[Review] my favourite online review ever.
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Excellent post Julian and one I would thoroughly agree with. I don't think that the persuit of tremendous sound becomes less of a priority - just that experience tells us the best way to get it.
sq225917
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stereo mic, no they were made on the same day,with the same paints in the same studio, one after the other but by two different artists.
Physically, in temrs of shape, weight, they are identical, it's just the fine details, that most people don't understand, and only idiots would dismiss or deny that set them apart.
but you still don't get it, some people choose to believe in things that are as yet unproven simply because new things get found all the time. your viewpoint remains as realistic as that of people who didn't beleive that air was made up of gasses, simply because way back when it couldn't be measured. now we know better.
no doubt when science catches up and overtakes marketing snake oil and hyperbole you'll accept the differneces.
though i kinda like the idea that you are entrenched in a view that says, we will never explain anything we don't yet know.
cos that's ok, because you 'know' you are right.
Physically, in temrs of shape, weight, they are identical, it's just the fine details, that most people don't understand, and only idiots would dismiss or deny that set them apart.
but you still don't get it, some people choose to believe in things that are as yet unproven simply because new things get found all the time. your viewpoint remains as realistic as that of people who didn't beleive that air was made up of gasses, simply because way back when it couldn't be measured. now we know better.
no doubt when science catches up and overtakes marketing snake oil and hyperbole you'll accept the differneces.
though i kinda like the idea that you are entrenched in a view that says, we will never explain anything we don't yet know.
cos that's ok, because you 'know' you are right.
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Oh come on! If they were painted the same way at the same time, who would go on to become the master, and therefore which would be more valued? Any difference in the painting at all will be identified by scans and cross referencing under scientific conditions. You know it's a poor analogy and yet still you try to make a case as fanciful as "some others"
Hopefully for the last time, science exists to answer questions, real questions posed by real experiences or materials. With regards to the audible differences of electrically identical cables, there ARE NO real experiences under controlled conditions to pose a question for scientists. Until there is, there is nothing to look into other than the reasons why some people respond positively to the placebo.
David
The way. I can only point you to the very large number of long term audiophiles who gravitate towards efficient loudspeakers and low powered amplification and eventually settle there. There's obviously no one answer to such a subjective experience, but there are some blind alleys and dead ends that are best avoided. As Julian pointed out, their interest in audio acoutrements without scientific back up does tend to wane somewhat.
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Mike,
Well, I use a pair of ruark scepters and a valve amp, so those I think fall into that categary.
Agreed it is highly subjective......IMO something of a "black art".
Well, I use a pair of ruark scepters and a valve amp, so those I think fall into that categary.
Agreed it is highly subjective......IMO something of a "black art".
julian2002
Muper Soderator
david,
- brace yourself long post alert -
i (anti?)gravitated away from tweaking due to the realisation that i was spending a huge sum on trying to tweak my existing kit to sound like something else. probably the most tweaked item was my old naim cd 5 i tried:
supports:
carbon feet, squash balls, sorbothane, some black non metalic pointy things, artificial pummice, paving slabs and finally a townshend seismic sink. often in combination.
aprox £350
psu's
russ andrews smpsu, naim flatcap, naim hi-cap.
approx cost £700! (if i hadn;t ultimately sold the flatcap to finance a hicap it'd be a grand)
cables i/c
standard naim snaic, naim black snaic, chord din to din, russ andrews din to din, umpty different homebrews using everything from silver cable to cat5 using various methods of braiding, twisting, seperation , etc. (admittedly there was little actual knowledge behind what i did i just systematically tried each approach possible with each cable listened to it and went a tiny bit greyer)
aprox cost £250
cable / power:
standard, isotek cable, isotek mini sub, supra semi-diy cable. didn't diy power cables other than from a kit. didn;t want to end up living in a cardboard box after my house burned down due to me using the wrong sort of wire or something.
