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Lets talk cables

SIY

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If you're doing a double blind test, you can't influence anyone else.

Something tells me you're not bothering with basic controls. Please correct me if I'm wrong by specifying how your double blind test will be set up, controlled, scored, and validated.
 

Blumlein 88

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People who believe they can't hear a difference might be less likely to find (or report!) them, so...
Well we already know people are very prone to report differences even when there are none. Not just with sound, but with our other senses. Just a tendency of the human organism. So that plus people who believe they hear a difference should very easily demonstrate they really do. But somehow they usually don't.
 

Shadrach

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You don't. You keep both & work out which is better for particular recordings, in the context of your ancillary hardware.

Or you decide the differences are minor & start playing with DSP to adjust the recordings.
I can't see that being practical; and the problem of deciding which is 'better' is still there.
There is often a world of difference between what one likes the sound of and transparent, or attempting to make a system such.
Buying equipment because you like the sound of it is fine, but you can't ascribe any other properties to that system such as transparency unless it measures as transparent. Better for you doesn't make it better for anyone else necessarily. That's really the point of measurement and the point of this forum.
 
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They cost me around 10 bucks, put them together from stuff I still had, the pink wire I had to buy, the guy who sold me the wire, told me to cut the wire to exactly the same length as my other wire , so as not to have the sound come out of the speakers at different levels:), I said I would.
speakerwire.jpg
Am I going to be banned using these ?
 
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MattHooper

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At one time I was given 3 different Shunyata AC cables to test in my system, from low, middle, high price in their line up. I didn't detect any sonic difference employing the first two, but the highest priced one seemed to change the sound of my system. Puzzled, I had a friend help me blind test it against a stock power cord. Once I didn't know which was being used, I found the sound of the Shunyata cable in the system indistinguishable from the stock power cord. That was a big lesson in the power of sighted bias, and a money saver.

My pal reviews high end audio and often times he has as much as 50 or 60,000 dollars worth of cabling in his system (yeah, you read that right. Like sometimes just a pair of speaker cables or interconnects costing 18,000 dollars!). I use generic belden cable. At one point he bought what had been my pair of main speakers for many years from me. At his house, hooked up to bazzilian-dollar cables, AC cables etc, I didn't detect any sonic epiphanies. Sounded pretty much the same as at my home...in fact...better at my place (my room is even better I think).

Here is the puzzle I often present audiophiles who are so big on the necessity of boutique audio cables in getting great sound:

The vast majority of the music audiophiles listen to, including many of the classic audiophile show off tracks from the 60's onward to most of today's - were recorded using bog-standard cables. Microphone and patch cables that had been dragged around from location to dirty location.
Mixing bays with tons of old cables. It all went through generic cables no cable-loving audiophile would EVER consider using in his system.

That means that in almost all cases where an audiophile is oohing and aahing at the "incredible sonic transparency" of his new audio cables....what he is hearing is the sonic quality captured and transmitted through bog-standard, cheapo cables used for the recording. It is impossible for the new cables to transmit anything that was not already transmitted and captured using non-audiophile cables used for producing that music.

So every "ooh and ah" is also a comment on the audio quality captured/transmitted by plain old non-audiophile cables.

Which shows that such cables are perfectly adequate to transmit the awesome level of fidelity audiophiles hear in their sound systems.

I frankly don't see any way around this basic, logical point. (And haven't seen a cogent response when I bring it up).

(BTW, that leaves open the possibility - if only logical not in practice - that some audiophile speaker, interconnect cables could be made that are "better" somehow than the ones used for the great recordings. But even IF that were the case, the point would remain that however great those cables are, the sonic information is limited to whatever cables were used for the recording and can only reveal how great that sound was. In fact, what the audiophile is hearing is ultimately the VERY WORST cables those music signals passed through via the music-making process - the bottleneck as it were )

I have some audio cables - canare and belden - that were made by the same people who did the cabling for various local mixing studios. Audiophiles scoff, yet they listen to recording in awe, made using the same brand of cabling, or similar).
 

Blumlein 88

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At one time I was given 3 different Shunyata AC cables to test in my system, from low, middle, high price in their line up. I didn't detect any sonic difference employing the first two, but the highest priced one seemed to change the sound of my system. Puzzled, I had a friend help me blind test it against a stock power cord. Once I didn't know which was being used, I found the sound of the Shunyata cable in the system indistinguishable from the stock power cord. That was a big lesson in the power of sighted bias, and a money saver.

My pal reviews high end audio and often times he has as much as 50 or 60,000 dollars worth of cabling in his system (yeah, you read that right. Like sometimes just a pair of speaker cables or interconnects costing 18,000 dollars!). I use generic belden cable. At one point he bought what had been my pair of main speakers for many years from me. At his house, hooked up to bazzilian-dollar cables, AC cables etc, I didn't detect any sonic epiphanies. Sounded pretty much the same as at my home...in fact...better at my place (my room is even better I think).

