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Measured differences between interconnect cables

Head_Unit

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I just noticed your response, and you got it wrong. This test included everything, including SPL, with a microphone.
[referring to @kongwee
I think @kongwee fooled you with misinformation. In fact, complete set of tests were done, both electrical response and acoustic response with real speaker and microphone.
Huh? Where? I just looked at the original post again reading very slowly. There are many nice graphs, very interesting. However now I notice it does not say what the cables are connected between and what those graphs are showing. ARE they electrical? Acoustical? Am I going blind? Is it in a later post I missed?
@GXAlan can you please elucidate?
It's a lot of nice work, actually somehow the original post can maybe be edited to clarify?
 

MAB

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[referring to @kongwee

Huh? Where? I just looked at the original post again reading very slowly. There are many nice graphs, very interesting. However now I notice it does not say what the cables are connected between and what those graphs are showing. ARE they electrical? Acoustical? Am I going blind? Is it in a later post I missed?
@GXAlan can you please elucidate?
It's a lot of nice work, actually somehow the original post can maybe be edited to clarify?
Kongwee was responding to my post, where I referenced the following experiment, with all sorts of acoustical measurements, and said that it had no measurements.
 

Cbdb2

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Actually this report from QED provides very good insight on cables. ITs very old but I would say still pretty good read.

Bs from a cable seller.
 

MAB

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That fact that this thread show the measured in component, not speaker SPL level. Really don't need to tag me. I am not even in this tread https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../different-binding-posts-is-it-audible.16052/
No, I posted the link stating that someone always says "but you didn't measure full-speaker" or whatever...
And you responded that the link I posted was a "partial setup testing the usual voltage dB measure. Nobody I said again done in SPL." Which is a mischaracterization of the link, which contains bot electrical and acoustic measurements, and quite a comprehensive set of them.
Here is a screen capture of the exchange to refresh your memory.
1672113897720.png

Understand?
 
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GXAlan

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[referring to @kongwee

Huh? Where? I just looked at the original post again reading very slowly. There are many nice graphs, very interesting. However now I notice it does not say what the cables are connected between and what those graphs are showing. ARE they electrical? Acoustical? Am I going blind? Is it in a later post I missed?
@GXAlan can you please elucidate?
It's a lot of nice work, actually somehow the original post can maybe be edited to clarify?

Electrical. Unbalanced RCA cables between a USB DAC and ADC. This was done with a low tech Korg DS DAC 10R which shows that even a plain device can be sensitive enough to measure cable differences (when the environment is noisy).

I later caught more effects of LED ceiling lights with an E1DA Cosmos.

 

kongwee

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No, I posted the link stating that someone always says "but you didn't measure full-speaker" or whatever...
And you responded that the link I posted was a "partial setup testing the usual voltage dB measure. Nobody I said again done in SPL." Which is a mischaracterization of the link, which contains bot electrical and acoustic measurements, and quite a comprehensive set of them.
Here is a screen capture of the exchange to refresh your memory.
View attachment 252572
Understand?
I am responding you do not a full speaker setup. A complete system. Real Waveform not dB vs frequency plot. A binding connect to tweeter with mic feed of you can say you got me. I admit it just base on this setup, ignoring a full speaker setup I mention. I admit I am wrong that you do a partial BP to tweeter with mic feed. I'm apology. But no to a full setup. And no to show real waveform.
 
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MAB

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I am responding you do not a full speaker setup. A complete system. Real Waveform not dB vs frequency plot. A binding connect to tweeter with mic feed of you can say you got me. I admit it just base on this setup, ignoring a full speaker setup I mention. I admit I am wrong that you do a partial BP to tweeter with mic feed. I'm apology. But no to a full setup. And no to show real waveform.
Thanks, appreciate your post.
 

Pegwill

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Hi Guys

While I don’t pretend to understand all the technicalities behind the measurements neither having access to the sophisticated equipment to highlight the differences, while skimming across the internet I came upon this.


I’m sure a lot will have seen this device however that is not the reason for the post, but how he draws his conclusions by using ‘Audacity’ a free app. This of course will be available to most. It would appear the biggest problem is aligning the two recordings. I have yet to try it myself, but it maybe of some use after all if, you can’t see a difference, I guess you won’t be able to hear a difference.

Just my thoughts anyway, hope it helps.

Regards

Pegwill
 
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DSJR

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Youtube poster techmoan also tried one - [edit - CD shaver] (I love his often irreverent posts) and I remember he didn't find it made any difference at all.
 
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ctrl

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[off-topic] In reference to the "Different Binding Posts - is it audible?" thread.

Huh? Where? I just looked at the original post again reading very slowly. There are many nice graphs, very interesting. However now I notice it does not say what the cables are connected between and what those graphs are showing. ARE they electrical? Acoustical? Am I going blind? Is it in a later post I missed?
@GXAlan can you please elucidate?
It's a lot of nice work, actually somehow the original post can maybe be edited to clarify?
That fact that this thread show the measured in component, not speaker SPL level. Really don't need to tag me. I am not even in this tread https://www.audiosciencereview.com/.../different-binding-posts-is-it-audible.16052/
A binding connect to tweeter with mic feed of you can say you got me. I admit it just base on this setup, ignoring a full speaker setup I mention. I admit I am wrong that you do a partial BP to tweeter with mic feed. I'm apology. But no to a full setup. And no to show real waveform.

The thread shows electrical and acoustic measurements of various binding posts.