aprox cost £500 (most of that was the mini sub though)
others:
damping the casing with dynamat, damping the caps with dynamat, painting my cd's edges green, wiping the cd's with special wipes, damping various bits of the transport. putting blutack around the edge of the swing out door to block external light from entering. cable dressing so there was no tension on the cables, lifting the cables off the floor, having the din locking collar done up, not having the din locking collar done up, spraying various sprays on to contacts, din plugs, fuses, etc. putting bags of sand on top of the cdp, putting a paving slab on top of the cdp.
aprox cost: £100 and nearly my sanity
so i've spent about £1900 PLUS the cost of the cd5 which i bought new for (iirc) about £1100 so 3 fucking grand on a cd player. this of course doesn;t take into account all the time i spent doing this, driving to obscure bits of the country to pick up e-bay purchases or to every maplins within a 50 mile radius of my house trying to find one that had a certain type of wire, solder or din plugs in stock.
i eventually got the sound i wanted from a squeezebox 2 (£200), a maplins psu (£20) and an audio synthesis dax decade (£1250) total cost? £1470 or thereabouts... hmmm 3k vs 1.5k OK!
now maybe if i'd carried on playing with wires, tried battery power, changed all the internal caps and op amps i'd have got the sound i wanted but it was far less hassle to sell all the stuff i could (and make a loss cos a lot of it i bought new) and buy what i knew i wanted (bought 2nd hand - learned that lesson RATHER quickly) rather than carry on buggering about trying to make a silk purse out of a sows ear and potentially make my cd players price crash by messing about irreversibly with it's innards.
unfortunately changing to this meant that my 82/hi/hi/250 was unnecessary / sounded crap with my new front end so that went however i'd leaned my lesson remember and instead of keeping the 250 and pissing about with wires and mods i sold it for a good price and auditioned a large number of amps within my budget - not just at dealers but at friends / bakeoffs / etc. eventually ended up with the vincents i now have and have zero wish to fiddle with them.
except....
i now want to have a go at vinyl mixing so i need analogue inputs which the decade doesn't have so i may be jumping onto the merrygoround again with thoughts of integrateds with internal dacs, massive power a/v amps, external adc's, phono stages and all sorts currently running through my head. luckily my main system is in storage at the moment and i'm currently listening to music on a b&0 5000 system with mission speakers and an archos gmini as the source. the loom is whatever came free / i had lying around and it's all sitting on an old chest of draws - the speakers are 7ft off the ground 6ft apart on a bookshelf and one is in the top corner of the room.
sounds fuckin' great.
- brace yourself long post alert -
i (anti?)gravitated away from tweaking due to the realisation that i was spending a huge sum on trying to tweak my existing kit to sound like something else. probably the most tweaked item was my old naim cd 5 i tried:
supports:
carbon feet, squash balls, sorbothane, some black non metalic pointy things, artificial pummice, paving slabs and finally a townshend seismic sink. often in combination.
aprox £350
psu's
russ andrews smpsu, naim flatcap, naim hi-cap.
approx cost £700! (if i hadn;t ultimately sold the flatcap to finance a hicap it'd be a grand)
cables i/c
standard naim snaic, naim black snaic, chord din to din, russ andrews din to din, umpty different homebrews using everything from silver cable to cat5 using various methods of braiding, twisting, seperation , etc. (admittedly there was little actual knowledge behind what i did i just systematically tried each approach possible with each cable listened to it and went a tiny bit greyer)
aprox cost £250
cable / power:
standard, isotek cable, isotek mini sub, supra semi-diy cable. didn't diy power cables other than from a kit. didn;t want to end up living in a cardboard box after my house burned down due to me using the wrong sort of wire or something.
aprox cost £500 (most of that was the mini sub though)
others:
damping the casing with dynamat, damping the caps with dynamat, painting my cd's edges green, wiping the cd's with special wipes, damping various bits of the transport. putting blutack around the edge of the swing out door to block external light from entering. cable dressing so there was no tension on the cables, lifting the cables off the floor, having the din locking collar done up, not having the din locking collar done up, spraying various sprays on to contacts, din plugs, fuses, etc. putting bags of sand on top of the cdp, putting a paving slab on top of the cdp.
