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A Short History of High-End Audio Cables

Blumlein 88

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Fulton cables were prior to Monster. (I didn't watch the video). William Low of Audioquest was selling a LiveWire brand prior to starting AQ and roughly the same time Monster was started. I suppose Monster was the first widely known company for such cables.
 

Martin

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I think this is Geoff Kait’s best tweak ever and it’s free!

The Photos in the Freezer Tweak is simple. Place two photos of yourself, one a younger photo and the other a more recent photo in separate clear ziplock bags. With a fine tip RED PEN write on one side of each ziplock bag,

‘x = PRESENT TIME

and on the other side with RED PEN write,

‘x 26 ‘x

Note that x is lower case.

Place the finished two ziplock bags with photos in the freezer and keep them there.

Then listen to some things you’re familiar with and see if the sound is improved. You do not have to wait until the photos are frozen. If you are not sure if the sound improved, try taking the photos out of the freezer and listen again without the photos. If you hear the sound as improved with the photos IN the freezer you can leave them there.

Copied from: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussi...y-design-or-by-tweaking?page=3&sort_order=asc

Martin
 

MediumRare

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talk about all these different masterings and pressings (some going for ridiculous $$$) of Led Zep II ... and the first track - Whole Lotta Love - just sounds like crap. The distortion and all, which gets worse as Page and Kramer got excited on that old 12 channel rotary console they mixed it on.

Watch that vid at the end where at the fade the original that was "remastered" in 2014 just sounds hideous... as did the old pressings and CD
Yes! I need better SQ Led Zeppelin. What can you recommend?
 

DonH56

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I still have a pair of Fulton Gold cables with short Fulton Brown jumpers to fit my ARC D-79's terminal block (which I do not have anymore).
 

ajawamnet

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Fulton cables were prior to Monster. (I didn't watch the video). William Low of Audioquest was selling a LiveWire brand prior to starting AQ and roughly the same time Monster was started. I suppose Monster was the first widely known company for such cables.


I was fabbing Blue Litz cables around the same time - early 1980s. Monster was founded in 1978
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Cable

I recall when I was designing the 2x1AC preamp for Lane Poor - the pick manufacturer - him telling me that he was one of the first production managers at Monster. Told me he couldn't stand the marketturds for very long and left.
 

AudioSceptic

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Fulton cables were prior to Monster. (I didn't watch the video). William Low of Audioquest was selling a LiveWire brand prior to starting AQ and roughly the same time Monster was started. I suppose Monster was the first widely known company for such cables.
In the UK the first branded cables I was aware of were QED 79-Strand and Radio Spares 56-Strand. This was late 70s, I think, but does anyone know exactly when?
 

blueone

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The most curious thing about the article, and the rest of Olsher's work for Stereophile and The Absolute Sound, is that he apparently is or was a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At least I suspect he is actually Richard H. Olsher, because sometimes the name Dick Olsher is mentioned as a LANL researcher. Still, you would think a practicing physicist would be the least likely person to fall for audio cable myths.

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/39879423_Richard_H_Olsher
 

pozz

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I think this is Geoff Kait’s best tweak ever and it’s free!

The Photos in the Freezer Tweak is simple. Place two photos of yourself, one a younger photo and the other a more recent photo in separate clear ziplock bags. With a fine tip RED PEN write on one side of each ziplock bag,

‘x = PRESENT TIME

and on the other side with RED PEN write,

‘x 26 ‘x

Note that x is lower case.

Place the finished two ziplock bags with photos in the freezer and keep them there.

Then listen to some things you’re familiar with and see if the sound is improved. You do not have to wait until the photos are frozen. If you are not sure if the sound improved, try taking the photos out of the freezer and listen again without the photos. If you hear the sound as improved with the photos IN the freezer you can leave them there.

Copied from: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussi...y-design-or-by-tweaking?page=3&sort_order=asc

Martin
geoffkait said:
Unfortunately the explanation is beyond scope of this discussion. Even if it wasn’t it’s a very long story. It’s not easy to explain, either. But the key is that cryogenic and home freezing processes involve Morphic resonance in addition to straightforward physical science. This idea of information fields and low temperatures is perhaps best demonstrated by the notorious Photos in the Freezer Tweak. Of course, the idea that the home freezer can be made more powerful than -300 deep cryo is blasphemy to every audiophile who thinks all tweaks are snake oil and believes “sound engineering principles” are the golden path to audio Nirvana.
Wtf is this.
 
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ajawamnet

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That must have been fun to do. How did you get access to the original tapes?

They were released by a firm in Japan - my guess as to why and the story of the remix is here, along with some other info for anyone interested:

http://www.ajawamnet.com/ajawamnet/remixoflz.html

As to fun, well.... as I mention, at first I didn't want any parts of it. But the guy requesting it was a big fan of the TTD remix I did and really wanted to hear if I could clean it up.

