New GR-Research Video - Audiophile Cable Truths

[DonH56]

Here's one:
View attachment 114285
At 66, the only question I have is whether my remaining hearing or my remaining brain cells will vanish first.

Whichever degrades first, surely you must take some comfort from the chart in knowing that no matter how deaf or crazy you get, you'll still be able to talk about it with your fine vocabulary? Some days it seems like that's all I have going for me...

 

[josh358]

Whichever degrades first, surely you must take some comfort from the chart in knowing that no matter how deaf or crazy you get, you'll still be able to talk about it with your fine vocabulary? Some days it seems like that's all I have going for me...

I have every reason to believe that I'll one day be all words and no sense, if only because I've been accused of that already -- and I take comfort in known that by the time I'm 90 or so, I'll be ideally suited to run for Congress.

 

[wwenze]

I doubt the vocabulary part because I'm currently learning a new language.

 

[josh358]

I doubt the vocabulary part because I'm currently learning a new language.

Really -- I was lousy at learning new languages when I was a kid, and I'm just as lousy now.

Seriously, at this point, I have nominative aphasia. I'll remember a math formula right away, but I can't remember the name of a piece of gear I use every day. That said, they kind of sensationalize the chart by stretching out the Y axis -- the Z-score represents the number of standard deviations above or below the mean, and at my age, fluid intelligence is half an SD below the mean, which would be 7.5 IQ points below average for someone with my IQ, using the most common IQ scale (SD 15). Something like 1 SD below what it was at 20, though -- wow.

 

[mansr]

And then there's this case: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/27/16055
In short, a man with brain damage is unable to see numbers.

 

[mansr]

At 66, the only question I have is whether my remaining hearing or my remaining brain cells will vanish first.

Make them compete: go to loud concerts and do lots of drugs.

 

[bogart]

I think of Linus Pauling and vitamin C.....

I curse him every time our supplements cabinet is replenished

 

[Chrispy]

I curse him every time our supplements cabinet is replenished

A supplements CABINET? Wow.

 

[bogart]

A supplements CABINET? Wow.

A little poetic license on my part... if I said the "box on the pantry shelf that holds all the vitamins" you'd never have replied

 

[mansr]

I prefer to get my nutrients from food.

 

[josh358]

Make them compete: go to loud concerts and do lots of drugs.

What if we did both?

 

[Chrispy]

A little poetic license on my part... if I said the "box on the pantry shelf that holds all the vitamins" you'd never have replied

Me too. Then again I don't use any so even a box sounds like a lot.

 

[ta240]

T....In science you are only as good as your method and evidence - it's all about the evidence for any claim, never the "man" making the claim. Because everyone is fallible and being right about something the last time doesn't make you right about something else this time.....

In the social media age you are only as good as the number of followers you have.

.....Tons of brilliant scientists through history have gone off the rails and believed in wacky things. That happens when they aren't being scientists.
And even if they had made major contributions, it's because those contributions survived the crucible of experiment, replication etc. The wacky stuff stays on the sidelines because it never passed those tests. (It's often said in science that a scientists is lucky to have only one or two of his hypotheses/theories become successful).

Being very smart in some areas or things does not preclude being crazy in other areas or with other things. The way to be remembered as a genius is to have bigger successes than failures.

Nearly 20 years ago his LS9 line arrays reset my expectations of what a sealed box could do. More recently the design (don’t remember the name) with the open baffle midrange was really impressive at RMAF - it was very precise but had nice “air and space” in the soundstage. His open baffle woofers are nice too, but less distinctive.

Is there just not enough money in making quality products that are real or is there a slippery slope of insanity when it comes to audio.

 

[josh358]

Is there just not enough money in making quality products that are real or is there a slippery slope of insanity when it comes to audio.

There's a distinction to be made between quality products and so-called "audio jewelry" with its absurd markups and, not infrequently, undistinguished sound. H-frame dipole woofers and Neo 10/Neo 3 line sources would certainly be in the former category. Properly done (and it's pretty hard not to do them properly), they should knock your socks off, for a lot less money than a similarly good dynamic speaker would cost.

Sadly, "luxury audio" is about the only part of the high end market that is thriving. With a few exceptions, manufacturers have had to move their lines ever upward, and dealers have had to focus on this segment as well.

 

[ta240]

There's a distinction to be made between quality products and so-called "audio jewelry" with its absurd markups and, not infrequently, undistinguished sound. H-frame dipole woofers and Neo 10/Neo 3 line sources would certainly be in the former category. Properly done (and it's pretty hard not to do them properly), they should knock your socks off, for a lot less money than a similarly good dynamic speaker would cost.

Sadly, "luxury audio" is about the only part of the high end market that is thriving. With a few exceptions, manufacturers have had to move their lines ever upward, and dealers have had to focus on this segment as well.

That is what intrigued me with GR Research, they seem to be in both camps but it does make sense that the audio jewelry side is required to make enough money. And at the same time it is easy to get swept up in the "everything matters" camp. If I had enough room to have them far enough out from the wall the H frame woofers would be really high on my list.