The electrical resistance measurements are used to show that you can easily measure minimal differences between different binding posts.

The acoustic measurements with tweeter and microphone enable us to classify how big the influence of the binding posts is on the acoustically transmitted signal of a loudspeaker. In the experiment only the high-pass filter part of a crossover is used (to feed the tweeter). Just as in hifi high-end circles a passive 2-way speaker would be driven by bi-amping.

There, the influence of the different binding posts (see section 3 and below) on the acoustic frequency response, the phase frequency response (i.e. the temporal behavior) and the multitone distortion (which include harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion, etc.) is then shown.
.
Please ask further questions about this in the "Different Binding Posts - is it audible?" thread.
 
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Pegwill

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Hi @DSJR

It’s not clear to me if you read my post or just looked at the picture. The whole point of my post was the use of ‘Audacity’ not whether or not the device being tested worked or not.

If you consider that Audacity cannot be used in this manner that’s a different thing. It seemed logical to me, who does not have acres of technical equipment or the knowledge to use it, but I think I could get my head around Audacity.

Regards

Pegwill
 

pkane

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Presented purely for interest.

TLDR:
1) Differences in cables exist and can be measured at the audio level and achieve statistically significant differences
2) The differences are vanishingly small, so it doesn't make sense when listening to audio
3) The differences may make a difference when measuring gear
4) These tests will be repeated when my E1DA Cosmos Grade-A unit arrives later this week.

I'm going to tell the whole story and the process I took.

Background, Korg DS-DAC-10R in loopback mode. This isn't a high performance DAC/ADC but it does have a clean power supply, easy to access RCA jacks and it's pretty consistent. It's consistently noisy and consistently distorted from run to run. My main goal was to run through a few different software options in preparation of my incoming E1DA Cosmos ADC.

Cables on test:
1) Silver plated copper, flat ribbon cable, unshielded. I thought it sounded pretty good and then I tried it where I had RF interference and ditched it. I actually wanted to send it to Amir a few years back, but cable testing was a low priority. This is the cable shown here:
and here is proof I thought they sounded different.
View attachment 232241

2) Monster Cable Ultra Series 800 "THX" Certified
Got these as a freebie with something I bought.

3) Straight Wire Virtuoso 3 (JBL Synthesis branded)
Got a bunch of these and I also thought it sounded noticeably better than I bought more. These came from eBay from a pulled system.

First Experiment
RMAA loopback.
I ran the cables A->B->C->C->B->A sequentially and got this:
View attachment 232242

No real difference but it was interesting that the noise and dynamic range of the silver cables were very different from the Straight Wires. If you just throw them as aggregate as unpaired student's t-test, it's p < 0.0001
View attachment 232243

Next I ran multitone tests, no real difference. I felt as if there were differences in the subjective SHAPE of the noise in the bass area
View attachment 232244
View attachment 232245
View attachment 232246


This is where it gets very interesting
View attachment 232247

View attachment 232248

View attachment 232250


1. I don't know why the Straightwire delivered an extra dB during one run. I didn't change anything.
2. Notice the humps at ~15 kHz and 20kHz.

I then decided to run a test tone at exactly 15kHz
View attachment 232252

View attachment 232254

View attachment 232255


These tests are run serially. That is, I ran the full set of 50 Hz test tones. Then ran the full set of 15 kHz test tones. (I changed the cables 6 times not 3 times).

With these sets of tests, it was pretty clear that the left and right cables were different with the straight wire. We're still looking at a difference that is vanishingly small, but you do see differences.


Reversing the cables shows that the humps follow the cable.

View attachment 232258


Since I had multiple StraightWire cables, I found some replacements and measured them again. Boom. Really clean results. This was about 1 hour later.
View attachment 232261

Immediately after getting these flat results with the newer cable, I went back to the broken cable 1 hour later after the original set of tests to ensure that it wasn't random noise in the system somewhere

View attachment 232262

If you compare the 15 kHz results between the Monster Cable and the working Straight Wire cables:
View attachment 232263

Just saw this thread. A heroic attempt to test interconnects! I'd suggest that a simpler test for cables would be using DeltaWave to null the results.
 

DSJR

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Hi @DSJR

It’s not clear to me if you read my post or just looked at the picture. The whole point of my post was the use of ‘Audacity’ not whether or not the device being tested worked or not.

If you consider that Audacity cannot be used in this manner that’s a different thing. It seemed logical to me, who does not have acres of technical equipment or the knowledge to use it, but I think I could get my head around Audacity.

Regards

Pegwill
I was talking about the CD shaver (edited to make it clear). I have no issue at all with objective comparisons of cables and apologise for muddying the waters (I'm extremely good at that it seems....).
 
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GXAlan

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Just saw this thread. A heroic attempt to test interconnects! I'd suggest that a simpler test for cables would be using DeltaWave to null the results.
This predates my other experiments with DeltaWave/Multitone tool. :)

I still have to redo the amplifier null tests. I have a better thought process on how to do these reliably.
 

pkane

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This predates my other experiments with DeltaWave/Multitone tool. :)

I still have to redo the amplifier null tests. I have a better thought process on how to do these reliably.

Here was my attempt from a few years ago:

 

egellings

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That is interesting. What on earth is going on with the LED???

OK, yeah. Good to move on rather than dwell on cables.
Maybe the LED was powered by a switch mode supply and spewing a bit of RFI.
 
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