I then listened to a bunch of amateur remixes and after hearing the raw tracks again I told them no way. But after going thru it in my own mind and how disappointed I was in hearing the remasters a few years earlier I really wanted to hear it without the silly distortion. That and the drums were a bit funky - I show why in the one pic on that webpage. The theremin part is a bit more ballsy and you can really kinda hear the interchange between Plant and Page's noisy stuff.

I left the full ending in 'cause Plant nailed that wail. The only other thing is I hope he gets to hear that remix before he leaves this mortal coil - he really sang that quite well, and it's so buried in the original mix that Page and Kramer did.

The other thing that kinda grew out of it is the VU Meter vid - it's really amazing to see how tight they played. I've spent a good portion of my life looking at multitrack VU's and typically with bands that are not so good. And seeing how they got all that wonderful noise out of just 8 tracks is amazing.. the fact that Page and Jones were so studio savvy after years as session players is obvious.
 

MickeyBoy

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In 1978 I started working at Opus One in Pittsburgh. We were a dealer for Dahlquist - fixed many a DQ10.

I recall the cobra stuff.... lots of sales guys wanted to sell it. As far as our lab was concerned - all snake oil. Had no bearing on any measurable parameter. What was interesting was the Blue Litz coax wire we sold.

Pain in the ass to solder to the gold RCAs...

I'd get a 500' spool for $75.00 ... Id chop (2) 3 foot pieces off - solder some gold RCA's on it ( to solder litz wire you need to get the lacquer to melt back during tinning) and sell them for over 100 bucks...

Now on some systems - it actually loaded things up a bit funky and if you did a sweep thru it you'd see a slight rise as it went up in freq due to the funky loading.

Not one of these silly high end wire companies ever refers to Schaum's book on transmission lines, nor even knows who Oliver Heaviside is.

That'd be like a surgeon who has no idea what Gray's Anatomy is (no, not Grey's the silly TV show) ...

"Hello Mr. Simpson!!"
View attachment 32111

Confession is good for the soul. Regarding the Cobra cables, I believe I was the first in the US to write about how cables could audibly influence music reproduction and in particular how much of an improvement the Cobras were. This was for the St Louis area very small circ magazine called AudioGram. I remember a professor at the University of Wisconsin, R. Greiner, took me to task. How he found out about it is a mystery. No mystery in that later in life I found out - slowly - that he was right. I still have the Cobras, free to anyone who wants them.
 

DonH56

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I think it was the Chicago CES where I saw a pair of Cobra cables smoke a pair of Infinity (or Stax? early class D) amplifiers. They didn't tolerate the high capacitance (I don't think they were all the stable anyway, but...)

I may have a copy of AudioGram in my boxes someplace -- I was in Columbia at the time (college kid).
 

pozz

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Confession is good for the soul. Regarding the Cobra cables, I believe I was the first in the US to write about how cables could audibly influence music reproduction and in particular how much of an improvement the Cobras were. This was for the St Louis area very small circ magazine called AudioGram. I remember a professor at the University of Wisconsin, R. Greiner, took me to task. How he found out about it is a mystery. No mystery in that later in life I found out - slowly - that he was right. I still have the Cobras, free to anyone who wants them.
A real piece of history there. I appreciate you sharing that.
 

nintendoeats

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Since this seems to be a bit of an "expensive cables are dumb" thread, here is a fun take.

SCSI is a communications protocol for storage devices. It is still with us, but it was more visible back in the 80s and 90s. Back when it was conceived, it was primarily used with parallel connections, over 50-pin cables at 5 and then 10 MHz (over time this evolved all the way to 68-pins at 160 MHz, albeit at very short cable lengths). We mass-manufactured super-thin ribbon cables that were capable of reliably transmitting 25 parallel signals at 40MHz in a very electrically noisy environment at reasonable prices. IDE, a slower but also parallel interface, was dirt-cheap because everybody used it. I don't know what the clock rate for IDE was, but I will bet you all of the money in the world it was more than 20 KHz.

If we can do 50-pin parallel signaling at 40 MHz using mass-market cables in that kind of environment, then why would we need super-duper diamond-infused unicorn-har 300-dollar-per-meter cables to hear even a few hundred KHz properly? I grant you that one is analog signalling and the other is digital, but the difference in frequency is so extreme that it seems comedic to suggest that this matters. A 10 microsecond noise spike in an analog audio signal is completely meaningless (unless it is so large that it blows out your speakers). In Ultra2 SCSI, that's enough to mangle 400 bytes.

This is not the best argument against fairy-cables, but I think it puts things in a nice perspective.

EDIT:Another similar analogy, just consider how much high-frequency analog information has to go down a coax wire for cable television. It's mind-boggling.
 
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