

I have not read that link as it looks pretty big... but there are a few things to point out.

We do know the smallest sound the human ear can detect - it is the thermal vibration of air molecules. About 20micropascals IIRC. You can't go any smaller in signal strength using air as a medium because the sound would be below the noise floor.

Hearing is not entirely analogue. The stereocilia that produce an electrical charge when stimulated inside the inner ear either produce a charge or not, and only when stimulated in one direction whats more. The combination of these small electrical charges makes up the over-all signal.

Ben, I think I know what you are getting at about concentrating though. I believe the point you are making is that our mind actually receives ALL the information our ear picks up. But what we 'hear' is only what our mind deems necessary. The rest of the information gets thrown away (or does it?). It helps us survive in nature and all that. So it could be that when we consciously listen to something we are throwing away more 'unnecessary' information in order to get a clearer picture... If you get my drift. I think that’s what you mean anyway?

On the other hand, it still all goes to our subconscious, whether or not we are consciously focusing on some parts or not.

 

Yes, perhaps it does. An increase in stress might conceivably lead to diminished critical judgement.

My point was any such stress is a constant throughout the test. If a positive difference can first be noted under sighted conditions, with any test-induced stress the listener may be subject to, the listener will be no more stressed under unsighted conditions because at all times the listener is aware they are being tested.

Besides if differences are that subtle they evapourate under a little stress, then what magnitude of difference is there really. Any self-appointed Golden Ears should be able to sail through a blind test no problems.

I'll have a look.

 

It is pretty cool. I referred to something along the same lines in a post in this thread near the begining ( about experiments with sound above the hearing of the ear being recieved by the brain ) Though this particular mechanism for 'hearing 'in the range below 1000Hz is new to me.

 

as i read it,it was saying that due to this mechanism we might experience things that can't be heard. if that makes sense, they create an interaction in our auditory processing system that simply woulsdn't exist in a good old fashioned mic set up.

and then considers how this may affects the experience.


i'm down with that, you have to consider the whole system not just the sound waves from when they leave the cone to hitting the ear, but everything beyond the ear.

it's actually a pretty enlightening topic.


so then anyone want to do decent LCR tests on some cables and see if my silver ones provide figures that copper can't easily match. i'm happy to believe it all comes down to LCR.

thing is how significant a difference in LCR can we hear, or think we can hear....?

 

Me too. I've been investigating DIY interconnect theory and design over the past couple of weeks and have constructed various test pairs from sub-minimalist to semi-complex, with and without shielding. Had my son do the blind test swap overs in my spare system (MF E600 CDP, Pioneer A400 amp, and Wharfedale Linton 2 speakers).

Differences in sonic character? Truthfully, none at all. Great sound whichever I used though I haven't yet tried silver.

Then yesterday I came across this thread. So this evening I pulled out some of the commercial directional leads from my main system - VDH The Second, AQ Quartz Hyperlitz and Cable Talk Monitor 2 - to test in the spare system. As I can connect the leads with my eyes closed I first spun them round and obviously couldn't see the directional arrows. I tested each configuration with a few tracks of Aaron Copland, Richard Thompson live and Massive Attack. Listened for feet-tap-ability, transients, detail, soundstage etc. Made a few notes, then checked and noted the cable directions (either both correct, both reversed, left reversed or right reversed), until I'd heard both correct and both reversed at least once.

Differences? None whatsoever between £75 and £200+, nor whichever direction. A couple of times I thought e.g. 'ah! that brushed cymbal isn't there'. Then I'd go back, listen again and find it was. Worse still (depending on your viewpoint) when I then compared them with a few of my home made jobs I could detect no difference despite wanting to reassure myself that at least the cheaper Cable Talks had been vfm.

And I reasoned further, if, as some claim, a couple of strands of thin magnet wire will do a fine job, then why not a few strands of lamp flex? It's all thin copper after all. So in went a set of those flimsy grey zip cord give-aways. Oh dear! I couldn't tell the difference. I'm now going to try fitting my last set of RCA's to some old iron flex and really torture myself.

I'd ebay the lot of the ones that have neen bathed in snake oil and sprinkled with finest fairy dust except I'm not sure I'd be comfortable passing the con on to another mug punter.

 

I'm assuming we're talking about the article on "binaural beats" posted by Ben here? If so:

As I understand it, it is claiming that our brain can detect a difference between two signals of slightly different frequencies applied to each ear. The combination of the two tones produces a signal, the amplitude of which varies at a very low frequency, and the brain registers this signal ... so what?

I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion?

This is just a variation on the effect you get sitting in a two-propellor aeroplane where one prop is rotating at a slightly different speed to the other. You hear a sound which gradually gets louder and softer.

You aren't hearing anything that can't be measured. In fact surely this is something which can be very easily measured?



Also, by the way, that article appeared to be getting a bit mixed up between the idea of two signals at slightly different frequencies and the idea of two signals slightly out of phase with each other - two different things, surely?

(from the article:"In summary it's the ability of the brain to detect a waveform phase difference is what enables it to perceive binaural beats.")

Might just be me not reading it carefully enough, though.

 

Please report back!

If they don't buy them from you, they're only going to pay even more to buy them new from one of the snake oil merchants!

Perhaps you could provide a link to this thread so potential buyers can make an informed decision; then your conscience will be clear!

