A non confrontational cable thread? We will see...

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by frimleygreener, May 19, 2019.

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  1. Madeuthink

    Madeuthink Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Oakmont, PA
    Quad using Home Depot cables at a show, if my memory serves me correct was around the year 1999 or 2000. They might have long since come out with new speaker models by then, since the ESL 63's were already released in the early 1980's. Maybe it was the model 2905 or something.

    Speaker designers are famous at times for all kind of unusual statements. Peter Walker might have heard a few bad examples of upmarket speaker cables and decided that cables are not important. The many among us that have gone much further than that in our seeking out stuff, know better. Or if he said that back in the 1970's or something, when there wasn't any real advanced cable technology or work going on, he would have been pretty much correct; at that point in time. The only cable I can think of from that era that anyone thought was worth paying even $100 for, was something called Peterson Litz which was not that well known and I believe was produced and marketed in America only. Now, just as many premium audio cables come from Great Britain as from America with many dozens of choices from British manufacturers like QED, Chord, Atlas, LFD etc.
     
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  2. Boltman92124

    Boltman92124 Go Padres!!

    Location:
    San Diego
    Didn't the ESL 63's go down to 2 ohms all the time?? They must need a good low resistance, good current delivery speaker cable.
     
  3. Madeuthink

    Madeuthink Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Oakmont, PA
    I am not sure about what load the Quads presented. I know there was a speaker back then called the Apogee Scintiias that went to half an ohm routinely. There was a guy from Texas who bought and sold in the Audio magazine classified whose first name was Mary. He tried to stay on top of things and felt the model 63's "weren't worth their price." The general consensus was that the old original Quads had a better midrange and clarity and that the newer ones had somewhat better dispersion and bass.
     
  4. Sneaky Pete

    Sneaky Pete Flat the 5 and That’s No Jive

    Location:
    NYC USA
    I’ve found an improvement with better cables. I’ve also noted that some cables work better in different systems. I had MIT cable in my old system and it was great very sweet and sharply focused center imaging. I upgraded my system and they sounded a little thick and syrupy. So I switched to Audioquest and it improved the clarity and the bass became tighter with a wider soundstage. I’ve seen this kind of result occur with cable changes more than once.

    Recently I bought a Bluetooth receiver and DAC combo, just so friends could listen to the music off their phones on my system. I bought a generic interconnect and thought it would be OK since Bluetooth is lossy. Anyway I never fell in love with the sound but I let it go because it wasn’t for serious listening. Then I was fooling around one day and switched to a nicer cable. The sound was much improved with the better interconnect. You don’t have to spend thousands to get good cables and they can improve your listening experience.
     
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  5. Madeuthink

    Madeuthink Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Oakmont, PA
    That is true. The fact that there are many speakers over $20,000 does not mean that you can't get a great pair for under $1,500, especially used. Same with cables, that the ultra expensive does exist, does not mean we are doomed to have mediocre sound. I picked up a cable dirt cheap on ebay recently that I respect.
     
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  6. Cupids_bow

    Cupids_bow chillin like a villain

    Location:
    The OC
    I recently switched my toslink Audio Quest Forest (on the left) to Audio Sensibility’s Neotech on my sacd/cd player, which I run through my PS Audio dac. I should’ve done this a long time ago, now I can’t stop listening to my redbook cd’s. It’s a world of difference, sometimes too revealing in fact and makes bad pressings really sound terrible. But, get a good one and it’s bliss - details I’ve not heard before, nice tight bass with clear highs. I’m quite happy with this little upgrade that paid big dividends.
    [​IMG]
     
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  7. Dansk

    Dansk rational romantic mystic cynical idealist

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    It's digital. It's a stream of ones and zeroes, light on and light off, high voltage and low. If they aren't making it from one end of the cable to the other, you don't get any sound at all.

