Analysis of Paper on Measurements of RCA Cables by Kunchur (Video)

[RigorDude]

I don't think there are scopes or pulse generators in any astrophysics department or lab, usually there is only computers and books So it seems the mates of the EM department forgot to lock the door of some lab and someone has been having a nice party there.

You keep talking like Kunchur’s field is astrophysics. It is not. His primary field is condensed-matter physics, in which he would likely be quite well grounded in the behaviors of EM conducting materials. Astrophysics isn’t even listed as an interest. The only link to astrophysics is the name of his department.

 

[krabapple]

You keep talking like Kunchur’s field is astrophysics. It is not. His primary field is condensed-matter physics, in which he would likely be quite well grounded in the behaviors of EM conducting materials. Astrophysics isn’t even listed as an interest. The only link to astrophysics is the name of his department.

And yet.....

 

[xaviescacs]

You keep talking like Kunchur’s field is astrophysics. It is not. His primary field is condensed-matter physics, in which he would likely be quite well grounded in the behaviors of EM conducting materials. Astrophysics isn’t even listed as an interest. The only link to astrophysics is the name of his department.

I admit it, I haven't checked his curriculum nor his current occupation. I just followed amir's comment on the video. I should have checked that before making such uninformed statements.

Perhaps he wants to leave the department and he is sending a message to his colleagues: or you let me leave or I'll keep publishing articles under your name. Not sure who is going to accept him though... Or perhaps he wants to be wired by a high-end audio company to build superconductors for home audio, with the Helium tanks and all the stuff... that makes more sense...

 

[lc6]

View attachment 227417

This is also a good one

According to the Jay boy (see about 14:30 into the video cited in an earlier post in this discussion), cable lifters perceptually work only in (a) an acoustically treated room, and (b) in a room with hard floor, but not in one with a carpet. So it must be that hard floor compresses the magnetic field, but a carpet does not. Or is it the acoustic vibrations transferring to cables? And what about acoustic panels -- do they affect the magnetic field of speaker cables, too? Or said acoustic vibrations? Think about the possibilities. It boggles my simple mind.

 

[Blumlein 88]

According to the Jay boy (see about 14:30 into the video cited in an earlier post in this discussion), cable lifters perceptually work only in (a) an acoustically treated room, and (b) in a room with hard floor, but not in one with a carpet. So it must be that hard floor compresses the magnetic field, but a carpet does not. Or is it the acoustic vibrations transferring to cables? And what about acoustic panels -- do they affect the magnetic field of speaker cables, too? Or said acoustic vibrations? Think about the possibilities. It boggles my simple mind.

You can measure acoustic effect on cables whether from magnetic fields or triboelectric effects. Not happening at any level someone can hear.

 

[amirm]

According to the Jay boy (see about 14:30 into the video cited in an earlier post in this discussion), cable lifters perceptually work only in (a) an acoustically treated room, and (b) in a room with hard floor, but not in one with a carpet. So it must be that hard floor compresses the magnetic field, but a carpet does not. Or is it the acoustic vibrations transferring to cables? And what about acoustic panels -- do they affect the magnetic field of speaker cables, too? Or said acoustic vibrations? Think about the possibilities. It boggles my simple mind.

Don't you love those disclaimers in advance so that if someone doesn't hear a difference, it could be blamed on that? Yet everyone who tries these tweaks reports an improvement with or without those conditions!

 

[bevok]

Excellent video, I think it’s great having intelligent discussion in this format which puts claims in context. Must have been a lot of work to put together so thanks.

 

[JSmith]

If AES want to maintain any credibility, the first published "paper" should be removed... really, peer reviewed?

Some interesting comments posted, however as mentioned previously in the thread, many replies must be getting removed;

AES Journal Forum » Cable Pathways Between Audio Components Can Affect Perceived Sound Quality

The AES Forum is where our members get to interact with each other in between conferences and section meetings.

secure.aes.org

JSmith

 

[Peluvius]

If AES want to maintain any credibility, the first published "paper" should be removed... really, peer reviewed?

Some interesting comments posted, however as mentioned previously in the thread, many replies must be getting removed;

AES Journal Forum » Cable Pathways Between Audio Components Can Affect Perceived Sound Quality

The AES Forum is where our members get to interact with each other in between conferences and section meetings.

secure.aes.org

JSmith

What credibility would you assign to a group associating itself with misleading and deceptive conduct? What would a retraction be at this late stage other than an attempt to manage the damage?

 

[JSmith]

What would a retraction be at this late stage other than an attempt to manage the damage?

Fair point and agree.

