JustAnandaDourEyedDude
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Thanks, I am with you on that. Build quality and looks are what I'm really paying for.
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This audio cable business is getting out of hand...
- Thread starter amirm
- Start date
Thanks, I am with you on that. Build quality and looks are what I'm really paying for.
Reminds me of this paper on HDMI where noise is 20dB worse because the shield is connected to connector via pigtail
https://interferencetechnology.com/hdmi-cables-emi/
solderdude
Grand Contributor
We are talking about headphone cables where the only real difference is the sheating which is thicker.
see: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ster-prove-his-claim.11075/page-2#post-313125
Also there isn't even a common return wire in Sennheiser cables as it is a 4wire cable connected only in the plug.
The source impedance is too low to even screw up induction in the neighboring cable.
Both channels of 1 cable have to be really broken to affect sound quality.
It looks more like @Get a hearing test needs to let someone else swap (or not swap) the cables while he cannot see which cable is used and see if he can guess right which cable is connected 10 times in a row.
Is this forum slowly being taken over by subjectivists who ignore the science?
solderdude
Grand Contributor
I guess that's the downside of a forum getting noticed more and more.
It will attract confident subjectivists who are sure their hearing capabilities exceed that of measurement equipment and are of the opinion that steady state/multitone/noise measurements do not represent music signals.
I guess there are far more subjectivist sided people on the planet than measurement folks.
It will attract confident subjectivists who are sure their hearing capabilities exceed that of measurement equipment and are of the opinion that steady state/multitone/noise measurements do not represent music signals.
I guess there are far more subjectivist sided people on the planet than measurement folks.
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Seems to run in cycles. Something gets ASR noticed ( a review of some other forum's favorite). People come here look around. Some few decide to straighten things out. After a week or two it settles down for awhile. Then repeats. Certainly tedious and tiring sometimes to see the same old misguided stuff.
Somehow I am reminded of the Eloi (who live a banal life of ease on the surface of the Earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi) from H.G. Well's "The Time Machine". Happy to live in a make-believe world, ignoring the science and technology that makes their life possible.
I bet you don't.
I bet he won't take the bet.
Get a hearing test
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Already got sht for buying 5 cables. Besides cant tell a difference between 50 cent rca and 1.5 dollar one. 18 dollar one is the worst. Gonna try them on a speaker setup.
solderdude
Grand Contributor
make sure you test without knowing which cable is connected and do the comparison often enough (at least 15 times) where you listen/guess which cable happens to be plugged in.
Price is irrelevant. To put it frankly - the difference is probably in your mind, not in reality.
GET A ROPE !!!
Im late to the party so I might have missed this but star quad is 2 twisted pairs made for ballanced connections, believe it was designed as mic cable. For unbalanced cable coax is better. So they didnt even get that right. And the shield connected at one end is debatable. After saying that I dont believe there is any audible difference in the short runs in low EMI homes of audio ICs of basic quality. And when people actually do hear a difference its the process of accidentaly cleaning the conectors as you replace them.
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Yep it sure is, in spite of the outstanding efforts of a few diehards. I got heated with a vinylista PITA here a while back and a mod essentially sided with the guy and instructed me to piss off, and that was my signal that it was time for me to check in here, well, almost never.
There is something inherent about audio, and most audio hobbyists, that draws toward snake oil like moths to a flame. It just is. Better to make your own way and stay away from audio forums.
There is something inherent about audio, and most audio hobbyists, that draws toward snake oil like moths to a flame. It just is. Better to make your own way and stay away from audio forums.
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Sherlock Holmes would say cable believers must have grown up in houses with basements. Down there they saw the water main coming in from the street, splitting up to feed all the showers and faucets, and returning through the fat white sewer pipes. They heard the water rushing through, perhaps turbulent at awkward right-angle elbows. They saw the electric supply coming in and splitting up. Intuitively they internalized the wrong model, as if "electricity" rushes around like water in pipes.
Proper understanding would tell them that "electricity" isn't a physical thing and doesn't rush anywhere. If a circuit is completed, a state of charge propagates, and an insubstantial and incorporeal electric field exists, which modulates with the signal. But nothing physical actually goes anywhere. Electrons are the charge carriers. Already, at room temperature, they are thrashing around like crazy because of thermal excitation. On top of that random motion a tiny, tiny vibration is superimposed by the charge. Once in a great while an electron might migrate a tiny fraction of a nanometer - but usually toward the source, not the destination. (So much for directional cables.)
Surely the mistaken notion that electricity is a physical thing moving through the wire is what drives the whole cable trade. How many times have we heard the word "flow"? But don't be too harsh on the trade, or the believers. I don't entirely buy the idea the trade is wholly cynical and exploitative. Their customers are begging them for this stuff. They want to believe. Some people love music; a further subset gets great joy and emotional satisfaction from listening at home; a further subset is driven to want more joy and satisfaction; a further subset becomes quite desperate to get more. Really they should fix their room or upgrade a major component, but they can't afford it, so they spend what they have on accessories. They suffer a kind of mental "crosstalk", where the undeniable emotional context of music leads them to believe the associated hardware has some kind of emotional or mystical quality too. Irritating, no doubt, but not the end of the world. Human nature.
