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Stereophile article on speaker wire measurements

sergeauckland

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I can't understand what he's trying to show. All cables will show energy storage, they must do as they all have some capacitance and inductance. So what? Anyway, the differences between the cables are all the square root of didly-squat.

Still, he got paid for a few hundred words........

S.
 

tomtoo

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Iam far away to be a expert.
But it's realy strange.
1)The text says you can heare the difference of cables. So let's measure and if we see a difference that is the confirmation that you can hear it. Thats not science. You can measure a lot of shit that you can't hear!!
2) Use a 1mm^2 twisted cabel and you stay in the middel of measured performance.(measured and i not see any proven correlation to hearable)
Yeah thats a cheap solution!
 

tomtoo

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Edit says:
"..Testing the RF transmission of Kimber Kable, up to 3GHz, at Ben Duncan Research Labs, in 2008. .."

Impressive to test a speaker kabel at 3GHz. But i dont see why i schould care how the kabel performs at 3GHz?
 

pjug

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driven with a discontinuous signal (that represents a music transient)

should be

driven with a non-smooth signal (similar to clipping)
 
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pozz

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This article is related to the chapter on speaker cables in Philip Newell and Keith Holland's book on loudspeaker design recently (second edition published in 2019). I don't have the book on hand but my impressions were similar: what is really being highlighted? Are these like the discussions about ringing in DAC filters?
 
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pozz

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Edit says:
"..Testing the RF transmission of Kimber Kable, up to 3GHz, at Ben Duncan Research Labs, in 2008. .."

Impressive to test a speaker kabel at 3GHz. But i dont see why i schould care how the kabel performs at 3GHz?
It seems like the idea was to check for stability in amplifier/cable interactions.
 

Koeitje

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This entire thing makes no sense. Why not start with the premise that you don't know if a speaker cable makes a difference and test the hypothesis that it does. You then conduct a double blind test and see the results.

After that you can also measure what kind of characteristics the cables have. I'm also missing some kind of frequency response measurement. Difference between cables are often described as having more body, bass, or treble. Those should be easily measurable. So all in all its just a bunch of gibberish on a page.
 

tomtoo

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It seems like the idea was to check for stability in amplifier/cable interactions.

Ok i see, at 3GHz a Audio Amp?? Even 3MHz would be far from any usage, but 3GHz is measuring in another galaxy.

Edit says: yeap thats like measuring the mass of the center black hole in Andromeda and telling me how big this influence is on the taste of my breakfast cornflakes imo.
 
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JeffS7444

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So this is actually a test using ultrasonic frequencies? Not an expert here, but the region of the waveform being examined sure as heck looks like square waves to me, and I wonder if they actually represent signal which is well beyond 20 kHz (square waves not being pure tone but rather, a composite of harmonics). Next, was inductance of the cables measured, and if so, does cable inductance predict what was observed?
 

FrantzM

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This actually shows how ASR is changing the landscape. They're finding it is not enough for the reviewer to find the sound of Silver cables "cold" and that of bronze cables "warm" ... I am certain that the sound of any cable made of U238 would sound particularly toxic but I am digressing :).
Now they are trying to show that , the can be "scientific" too: Since there are differences in measurements, there must be audible ones; Science ( Physiology among many disciplines) be damned!! :mad:
An Himalaya of, Bovine Manure, aka "BS"!
 
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pozz

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This actually shows how ASR is changing the landscape. They're finding it is not enough for the reviewer to find the sound of Silver cables "cold" and that of bronze cables "warm" ... I am certain that the sound of any cable made of U238 would sound particularly toxic but I am digressing :). Now they are trying to show that , they, can be scientific too: Since there are differences in measurements thus there must be audible one; Science and biology be damned!! :mad:
An Himalaya of, Bovine Manure aka "BS"!
The article was originally published in 1995, but maybe they unearthed it now as a reaction to the testing done here.
 

tomtoo

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This actually shows how ASR is changing the landscape. They're finding it is not enough for the reviewer to find the sound of Silver cables "cold" and that of bronze cables "warm" ... I am certain that the sound of any cable made of U238 would sound particularly toxic but I am digressing :). Now they are trying to show that , they, can be scientific too: Since there are differences in measurements thus there must be audible one; Science and biology be damned!! :mad:
An Himalaya of, Bovine Manure aka "BS"!

Iam not a expert and than there is the language barrier. But i read it two times and this read still remains the same. It's not in any way scientific.
 

SimpleTheater

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1)The text says you can hear the difference of cables. So let's measure and if we see a difference that is the confirmation that you can hear it. Thats not science. You can measure a lot of shit that you can't hear!!
I think its funny that anyone that believes the difference in quality speaker cables, doesn't do the most obvious test of all, measure the speakers. If the cable sounds different, the speaker output must be different. But they measure the cable because the inaudible differences pertaining to gauge, metals and twisting difference, can be shown. If they actually compared a reference speakers measurements using different cables they'd find nothing (ok, maybe they'd find a .001 db difference at 20,000 Hz using 10 meters of cable).
 

wgb113

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The most important measurement for speaker cables that I've found is from amp to speaker terminal.
 

egellings

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Note that diddly squat needs to be a positive number if you decide to take the square root of it. Negative diddly squat just won't cut it. Just maybe, imaginary diddly squat might have positive audio qualities and therefore should be investigated.
 
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