I can't see how this "paper" even qualifies for their own submission criteria;

AES Journal Manuscript Types

The different types of manuscript acceptable by the Journal are described in detail.

www.aes.org

Journal Author Guidelines

Authors submitting papers to the Journal should review these guidelines.

www.aes.org

... a far cry from 1982;

AES E-Library » Listening Tests-Turning Opinion into Fact

Listening tests of many kinds take place regularly in the audio industry. Most of them lack the necessary psychological and acoustical controls to produce results that are of real significance, yet the course of audio is regularly influenced by opinions derived from such tests. Some familiar and...

www.aes.org

JSmith

 

[René - Acculution.com]

As soon as you start fiddling with cables and risers yourself, you are priming your brain; you are touching things, you are smelling the new cable, you know the cost, and btw you are not sitting in the same position when you sit down again, so some difference is to be expected. What you need is that someone sneaks in and changes things around without your knowing... Do you now hear a difference with a setup that you know really well?

And those papers are of a fairly low quality; I publish and review papers myself and this is really low-tier stuff, but I do see more and more like this being published, so the quality has gone down over the years. And strangely, more abstract, and arguably more interesting, papers can be difficult to get published.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Well this is coming in 2025 for some research papers.

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

You keep talking like Kunchur’s field is astrophysics. It is not. His primary field is condensed-matter physics, in which he would likely be quite well grounded in the behaviors of EM conducting materials. Astrophysics isn’t even listed as an interest. The only link to astrophysics is the name of his department.

Let’s just hope he’s more knowledgeable with superconductor physics than he is with anything at all associated with audio. His papers literally read like they were written by some random audiophile after someone gave him a lab and an oscilloscope to play with. An example would be trying to test the ”timing resolution” by literally soldering random capacitors and resistors to a relay, cause digitally synthesizing it would cause too much aliasing and filter lag, or something which would clearly bias the experiment. So… we’re just gonna whip out the soldering iron from AliExpress and go to town! The pinnacle of true experimental control excellence.

Edit: The experiment is clever in that it uses a low pass filter and a square wave to alter the "attack" of the waveform by essentially altering the harmonic content out at supersonic frequencies that are, as the paper shows via its own testing, inaudible. In principal, any discernable differences should be due to hearing the "envelope" of the waveform and thus showing high resolution in the time domain. But what he fails to do is have any sort of control (both in terms of actual controls and also as an experimental control to screen out that obvious result) that can maintain the same fundamental energy as the various filters are switched in and out of the signal path, and in Table 2 he even shows this that the amplitude clearly changes, which is what the test subjects are really reacting to. They handwave that its below the JND and can be "neglected" but show me the actual measurements from the amplifier output! Essentially he is just establishing a dB threshold above which changes become audible to the test subjects since to the ears that is just a sine wave at the fundamental instead of a square wave. On top of this there could even be resonances in the headphones themselves, but the "measurements" seem to indicate otherwise. And god knows what other issues there could be. Be interesting to have someone who is knowledgeable in Kuncher's main field of work peer review it, but I would not want to waste their time with such trivial things.

 

[voodooless]

Well this is coming in 2025 for some research papers.

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

President Joe Biden’s administration announced yesterday that, by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published. Data underlying those publications must also be made freely available “without delay.”

Last time I checked, AES is not a federal agency...

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

As soon as you start fiddling with cables and risers yourself, you are priming your brain; you are touching things, you are smelling the new cable…

I can just see him now in the back of a darkly lit room, dragging a $10,000 cable made from pure silver and platinum across the bottom of his nostrils as he takes a long, heavy sniff... Much like someone would do with a fine wine.

Edit: Im sure that’s not quite what you had in mind and I agree with the statement, but I could not resist.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Last time I checked, AES is not a federal agency...

Don't think it has to be a federal agency. Just federally funded. i imagine his university is somewhat federally funded. Don't know if that will apply to his research or not in this case as I don't know the funding.

 

[voodooless]

Has anyone read his latest paper: http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~kunchur/papers/Stereo-height--Kunchur.pdf ?

There is a category of realistic sounding systems—sometimes referred to as “high‐end audio” (which I will abbreviate as HEA)—that lies far beyond mainstream‐consumer audio. Carefully setup and tuned HEA systems are extremely rare, and most people interested in music are not aware that this level of audio reproduction exists. They are astounded when they experience for the first time the 3D recreated soundstage with phantom images of instruments and their acoustic surroundings, reproduced with amazing timbral detail. HEA components are already close to perfection in standard specifications—for example, the amplifier used in the present work has a frequency response of DC to 1 MHz ±1 dB, unweighted signal‐to‐noise ratio of 97dB, and ~0.01% total distortion.

High-end Amplifier with 80 SINAD and 97dB SNR? Really? That is hardly transparent, nor SOTO.