    Watch a satellite TV picture during a storm - that's what digital does when the signal breaks down. It starts to get choppy, there are clicks and pops, large pieces of it go missing at a time. Audio does the same thing, if you've ever listened to digital FM radio.

    It is scientifically impossible to get "tighter bass" or "clearer highs" by improving a digital signal path. Digital doesn't work like that. It's either there or it's not, and when it's not, it sounds ugly as all hell.

    I'm willing to overlook the debate about analog signal cable, even though I don't believe any of it myself, because there's at least a scientifically plausible way that the quality of the conductor can affect signal transmission and cause the changes people describe.

    But TOSLINK? Gimme a break. This is just too damn much.
     
  8. jtw

    jtw Forum Resident

    Can anyone direct me to a double blind test report in which it was concluded that cables do make a difference? I'd be interested in reading it. The tests I've read don't exactly motivate one to go out and spend.
     
  9. Dansk

    Dansk rational romantic mystic cynical idealist

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    None will be forthcoming because they don't exist.
     
  10. Madeuthink

    Madeuthink Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Oakmont, PA
    Double blind listening tests have BIG problems. To really get to know the character of audio gear, be it cables, components, speakers etc. you really have to live with them awhile and preferably hear it with a wide range of material over a serious span of time. The first problem is the nature of audio evaluation itself. With visual evaluation you can instantly judge whether someone standing near you is tall or short, fat or skinny, has a dark or light complexion etc. Sound is invisible. Accuracy (which should be the definition of high fidelity) involves hearing the reproduction, remembering it and comparing it in your mind with your remembrance of how real instruments sound. If someone is an accomplished acoustic guitar player who practices on his instrument 4 hours a day, and they are played back a CD of a solo guitar recording that you think is the model of perfection, and you both are asked "is that an accurate recording of an acoustic guitar", you may think "yes" but they may think & say "no", because they know better than you, what an acoustic guitar sounds like. They know exactly the sounds it makes and the sounds it doesn't make and what it sounds like when you hit the strings a certain way etc. Unlike visual evaluation which can be quick and accurate, audio evaluation involves more time and is more complex and involves more things. The instant evaluation that blind listening tests require just are not what humans are good at. However with continued exposure and familiarity with something over a serious length of time, which increases familiarity and improves our discrimination and helps us realize its true nature, accurate audio evaluation is possible.

    An analogy would be this. In childhood I knew a few identical twins. At first I couldn't tell them apart. Other people couldn't either, but after playing with them every day and being around them a lot of the time, there eventually was no problem telling them apart by just looking at them. What seemed impossible and no difference, was now easy as cake to tell them apart. They looked completely similar, more similar than the way different audio gear sounds, but what looked like an impossible task to visually discriminate was easy as can be for their parents or anyone who spent enough time around them. Our audio evaluation capabilities pale in comparison to our visual comparison capabilities which can be immediate and accurate in most instances, unlike audio evaluation, which can take some time and familiarizing to be accurate. So the whole idea of blind listening tests might be a really bad idea, considering our natural make up as human beings.

    It's interesting that with another of our senses; taste, people who like one thing and someone else totally dislikes it and likes something else, never causes any friction or conflict at all. People just realize that each person likes what he likes, and we are all different. What is it about audio that the same instincts wouldn't naturally occur?
     
  11. sotosound

    sotosound Forum Resident

    Pre to power, since this will affect all sources, including the DAC.

    Then add DAC to pre, which might provide further improvements if the interconnect is a goodun.

    Also, different digital cables between digital source and DAC can make a very significant difference to sound. This was my most recent discovery. I thought that bits and bytes were just bits and bytes, but I now understand that there's also a wave form involved. (Sheesh!)
     
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  12. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I think the value of double-blind listening tests is to simply establish if a given individual can indeed discern audible differences, and to determine the quantity of those differences. Certainly you can't judge the quality with a simple A/B comparison. That's what the extended listening is for.
     