aprox cost: £100 and nearly my sanity
so i've spent about £1900 PLUS the cost of the cd5 which i bought new for (iirc) about £1100 so 3 fucking grand on a cd player. this of course doesn;t take into account all the time i spent doing this, driving to obscure bits of the country to pick up e-bay purchases or to every maplins within a 50 mile radius of my house trying to find one that had a certain type of wire, solder or din plugs in stock.
i eventually got the sound i wanted from a squeezebox 2 (£200), a maplins psu (£20) and an audio synthesis dax decade (£1250) total cost? £1470 or thereabouts... hmmm 3k vs 1.5k OK!
now maybe if i'd carried on playing with wires, tried battery power, changed all the internal caps and op amps i'd have got the sound i wanted but it was far less hassle to sell all the stuff i could (and make a loss cos a lot of it i bought new) and buy what i knew i wanted (bought 2nd hand - learned that lesson RATHER quickly) rather than carry on buggering about trying to make a silk purse out of a sows ear and potentially make my cd players price crash by messing about irreversibly with it's innards.
unfortunately changing to this meant that my 82/hi/hi/250 was unnecessary / sounded crap with my new front end so that went however i'd leaned my lesson remember and instead of keeping the 250 and pissing about with wires and mods i sold it for a good price and auditioned a large number of amps within my budget - not just at dealers but at friends / bakeoffs / etc. eventually ended up with the vincents i now have and have zero wish to fiddle with them.
except....
i now want to have a go at vinyl mixing so i need analogue inputs which the decade doesn't have so i may be jumping onto the merrygoround again with thoughts of integrateds with internal dacs, massive power a/v amps, external adc's, phono stages and all sorts currently running through my head. luckily my main system is in storage at the moment and i'm currently listening to music on a b&0 5000 system with mission speakers and an archos gmini as the source. the loom is whatever came free / i had lying around and it's all sitting on an old chest of draws - the speakers are 7ft off the ground 6ft apart on a bookshelf and one is in the top corner of the room.
sounds fuckin' great.
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Great post Julian - I share your pain 
WRT the analogue in. Look for an old Sony Minidisc recorder on fleabay or an old M audio USB interface. - dirt cheap.
WRT the analogue in. Look for an old Sony Minidisc recorder on fleabay or an old M audio USB interface. - dirt cheap.
sq225917
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mic: yeh thats all good, but it's a perfect analogy. it doesn't matter who becomes what.
because 100 years ago we didnt have any of the hi-tech science to scan the pictures. but we still had art critics.
and thats where we are with cables, we don't have the gear to make the assesment in a scientifically valid way, the tools are too blunt.
i'm willing to accept that we will catch up, you just choose to beleive there is nothing to catch up with.
but that's ok because you 'know' you are right.
because 100 years ago we didnt have any of the hi-tech science to scan the pictures. but we still had art critics.
and thats where we are with cables, we don't have the gear to make the assesment in a scientifically valid way, the tools are too blunt.
i'm willing to accept that we will catch up, you just choose to beleive there is nothing to catch up with.
but that's ok because you 'know' you are right.
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I do know I'm right. You're not wrong there.
Even cable sheisters don't try to claim there's something at work that existing science cannot explain (because that would obviously make the customer wonder how they arrived at their expensive jewellry range).
Instead they try to pretend they know something about science that you don't - assuming there are enough potential customers out there that will be impressed without questioning it. They cite such "important factors" as skin effect.
Skin effect is known to cause an increase in resistance, while at the same time a reduction in internal inductance at the frequency extremes. Seems to me that skin effect can result in LCR changes in a cable. Of course it's also easily proveable that at audio frequencies this plays little role in measurement changes, let along audible ones.
So the cable sheisters (sorry manufacturers) will then argue that no -we need to look at skin effect and it's impact in the transmission line world - not for it's impact on impedence!