 

[800]

That is what intrigued me with GR Research, they seem to be in both camps but it does make sense that the audio jewelry side is required to make enough money. And at the same time it is easy to get swept up in the "everything matters" camp. If I had enough room to have them far enough out from the wall the H frame woofers would be really high on my list.

Has anyone run across distortion measurements for any sort of H-frame sub? Perhaps in the depths of the Linkwitz site?

 

[Xulonn]

Do any of these companies have any advertised life spans or stated levels of quality control?

Thee is nothing in audio that I know of that compares with the free hard-drive reliabilityt (stats on the internet. In spite of Topping's reputation here and elsewhere, I had two of their PA3 amplifiers die on me in less than a year.

I have been around floppy and hard drives since I before bought my first PC - an IBM Original PC with 2x360K floppies in 1984 I worked in IT from 1988 until 2000, and have never suffered from more than single file data loss.

Reliability with electro-mechanical devices is always an issue, but RAID and regular backups can avert HD data-loss problems. I have never had a hard disk fail on me, and these days, there is a unique resource for reliability data on enterprise server-farm hard drives - BackBlaze [LINK] that can help with decision-making. I would guess that BackBlaze publishes this data for PR purposes (based on 162,000 drives for 2020), but enterprise HD's are not the best for PC and NAS/RAID applications. However, based on the continuing excellent reliability of HGST HDs in server farms, I will soon "upgrade" my HGST 4Tb single-drive NAS to a 10Tb HGST model.

In audio, companies like Bryston and McIntosh have excellent reputations for reliability. Unlike most boutique audio gear, there is some justification for their high prices.

Australia's @restorer-john has a collection of very robust classic Japanese audio gear dating back to the 1970's, and I still own a 1993 Classé Model Seventy Power Amplifier. Some others here have had their audio electronics components for several decades. But for most new audio gear, potential reliability info is still guesswork.

 

[josh358]

That is what intrigued me with GR Research, they seem to be in both camps but it does make sense that the audio jewelry side is required to make enough money. And at the same time it is easy to get swept up in the "everything matters" camp. If I had enough room to have them far enough out from the wall the H frame woofers would be really high on my list.

I think Danny appeals more to the audio hobbyist than to the audio jewelry crowd -- the latter are people who drop $20,000 on a DAC that sounds no better than my OKTO <g>. But that doesn't mean that everything Danny says (or I say or anyone says) has a solid engineering basis, and there are certain questionable myths held by some audiophiles, including the myth of "high end" speaker cables.

Anyway, I just watched Danny's video and Amir's response. Danny makes a nice demonstration of inductive coupling, and that's a real issue, but it isn't RFI; rather, it involves baseband audio frequencies and the remedies for the former (cable separation, shielding, twisting, running cables at right angles, and balanced lines, off the top of my head) are different than they are for the latter. So I agree that he hasn't made his case -- besides which, I don't understand the business of wires crossed at right angles within an audio cable -- has anyone measured the reactance of this thing?

On the other hand, I thought that Amir went a bit too far in minimizing the issue of RFI. It's a common problem in audio circuits, even if we ignore the unfortunates who hear WABC through their dental fillings. When it does occur, the manifestations can be obvious -- a radio station demodulated by a transistor junction, buzzing -- but not always. And RFI could potentially sneak past the Zobel network and get into the feedback loop as Amir suggested.

I read an interesting article on the effect of RFI on audio amplifiers in the AES Journal decades ago, but can't find it in a search. Maybe someone remembers what it's called. Meanwhile, here's an interesting article in EDN that touches on some of these issues:

https://www.edn.com/rfi-keeping-noise-out-of-your-designs/

That said, I doubt that a speaker cable that filters RFI is of use, even when RFI is an issue.

 

[josh358]

Has anyone run across distortion measurements for any sort of H-frame sub? Perhaps in the depths of the Linkwitz site?

You could ask Tim -- he's made many measurements of his H-frame dipoles.

I've made some distortion measurements myself of a folded baffle dipole sub (not precisely an H-frame, but for these purposes, close enough), but they weren't systematic enough to be of use (I was measuring frequency response, not distortion, so made no effort to measure at varying levels).

 

[ta240]

I think Danny appeals more to the audio hobbyist than to the audio jewelry crowd -- the latter are people who drop $20,000 on a DAC that sounds no better than my OKTO <g>. But that doesn't mean that everything Danny says (or I say or anyone says) has a solid engineering basis, and there are certain questionable myths held by some audiophiles, including the myth of "high end" speaker cables.

I think there is a new group that is being created by youtube informercials; those that aspire to be the audio jewelry crowd. Those enticed by the $60 entry fee for buying tube connectors or the $10 doorstop to put on their dac or the $150 power cable.

There is also a lot of fun in thinking you understand something that other people don't know and Danny and his ilk feed that by giving exciting bits of fact with their pitches.