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  13. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    True. Any difference you would hear in a digital stream are caused by other factors. However, the type of interface can affect the quality of the transmission.
     
  14. Madeuthink

    Madeuthink Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Oakmont, PA
    With cable doubters there are too many theorists and not enough doers. Like Nike's phrase "Just Do It." For amazing levels of improvement you might have to go some serious bucks though.

    Another thing is the evaluator himself. I'm sure someone with really trained experienced "ears" like the late Harry Pearson or some of today's better audio reviewers could nail down the character of a piece of gear 10 times faster than most people on here, but even they would need more than the near instant evaluation that double blind testing requires. They take days, weeks, or even months to properly evaluate a piece of equipment, not seconds.
     
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  15. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    This is why reviews of cable or ascribing a particular sonic character to cable are silly. Unless there's triboelectric noise from moving the cable around, the cable isn't making any sound. What one is listening to when one listens to cable is the interaction of the cable with the source and load and we're not all using the same equipment. This is especially going to be true with speaker cable -- where we're all using different amps with sometimes pretty different output impedances and inductances and current providing abilities, and speakers with wildly different impedance curves. It's also going to be especially true with phono cables where we're all using cartridges of various inductances and output levels, and where the cable's resistance and capacitance is actually part of the RLC circuit of the phono cart and shaping the frequency response. With cables its really all about the right design and construction for the specific application.
     
  16. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    If accuracy is the definition of hifi, well, accuracy can be measured -- how accurately does the output signal reproduce the input signal?

    Worrying about whether or not the recording sounds most like a real acoustic guitar introduces another uncontrolled variable -- the recording. We can't know, unless we made the recording ourselves, how accurately the recording reflects the sound at the time of the music's creation. So there's no point in listening to whether or not the music sounds lifelike or something like that if your concern is accuracy, you can't know if your system is reproducing the sound accurately by listening.

    And then you're introducing another, wild variable -- psychoacoustic impressions. Once you're into the realm of preference, of subjective impressions of how you think instruments sound, of memory, of taste, you're outside the realm of accuracy and into individual psychological response to stimuli. You can judge audio gear according to that, and we all do, and that can be the standard for you if that's where your interest lies -- how lifelike something sounds to you -- but it's not a way of assessing the accuracy of the playback gear, if accuracy "should be the definition of high fidelity."

    I do agree with you that repetition is important to accurate evaluation. I've done a lot of critical listening -- recorded and performed music semi-professionally, and I worked in radio for a while where I did a bunch of audio editing -- and my experience with that is that there are certainly things you learn from doing it a lot, and there are things you hear with repeated listenings, all of which you might miss if you were untrained or inexperienced and only listening once quickly.

    But we have so many variables when we do these casual subjective listening comparisons -- for example, we don't typically normalize volumes with an SPL meter and test signal between each playback and human hearing is so enormously non-linear when it comes to response relative to volume, that unless we're normalizing with each listening test, we're actually hearing things very differently -- that I think in the post Stereophile/TAS world we wildly overestimate the quality of what we can know from listening.

    Like, if we're swapping cables without some kind of switch box or something, we're making new connections each time, and in my experience, often clean vs. dirty or better vs. worse connections can made a bigger difference than actually swapping cables. Is that responsible for the differences we're hearing?

    Also the cables can be very different -- one a twinax, shield floating at one end, one set of RCAs, foil shield maybe, stranded core cable, 22 awg, teflon dielectri; another coax, double braided shield connected at both ends, different RCAs, solid core 24 awg, some other dielectric. What's responsible for the sonic differences? The RCAs? The solid vs. stranded? The twinax vs. coax? The different dielectric? You can't know, too many variables at once.
     
    Last edited: Aug 13, 2019
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  17. Boltman92124

    Boltman92124 Go Padres!!

    Location:
    San Diego
    Right. I have my Echo plugged into an input on my pre-amp and I was using the standard Amazon 3.5>RCA cable. Thought it sounded pretty crappy. Replaced the IC with an Audioquest Golden Gate and things sounded a lot more musical.
     
