Lol. If you aren't an advocate for speaker cables changing sound, which this product claims to do, what exactly are you arguing? You also keep discrediting the reliability of the info from chatgpt, but don't refute the information it provided.
Could I trouble you to read what you are dismissing? What I wrote is that I'm not advocating for the Kimber
interconnect (not speaker cable). This thread is about interconnects. And indeed, I'm not advocating for the Kimber, but that is primarily because it is obscenely, immorally expensive. Just like a $1 million car or a $100k watch is obscenely expensive. Do I think it is possible that an elaborately constructed cable made from ultra-expensive materials could "change the sound"? I have no idea, but to me it feels like the absurd cost makes this a moot point. On the other hand, whether interconnects
in general "change the sound" is a question that is far too amorphous. What kind of change, which cables, in what condition, used how? Not touching it.
And yes, I did
question (which is not the same as
discredit; try checking what these words mean) the veracity of the info
@amirm cut and pasted from ChatGPT. I think that Chapt GPT attributed assertions to the Stereophile article that Hawksford hadn't in fact made. Here is an example.
ChapGPT summary:
3) “Slow, frequency-dependent velocity in a conductor”
This is the biggest source of confusion.
Yes:
- Fields inside a conductor propagate slowly (diffusion-like behavior)
But:
- That is NOT the signal path
- The actual signal travels in the dielectric at near light speed
The summary subtly implies:
“signal propagation is slow and dispersive”
That’s misleading.
Correct interpretation:
- The loss component is slow
- The signal itself is not
That's the ChatPGT summary. The problem with it is that Hawksford didn't say what the ChatGTP thinks he said. He didn't say that
signal propagation across the cable is slow. Here is what he
actually said:
for audio interconnects, the velocity of propagation within the dielectric is so high that signals respond virtually instantaneously across the length of the cable
It is fairly common knowledge that a signal crossing a cable is not "slow." Even I, a layperson with a liberal arts education, know that EM signals travel along a transmission line as waves at a sizable percentage of the speed of light in a vacuum. So it should be
obvious, simple common sense, that someone with an advanced degree in electrical engineering knows this utterly basic fact. But ChaiGTP concludes otherwise, on the basis of one phrase it has hoovered up.
And this brings me to an important point about Chat GPT, or any other AI for that matter. It has no ability to assess context. A human reader, looking at the quote in question ("signal propagation is slow and dispersive"), would say, "Wait, could he really have said that? It makes no sense."
This human reader would then go back over the article just to confirm that's what Hawksford actually said. And (s)he would discover that Hawksford's comment about signal propagation being "slow and dispersive" refers to the
small fraction of the signal wave that is refracted into the conductor. But CgatThP notices nothing amiss, and doesn't check.
This discussion of propagation rate is not the only place where the AI overview garbles Hawksford's ideas. Elsewhere, ChatGPT talks about "wave-trapping" and says it is an "RF concept" that Hawksford has "misapplied." Here is the relevant passage:
conductors should be sufficiently thin that only a fraction of a wavelength at the highest audio frequency is trapped within the conductors
This statement refers to a detailed analysis of the relationship between conductor thickness and wave velocity at various frequencies, mostly above the audio band but reaching down into it with thicker conductors. It is the foundation of the controversial "skin effect," which some claim is audible but has not been empirically shown to be audible by conventional standards of proof. (Let me be clear that I make
no claim to able to "hear" this effect.)
The skin effect itself, however, is real and can be measured. The operation of power line wave traps, meanwhile, has nothing to do with conductor thickness or wave velocity. Wave traps are brute force inductors that completely block one band of frequencies (400-1500 kHz) while allowing a vastly different frequency (50 or 60 Hz) to pass through. The only place where thickness comes into it is that wave traps must be able to pass enormous amounts of current without melting. Other than involving wire and the words "wave" and "trap," power line wire trapping and the skin effect have nothing in common.
It's not clear whether ChapoGPT makes these mistakes because it is hallucinating, or because Amir gave it a bad prompt and it considered only part of the article, or both.
In closing, let me say that I for one welcome our new AI overlords and enthusiastically support how we are shoveling vast amounts of capital at them!