They earnestly stress the importance of applying proper transmission line theory to audio cables in order to understand the nature of their sonic attributes, yet provide no concrete proof, analysis, or technical contribution in this regard. While transmission line theory can be relevent at much higher frequencies (starting in the MHz range, depending on cable length), these frequencies are decades past the audio range of human hearing and the audio equipment in question so are proveably (again) utterly irrelevent.
The concepts of transmission line relevancy and other dubious techniques such as cryogenically freezing cables, can easily be disproven by classical scientific methods all credible engineers utilise on a daily basis to understand and design electrical systems.
There is no rocket science to cable design, and to simply abandon proven parameters such as impedance (L,C,R) and geometry/shielding in favor of "just listening" or elaborate pseudo-scientific reasoning is something all potential consumers should be wary of if their goal is to obtain accurate, quality-controlled products in any facet of electronics and/or cabling.
Yes I know I am right. Sorry if you find that annoying but I think it's responsible to make people aware of this .Maybe you can prove me wrong? I see from you posts on PFM you are quite a believer! It's not really viable to claim that science is still in the dark ages now is it? And if you want to think it is...
From above (maybe you missed it
)
Even cable sheisters don't try to claim there's something at work that existing science cannot explain (because that would obviously make the customer wonder how they arrived at their expensive jewellry range).
Instead they try to pretend they know something about science that you don't - assuming there are enough potential customers out there that will be impressed without questioning it. They cite such "important factors" as skin effect.
Skin effect is known to cause an increase in resistance, while at the same time a reduction in internal inductance at the frequency extremes. Seems to me that skin effect can result in LCR changes in a cable. Of course it's also easily proveable that at audio frequencies this plays little role in measurement changes, let along audible ones.
So the cable sheisters (sorry manufacturers) will then argue that no -we need to look at skin effect and it's impact in the transmission line world - not for it's impact on impedence!
They earnestly stress the importance of applying proper transmission line theory to audio cables in order to understand the nature of their sonic attributes, yet provide no concrete proof, analysis, or technical contribution in this regard. While transmission line theory can be relevent at much higher frequencies (starting in the MHz range, depending on cable length), these frequencies are decades past the audio range of human hearing and the audio equipment in question so are proveably (again) utterly irrelevent.
The concepts of transmission line relevancy and other dubious techniques such as cryogenically freezing cables, can easily be disproven by classical scientific methods all credible engineers utilise on a daily basis to understand and design electrical systems.
There is no rocket science to cable design, and to simply abandon proven parameters such as impedance (L,C,R) and geometry/shielding in favor of "just listening" or elaborate pseudo-scientific reasoning is something all potential consumers should be wary of if their goal is to obtain accurate, quality-controlled products in any facet of electronics and/or cabling.
Yes I know I am right. Sorry if you find that annoying but I think it's responsible to make people aware of this .Maybe you can prove me wrong? I see from you posts on PFM you are quite a believer! It's not really viable to claim that science is still in the dark ages now is it? And if you want to think it is...
From above (maybe you missed it
)
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The burden of proof seems to be on the cable protagonist, on the flipside I guess you could ask Mike to prove that science is complete in its understanding of electricity. Although I'm not so sure that's true myself. So I always have a that niggling feeling of "does it 'see' everything?"
Fair play to those that enjoy cables, its all a bit too much for me but I see people enthusing about them and I think "at least I'm not as worse off as them."
You see what I did there? I called everyone a mentalist in a brilliantly subtle way
Hi Julian,
Thanks for that, interesting.
I'm sorry you've gained so litle here..or feel you have
!I wonder if the N**m stuff wasn't at least part of issue!!