As is another aspect. The pop-sociologist Vance Packard wrote in the early 1950s about a just-add-water cake mix introduced by the Betty Crocker corporation. It didn't sell well. The reason turned out to be that housewives wanted to feel more personally involved in any potential culinary success. They wanted to feel they had contributed. The mix was changed to just-add-water-and-an-egg. The beating of the egg turned out to be enough. The mix now sold well. Similarly, aftermarket fiddling like cable choice and burn-in means the listener feels he's earned it the hard way ... and, crucially, that he's possessed of secret insider knowledge. He's annoyed that anyone with a credit card can have the same as him, so he needs to differentiate himself in some way. Just today I saw an exchange on an audio forum: someone said he had a certain speaker; someone else said, "You did the blah-blah mod, right?" Like a secret Masonic handshake. As if to say, "We're inside, and they're outside."
But really ... I saw a report on an audio DIY forum. Someone ripped a bit-perfect file from a CD transport to his computer. Then he ripped it again, this time through a DAC, a yard of decent analog interconnect, and an ADC, to create a second file. Then he swapped out the interconnect for wired probes, and stuck the ends in a bowl of mud, and made a third file. Then, for a fourth, he stuck the probes in a potato. He offered 20" samples as FLACs online, and invited forum members to guess which was which. No one could really tell. Results were random.
Proper understanding would tell them that "electricity" isn't a physical thing and doesn't rush anywhere. If a circuit is completed, a state of charge propagates, and an insubstantial and incorporeal electric field exists, which modulates with the signal. But nothing physical actually goes anywhere. Electrons are the charge carriers. Already, at room temperature, they are thrashing around like crazy because of thermal excitation. On top of that random motion a tiny, tiny vibration is superimposed by the charge. Once in a great while an electron might migrate a tiny fraction of a nanometer - but usually toward the source, not the destination. (So much for directional cables.)
Surely the mistaken notion that electricity is a physical thing moving through the wire is what drives the whole cable trade. How many times have we heard the word "flow"? But don't be too harsh on the trade, or the believers. I don't entirely buy the idea the trade is wholly cynical and exploitative. Their customers are begging them for this stuff. They want to believe. Some people love music; a further subset gets great joy and emotional satisfaction from listening at home; a further subset is driven to want more joy and satisfaction; a further subset becomes quite desperate to get more. Really they should fix their room or upgrade a major component, but they can't afford it, so they spend what they have on accessories. They suffer a kind of mental "crosstalk", where the undeniable emotional context of music leads them to believe the associated hardware has some kind of emotional or mystical quality too. Irritating, no doubt, but not the end of the world. Human nature.
As is another aspect. The pop-sociologist Vance Packard wrote in the early 1950s about a just-add-water cake mix introduced by the Betty Crocker corporation. It didn't sell well. The reason turned out to be that housewives wanted to feel more personally involved in any potential culinary success. They wanted to feel they had contributed. The mix was changed to just-add-water-and-an-egg. The beating of the egg turned out to be enough. The mix now sold well. Similarly, aftermarket fiddling like cable choice and burn-in means the listener feels he's earned it the hard way ... and, crucially, that he's possessed of secret insider knowledge. He's annoyed that anyone with a credit card can have the same as him, so he needs to differentiate himself in some way. Just today I saw an exchange on an audio forum: someone said he had a certain speaker; someone else said, "You did the blah-blah mod, right?" Like a secret Masonic handshake. As if to say, "We're inside, and they're outside."
But really ... I saw a report on an audio DIY forum. Someone ripped a bit-perfect file from a CD transport to his computer. Then he ripped it again, this time through a DAC, a yard of decent analog interconnect, and an ADC, to create a second file. Then he swapped out the interconnect for wired probes, and stuck the ends in a bowl of mud, and made a third file. Then, for a fourth, he stuck the probes in a potato. He offered 20" samples as FLACs online, and invited forum members to guess which was which. No one could really tell. Results were random.
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That's for sure! I get weary of battling snake oil claims in the subjectivist oriented forums. It's maddening when those forums simply presume that "if I hear it it's true" is THE way that the hobby is practiced, and any version of skepticism or sane engineering principles are some "dogmatic" rabble-rousing.
That's what makes this forum such a nice reprieve. Here, if you make some objective empirical claim to truth, you'll be asked for good empirical evidence for the claim.
I guess for some people staying away from audio forums is the right path. "Know thyself" and all that.
For others (like me and clearly many here) audio forums can be a great place to discuss our shared hobby and continue to learn.
Cheers.
JustAnandaDourEyedDude
Addicted to Fun and Learning
I have not studied the topic, but my elementary understanding from browsing through little sections of books is that the charge carriers do actually move through the medium. Electrons are of course far more mobile than positive ions, due to the mass disparity, and the stronger binding of the ions in a solid. Electrons move from a location of negative electric potential to one of positive ep. But the notion that electricity flows from positive to negative is just a convention. Positive ions in solution will actually move, but in a solid their mobility is far less, and they will act as sites for electrons to hop to. In a metal solid, the outer electrons of atoms are loosely bound to individual atoms, and form an electron "gas" that is relatively highly mobile, resulting in high electrical conductivity. Thermal excitation is more about atoms and molecules dancing around and colliding or vibrating in place, I think. The thermal energy is tied to the translational, rotational and vibrational motions of atoms and molecules.
I have no argument with the rest of your post. So folks, don't sound the horns and gather the hounds for a subjectivist hunt, as some are wont to do in this forum. I am a science and math fan.