 

I wouldn’t call it a con skinumb, although you may feel conned. In my opinion it’s a dupe, one that relies on the exact same human psychology used to sell boutique cosmetics and nutrient pills and the like.

Perhaps some vendors are knowingly exploiting this (it would be naïve to think otherwise) perhaps some are less complicit because they have duped themselves. Either way I wouldn’t feel too bad about selling the cables on, ultimately it’s the buyer who dupes themselves rather than you duping them.

 

Not as easy as you think. If these binaural beats are what I think they are (having not read the article, sorry) then the beats are actually not in the sound wave that arrives at the ear at all. They are actually formed inside the ear. Because the ear is a non-linear device, when you sum two tones, harmonics are produced which are equal to the difference between the two tones. As a microphone is generally pretty linear, it is not going to appear in any measurement of standard practice.

But.. what this has to do with cables, I’ve no idea!

 

tenson, yeh thats it, its not the sound waves, if the way they are processed in the head.

sure some bright spark could rig up some essentially dual mono hardware that had a crosstalk feature that mimicced what the brain does.


not sure what it had to do with cables either, other than presenting a hypothesis for our ability to experience something that can't be measured by normal methods.

 

perhaps it's more complex than I am assuming.

when you say it's about an effect that's formed "inside the ear" .... well, wouldn't this be true for any kind of stereo effect, really? Whatever happens once the two mono signals get inside the ear / brain, those two signals can be easily measured.

Like you say, it's unclear what it's got to do with the discussion about cables, though.

 

Sorry I'm not sure what you mean? This effect is not just our perception of the two sounds, new sounds are actually formed in the ear, so it is not quite like other general 'stereo effects' like localisation. Yes, the two signals can be measured, but without fully understanding the non-linear functions of our hearing mechanism it is hard to simulate it in a measurement system. We do have a reasonable understanding of how we hear but still don’t fully understand the inner ear (e.g. place theory vs. frequency theory) not to mention our minds perception of the signal. So really our understanding is pretty limited compared to other areas of audio study. Personally I don’t know much more about this effect than I have already posted.

 

If you can not see the relevance of a post and link that covers how we hear/recieve sound to the discussion we have been having then I don't know what to say. Out of interest, why do you question my comments relevance?

 

Because... whether we hear extra harmonic products from the non-linear effects of our hearing mechanism or not, the same hearing mechanism is used whatever cables you have in the system. Hence I don't see it direct relevance to the topic of cables and blind tests. Maybe I need to stop focusing on it and the answer will come to me.

I do find the subject matter interesting and worthy of posting, don't get me wrong. I just don't see the relevance to the thread topic of cables.

 

Hi,

I have not read that link as it looks pretty big... but there are a few things to point out.

 

Sorry I'm a slow reader and I have other things to do with my day.

So I should read it before saying I don't see the relevance, but I can see what other people were talking about who did read it, and sq225917 has already said that the subject was indeed what I thought it was.

 

I have read it, and it does sound like a slightly different effect to what I was talking about because they contribute the effect to the olivary nucleus and only for frequencies below 1000Hz, rather than the inner ear and any frequency (even above 20KHz).

I guess maybe you are saying that due to our altered awareness when in different brain states that we could hear things one moment and not the next? But I don't think that has much relevance in the case of cable tests because brain sates don’t usually change within a few seconds, and the blind tests done allow the user to change the cable they are listening to whenever they like, so the perceptual state of the listener can pretty much be taken as a constant I would have thought.

It is a very interesting topic though.

 

Well as you asked. I tried a couple of configurations, settling on the easiest to build. The wire seems to be stranded tinned copper covered in a rubber sheath. A doddle to work with and ready twisted. Pictures 42 and 48 here http://photos.orange.co.uk/album/5049382 it's the blue and brown one. Picture 2 has a three strand version of it, but that required more work and bigger RCA's and didn't sound any different to me.

I listened and compared last night and this evening. The music sounds airier and more accessible, with greater depth and width in staging terms, as well as displaying an extended, smoother and more linear tonal range. There’s also a sense of natural flow and rhythm so often absent from other, more self-conscious interconnect designs. Indeed, flow is a good description in this context, relevant not only to the electronic functionality of this interconnect, but also to the unencumbered progress of the music. With The B&D Iron in the system, the sound has such natural intent and such smooth dynamics that the ‘electronic’ element is effectively filtered out.....hang on a minute, my mistake...that's a review of the £200 VDH 2. Well the Iron sounds the same, so it'll do.

I reckon that the Iron's conductors have been thoroughly burned-in and acoustically tuned what with being attached to a Black and Decker iron (other brands are available) permanantly parked on an ironing board in front of the spare-room hi-fi, hence being upto VDH standard straight off the work bench.

To paraphrase Charles Mingus 'Complicating the simple, that's easy. But making the complicated simple, that's genius'.

Rich

 

Thanks Tenson, I don't know much about this sort of thing at all, but as these things suggest that we can be affected, and notice, sound that is beyond the range of our ears (in both higher and lower freguencies) it would be wise to realise we might be limiting our approach to cables and Hi-Fi by setting parameters that are based on an incomplete understanding. Thats all I was getting at really.

 

The ear is nonlinear and can thus detect transients that correspond to frequencies outside our nominal hearing range - even though we cannot detect steady state signals of that frequency - this is already published.