I had a breif encounter with n**m....and i have t say it wasn't esp successful for me either. + AS you say it isn't a cheap avenue to go down........
julian2002
Muper Soderator
david,
i wouldn;t say i've gained little, just that i spent a lot of time and money on learning for myself what several people tried to tell me - i.e. if you aren;t happy with the sound of your equipment, change the equipment don;t bugger about with wires, supports and other faff UNTIL you are content with the sound you have.
as i said the cd5 was the one that had the most tweakery focussed on it but most kit i've had / have has had some fiddling done - even the amps sit on granite / mitchell cone supports - only cos they get very hot though and that was the cheapest solution that looked ok.
mike,
did a bit of google-fu last night and there are a number of mixers appearing from the likes of numark, bheringer, dennon, pioneer, etc. that do all internal eq and fading digitally. some of these have a digital out - the numark scratch mixer seems to do everything i want however it's output is 24/48 which i'm not sure the decade can deal with so further research needed.
i wouldn;t say i've gained little, just that i spent a lot of time and money on learning for myself what several people tried to tell me - i.e. if you aren;t happy with the sound of your equipment, change the equipment don;t bugger about with wires, supports and other faff UNTIL you are content with the sound you have.
as i said the cd5 was the one that had the most tweakery focussed on it but most kit i've had / have has had some fiddling done - even the amps sit on granite / mitchell cone supports - only cos they get very hot though and that was the cheapest solution that looked ok.
mike,
did a bit of google-fu last night and there are a number of mixers appearing from the likes of numark, bheringer, dennon, pioneer, etc. that do all internal eq and fading digitally. some of these have a digital out - the numark scratch mixer seems to do everything i want however it's output is 24/48 which i'm not sure the decade can deal with so further research needed.
Yes, I was lucky.
Pete, strongly adviised me to change from n**m.
Things have looked up considerebly since then.
I'm surprised you didn't get good results from the cd5......thats up the range a bit I think?
I'm sticking to valves now though
D.
Edit; slight logic crisis there obvioiusly
...more accurately, I'm sticking to my Arcam A5z (!)
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sq225917
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Mic: i'm with you partly.
cable sheisters, don't know exactly how cables sound different, so they try to glue some hard to fathom science to the product to explain what cannot currently be explained.
even just looking at LCR the interaction between those three and the infnite gear options would make it hard/impossible to predict with any accuracy.
this just means they are sheisters, it doesn't mean the cables don't sound different.
if a company just laid out its products and costed them based on material cost and margin with no sheist to explain why i think they'd do quite well. then let the buyer decide.
i do believe cables sound different in ways i can't explain, but i certainly don't beleive 99.9%of the manufacturer explanations as to why.
cable sheisters, don't know exactly how cables sound different, so they try to glue some hard to fathom science to the product to explain what cannot currently be explained.
even just looking at LCR the interaction between those three and the infnite gear options would make it hard/impossible to predict with any accuracy.
this just means they are sheisters, it doesn't mean the cables don't sound different.
if a company just laid out its products and costed them based on material cost and margin with no sheist to explain why i think they'd do quite well. then let the buyer decide.
i do believe cables sound different in ways i can't explain, but i certainly don't beleive 99.9%of the manufacturer explanations as to why.
julian2002
Muper Soderator
david,
i was getting good results from the cd5 but when i went up the naim amp ladder and spent time listening to other systems at dealers and friends i became dissatisfied with it. i tried all the tweaks listed above to try and 'fix' the 'problem' but would have been better off biting the bullet, saving up and getting what i really wanted and then trying some of the cheaper tweaks to fine tune the sound.
i was getting good results from the cd5 but when i went up the naim amp ladder and spent time listening to other systems at dealers and friends i became dissatisfied with it. i tried all the tweaks listed above to try and 'fix' the 'problem' but would have been better off biting the bullet, saving up and getting what i really wanted and then trying some of the cheaper tweaks to fine tune the sound.
why were you dissatisified with it?
what do you you now?
sorry if you've already told me........
what do you you now?
sorry if you've already told me........
Dev
Moderator
David, the clue is in his signature
.
P.S. You might also enjoy reading his speaker build diary.
.P.S. You might also enjoy reading his speaker build diary.
yes I will read the speaker build diary (thankyou)......
.....thats something on my jobs list (building new speakers), only 101 down the line.....
.....thats something on my jobs list (building new speakers), only 101 down the line.....
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