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  18. Dansk

    Dansk rational romantic mystic cynical idealist

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    Yes, a square one. The only thing that matters with a digital waveform is whether it reaches the correct voltage level within an acceptable amount of time. You're not hearing the waveform itself.

    This is what a noisy digital waveform looks like:
    [​IMG]

    The information, the bits corresponding to either one or zero, are still being interpreted correctly as long as the variations in the signal aren't so extreme that they cross the median (the line labelled as 't'). Once that begins to happen, you get clicks, pops, and audible distortion. It's unmistakeable. It doesn't sound like flabby bass and harsh treble, it sounds like digital garbage.

    This debate drives me up the wall because I work with technology for a living, and if half the things people in this thread believe were actually true, my job would be impossible to do because the machines wouldn't work in the first place. Networking anything would be impossible.

    Digital data is digital data. The device receiving the data doesn't care what's encoded in that data, if it's a Bach concerto, data from a remote weather station, or a porn video. Computers simply process data, end of story. The effects people are ascribing to these cables are scientifically, physically impossible.
     
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  19. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    I once watched a porn video with a Bach concerto playing in the background. Wasn’t a good experience..
     
  20. 911s55

    911s55 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wa state
    What was the bad part?
     
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  21. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host

    My girlfriend wasn’t into Bach.
     
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  22. Paopawdecarabao

    Paopawdecarabao Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Off topic but I guess a little bit related. Do you or someone zip-ties or run their cables on their rack or shelf to hide it. Especially bending if it is long? I asked as I do this if it is bad or not but I do separate the power cords from my interconnects when I run them.
     
  23. elvisizer

    elvisizer Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Jose
    huh? blind testing doesn't imply ANYthing about the length of the test.
    take as long as you want, just don't peek!
     
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  24. avanti1960

    avanti1960 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago metro, USA
    :)
    let the sound of your system motivate you
    are you happy with the clarity, tone and dynamics of every source?
    if not there are analog interconnects that can noticeably improve on each category.
    take a flyer on a set of nordost purple flares for example.
    music direct will give you 2 months to see if you like them.
    listen for a week or so and pop your stock cables back in. you could be shocked (not electrically of course! :)
     
  25. Madeuthink

    Madeuthink Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Oakmont, PA
    Sometimes what seems like a very complicated issue boils down to somethING ridiculously simple. A lot of people don't want to spend big money on a wire, because they don't believe wires should cost that much, so they delude themselves into thinking that wires all sound the same. For them to be right, people like Harry Pearson, J.Gordon Holt, John Atkinson and all the great audio evaluators of our time would have to be totally wrong, along with millions of audiophiles world wide, who not only hear the differences but have made the audio cable industry a multi billion dollar industry. An industry that just about every major (and minor) designer of amplifiers and spspeakers wholeheartedly recommends. Those are the real scientists with the real "say." Not people on an audio forum who can't or are unwilling to afford things and have logic that is seriously flawed and biased.

    In fact the whole high end audio industry is based on the supposition that everything matters, everything in the signal path influences the sound; why wouldn't something as important as cables ? Your whole audio signal flows through it... As far the comment that blind listening tests do not imply length of time: I don't know of one blind listening test anywhere, where people were concentrating days on end, on whether there was a difference between A and B. I think by that time everyone's mind would have been burned out (actually forever damaged) like Bertrand Russell and White, who after writing the famous ground breaking "Principia Mathematica" were pretty much intellectual vegetables after that. Some guy with good "ears" (meaning evaluation) listening to the same Steely Dan LP for five consecutive evenings and then having a new cable inserted into his system and his first impressions (and continuing impressions) would be worth more to me by far than blind listening tests. Spend your money the way you choose; but realize that we all have different experiences and we all have different nervous systems.
     
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