DACS Have they gone about as far as they can go?

[amirm]

Hallelujah!!! A single ray of the sun pierces deep within the dark chamber, illuminating the hitherto untouched depths in a glorious burst of brightness ...

Yes, Virginia, we are fixing faults ...

There are faults that are accepted as such, and those that are not. A disconnected cable is a fault that everyone accepts as being so without a test. Not aligning the molecules in a cable and resulting reduced soundstage is not a fault that is accepted and hence formal testing is required before accepting that premise.

 

[fas42]

The thing is, there's a sliding scale to that: to me, every cable that is simply plugged in is faulty - to most people that would be a very subtle fault, but I have spent 30 years learning to listen for, and, yes, hear the audible artifacts of that "fault".

Why can that be a fault? Well, there are some excellent books investigating the nature of electrical contacts, and it's a nightmare world at the microscopic level, at the metallic boundaries. I didn't start by reading that material, but found them in the end through my researching of what was happening.

Of course. conventional measurements will never pick this up - but unfortunately, very unfortunately, there is just enough low level distortion being caused by these less than perfect connections to cause artifacts audible to the human ear. Subtle, yes, but they're the ones that do the real damage - for example, make that Zu speaker mentioned in another thread unlistenable to.

Where the subjectivists get it wrong is that they apply various loopy band aids to the situation - they alter the nature of the artifacts by doing so, but rarely ever "fix" it! ... QED.

 

[amirm]

The thing is, there's a sliding scale to that: to me, every cable that is simply plugged in is faulty - to most people that would be a very subtle fault, but I have spent 30 years learning to listen for, and, yes, hear the audible artifacts of that "fault".

Do you think you can tell the difference in a blind test then where you don't know which wire is which?

 

[fas42]

What's faulty is the manner of how it make contact to its socket, mainly - and then the characteristics of the cable influence the spectrum of the distortion that results. I went through the "special" cable thing 30 years ago, and once I achieved competent sound did experiments, at a later stage, that demonstrated that completely ordinary wiring is fine.

If I could easily tell which wire is which in such a test then it really tells me that system is quite faulty - I should not be able to distinguish them. An audio friend was into cables, then I emphasised the importance of hard wiring or improving the contacts in the connection; he did an experiment of comparing ordinary cable with "very special" stuff - plugged in normally he could distinguish them, but when soldered into circuit the differences disappeared! End of worrying about such things for him too ...