Edit: to be fair, the Spectral also specs better numbers than 0.01%. But that's not the point. The point is that he thinks these numbers are fine for a high-end amplifier.

Sonic dissimilarities between HEA components arise from subtle time‐domain differences; and improvements in overall system performance come from meticulous setup and tuning, and careful attention to details such as the interlinking cables [10]

The citation goes to the very paper the video is about, so total bullshit

Most audio professionals do not believe that elevation can or should be naturally reproduced in two‐channel stereo. The present experimental result settles that debate. This effect has been demonstrated in private settings and in conventions, but the present work provides concrete proof through IRB (Institutional Review Board) approved controlled blind tests.

uhuh...
The DAC used is a:

Berkeley Audio Design® Alpha DAC® Series 2

If the review of the series 1 is anything to go by, this thing is also not very transparent...

Speakers are not super special

ProAc® Response® D2

Stereophile measured the D2R, which looks similar. Horizontal off-axis is okay, vertical though is a total mess.

kudos for some room treatment.

The key to sonic dimensionality is to maintain the highest signal integrity at every step in order to preserve the time‐domain fidelity to the subtlest detail.

So why then use sub-par components?

Typical popular recordings are recorded with microphones in close (<0.5 m) proximity to each instrument, recording the instruments one at a time on separate tracks that are mixed at a later time. Such a recording will not inherently capture a natural sense of space; instead it may employ artificially added delays, reverberation, etc. to create spatial effects. For a recording that does naturally capture the 3D sonic landscape, it is necessary for the audio system to avoid alterations in the temporal structure of recorded sounds that would compromise imaging

So like 99% of all recorded music...? And I'm pretty sure the high-end folk will still make the exact same claims with those recordings.

Before the trial, listeners were given the following instructions: a recording would be played with various instruments, two of which were a trumpet and a banjo (the piece also included a piano, sousaphone, and saxophone). When those two instruments started playing, the listeners were to note the locations of the instruments’ images, focusing on their elevations, and make a judgment as to which instrument (trumpet or banjo) was higher than the other

Okay, now to the important part:

The recording played was the Buddy Bolden Blues track on the CD (compact disk) “Test Record 1: Depth of Image” by the label Opus 3 released in 1984. Of the 29 subjects, 28 judged the trumpet to be higher and 1 judged both instrument elevations to be the same

Well duh! A trumpet is a handheld device that you blow into. Usually, people that play the trumpet are standing up. Just by the fact that I hear I trumpet, my mind already knows that the sound is coming from higher up

This experiment conclusively proves that a correctly set up two‐channel stereo system can in fact portray not only depth and lateral width (azimuth), but also elevation for appropriately recorded material.

No, it proves absolutely nothing ! At best it proved that in general people know where certain sounds come from. I don't even need a so called high-end playback system for any of this.

For this experiment to be actually useful, you would need to record these instruments at actual different places, so also places where the listener would not expect the sound to be. Only then you can start to make some decent conclusions.

This man is a disgrace to science!

 

[Cars-N-Cans]

No, it proves absolutely nothing ! At best it proved that in general people know where certain sounds come from. I don't even need a so called high-end playback system for any of this.

Sort of reminds me of Paul @ PS Audio raving about the extreme depth of soundstage with his IRS-V's. At least with those they are dipoles so there is an actual physical basis for why he potentially hears what he hears. But elevation? Maybe someone should send Kunchur a shag carpet to toss in front of his fancy speakers so he stops imagining things.

Reading http://boson.physics.sc.edu/~kunchu...olution-by-bandwidth-restriction--Kunchur.pdf its clear he has no idea of what experimental controls are, or chooses not to employ them. But I think we are familiar with that theme, now. Edit: Still sort of intrigued by the idea. It would be interesting to repeat it, but with a proper control included that maintains the fundamental amplitude regardless of filter insertion. If the two separate sets of tests yield similar results, then he would be onto something. But, I have my doubts.

 

[tomtoo]

A sitting trumpet player sounds different than a standig. It will have more low frequence thru floor support.

In advanced mixing this is used to give a feelt high to the soundstage. Add a little lows to one trumpet, and you can imagine its lower in soundstage.

 

[voodooless]

A sitting trumpet player sounds different than a standig. It will have more low frequence thru floor support.

Yeah, actually one should do these experiments with synthetic sounds. Otherwise you cannot prove that the trumpet sounded "low" because of the system being so good, or just the trumpet sounding different at different spots. And even with synthetic sounds played in an actual room, one could argue that the brain has a notion of how it should sound. The remedy would be to only audition the specific synthetic sound to the listener once so that he has no reference.