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Technically astute essays on audio cabling -- but will this expert get around to audibility?

Bruce Morgen

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thegeton

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Not a big PS Audio fan...
 
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Bruce Morgen

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Actually, these essays are by a credible expert at Belden and not a PS Audio minion -- I'm as dubious of McGowan & Co. as anyone, but IMO nobody on his tiny engineering payroll could have written this sort of stuff.

At any rate, suit yourselves. :cool:
 

Blumlein 88

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Cables are a solved issue. If anyone starts to lead you in the direction to doubt it, put them on your list of untrusted sources. Among signal transmission needs audio is a super easy signal to handle. There just isn't anything here. It is crazy how bad cabling can be and be fine for audio.
 

Blumlein 88

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Actually, these essays are by a credible expert at Belden and not a PS Audio minion -- I'm as dubious of McGowan & Co. as anyone, but IMO nobody on his tiny engineering payroll could have written this sort of stuff.

At any rate, suit yourselves. :cool:
Yeah, the retired Belden dude who saw where the money tree is. What I said in my above post. if someone tries to sow uncertainty about audio cables then you can consider them untrustworthy. Just like a credentialed MD who pushes health drink supplements for some side money.
 
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Bruce Morgen

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Yeah, the retired Belden dude who saw where the money tree is. What I said in my above post. if someone tries to sow uncertainty about audio cables then you can considered them untrustworthy. Just like a credentialed MD who pushes health drink supplements for some side money.

Fair enough.
 

Jimbob54

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Everything on the PS Audio site is bullshit, no exceptions. Doesn't matter who wrote it.

And ALL geared towards driving sales /awareness. To be fair, that applies to anything on the website of any commercial venture. But there is credible marketing guff (Benchmark etc) then this.
 

Bob from Florida

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Blue Jeans Cables should send a sample of the Iconoclast speaker cable along with the standard Belden 10 gauge speaker wire they sell to Amir for testing. Use identical terminations and lengths on both cables. That should validate any differences.
 

Chrispy

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Can't imagine wasting any more time on a BS Audio article/video....
 

sejarzo

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Blue Jeans Cables should send a sample of the Iconoclast speaker cable along with the standard Belden 10 gauge speaker wire they sell to Amir for testing. Use identical terminations and lengths on both cables. That should validate any differences.

Very interesting. When I was in chemical engineering at Purdue from 1975-79, Galen was a student in EE and a part time salesperson at Good Vibes Stereo, literally across the street from Purdue's engineering campus. At that time, Good Vibes also operated some stores at other colleges with large EE schools, and unsurprisingly was the top seller of Apt Holman preamps in the nation--so much so that Tom Holman came and spent a day in the store to talk about the design. I probably spent 90% of my earnings from summer jobs at Good Vibes, so I knew Galen quite well...and I know he owned Dahlquist DQ-10s when those were a hot item (and pricewise, out of the reach of most college students, LOL.)
 

amirm

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I love it when someone all of a sudden becomes a psychoacoustics expert: "Our ears are quick to hear the deterioration in fidelity based on frequency-arrival time and phase coherence. "

How the heck does he know this? Where is his reference? Sound in room experiences reflections which totally destroy any "phase" coherence.
 

Bob from Florida

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Interesting article from Nelson Pass from 1980.

https://www.passlabs.com/technical_article/speaker-cables-science-or-snake-oil/

Certain cables - low inductance with high capacitance - can oscillate at ultrasonic frequencies when a wide bandwidth amplifier is utilized. This might be why certain speaker manufacturers use Zobel networks to prevent this. Pass makes mention of this - not by name - to prevent fuse blowing in some of the amps used for testing. Perhaps we don't need super high bandwidth amps in case we pick the wrong speaker cable. This is one area where a tube amp with an output transformer can actually help - or just put in a Zobel network.
 

Speedskater

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Yes, it's possible for some combinations of reasonable amplifiers, reasonable cables and reasonable loudspeakers to ring or even oscillate at radio frequencies. It's also possible to win a big lottery and the odds are about the same.
 

Ilkless

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This reminds me of Rob Watts and Alan Shaw: technically-competent engineers using their expertise to inflate the audibility of equipment they sell. They appropriate superficially-empirical and rational arguments and apply them to extremely tenuous cases.
 
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