Here is the puzzle I often present audiophiles who are so big on the necessity of boutique audio cables in getting great sound:

The vast majority of the music audiophiles listen to, including many of the classic audiophile show off tracks from the 60's onward to most of today's - were recorded using bog-standard cables. Microphone and patch cables that had been dragged around from location to dirty location.
Mixing bays with tons of old cables. It all went through generic cables no cable-loving audiophile would EVER consider using in his system.

That means that in almost all cases where an audiophile is oohing and aahing at the "incredible sonic transparency" of his new audio cables....what he is hearing is the sonic quality captured and transmitted through bog-standard, cheapo cables used for the recording. It is impossible for the new cables to transmit anything that was not already transmitted and captured using non-audiophile cables used for producing that music.

So every "ooh and ah" is also a comment on the audio quality captured/transmitted by plain old non-audiophile cables.

Which shows that such cables are perfectly adequate to transmit the awesome level of fidelity audiophiles hear in their sound systems.

I frankly don't see any way around this basic, logical point. (And haven't seen a cogent response when I bring it up).

(BTW, that leaves open the possibility - if only logical not in practice - that some audiophile speaker, interconnect cables could be made that are "better" somehow than the ones used for the great recordings. But even IF that were the case, the point would remain that however great those cables are, the sonic information is limited to whatever cables were used for the recording and can only reveal how great that sound was. In fact, what the audiophile is hearing is ultimately the VERY WORST cables those music signals passed through via the music-making process - the bottleneck as it were )

I have some audio cables - canare and belden - that were made by the same people who did the cabling for various local mixing studios. Audiophiles scoff, yet they listen to recording in awe, made using the same brand of cabling, or similar).

There is a video of Keith Johnson of Reference Recordings talking at some audio show. He is a proponent of high dollar cables. At one point he was showing his recording gear. A question was made about the wire. He showed it. I recognized it as some 50 ohm instrumentation wire typically used in harsh environments in industry. Good well shielded wire, but not audiophile. He then says something like the wire he uses in recording is no where near the quality you guys have in your systems at home. I have to use in cases hundreds of feet of it. But no, your wire is of much higher quality.

So I'm thinking this over, wire at the listening end, a few meters at most is high quality. He uses stuff not suitable for that in 100, 200 in some cases he said 500 foot lengths to make his acclaimed recordings. Is no one sensing a disconnect here? He then when asked says oh well he can get away with it get good signal quality because he built his own microphone preamps and they have adjustable input impedance which allows him to get good quality signal transfer. Still I was sensing a bit of a disconnect. If adjustable impedance lets you get top quality signal transfer from low quality wire in lengths of hundreds of feet, well why not the same thing for the last few meters????? Really KJ??? Water off a duck's back to the true believers.
 

Sal1950

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Krunok

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They cost me around 10 bucks, put them together from stuff I still had, the pink wire I had to buy, the guy who sold me the wire, told me to cut the wire to exactly the same length as my other wire , so as not to have the sound come out of the speakers at different levels:), I said I would.
View attachment 24981Am I going to be banned using these ?

If you really cut them to the same length then yeah, you should be! :D
 

Ron Party

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Isn't there a chapter in the Masters & Johnson book about "poles of articulation"?
 

Cbdb2

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I used to think cables don't really matter much if they're well-built and professional grade (Canare, Belden, etc), and when it comes to speaker cables, line level cables (especially balanced), and especially digital cables, I still do think that.

But when it comes to tonearm cables I'm developing a different of point of view.

Voltages in the mV range and cartridge sensitivity to capacitance loading is making me believe that cables do really matter in the specific scenario of tonearms.
What about 100' mic cables on ribbon mics? Yet studios don't care as long as its pro cable, canare mogami etc.
 

Cbdb2

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As speedskater already pointed out, you can´t seriously discuss all the different purposes and cables in the same way.
Further, as price isn´t related to the physics of a cable, it is a totally different topic and should be discussed in another thread.

@palamudin,

people tend to oversimplify the matters with cables; reasons are a bit unclear to me, but imo there exists among EEs a tendency to belief due to guts feeling that cables must not make a difference and after establishing that belief sort of confirmation bias kicks in and they further only proceed information that corrobates their prior belief. That´s only human but can be sometimes very misleading.

Most important is to know that cables do not work in isolation but in a complete system as interconnects, loudspeaker cables and mains cables and that at each interface different cable properties are of interest.
Take EE out put audiphool in and change that to must make a difference and then your right.

Actually EEs believe that properly designed cables make no audible difference because they are educated.. And after establishing the physics they tend to believe the truth.
I would love to see the look on a professers face if a student studying EM theory asked about cable direction or microdiodes or cable lifters.

98% of EE students arnt audiophiles and don't care about your audio cables and so they have little prebias. They are there to learn about cables, all cable, not to guess about them the way you are.
 
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