Yiiiiiihaaa!!! The 20'000 UKP power cable is here!

[wwelly]

I think you are living in cloud cuckoo land.

You don't think the big companies like nordost have tried? (and failed)

Flawed logic and supposition will not help your cause.

In the past there have been blind tests that proved no difference, but then all of a sudden the tests are declared null by the believers as they say they were 'stressed' ahhh diddums.

You are basing your argument on what has been done in the past. My question is based on the assumption that irrefutable evidence could, one day, be presented. Just because that hasn't happened to date, doesn't mean that it might not happen.

If indisputable objective evidence was presented at some point, would a sceptic then be obliged to hear a difference? It's not a hard question.

 

[dave]

...or what would an objectivist say if he heard a cable sound different (consistently and repeatedly) from another cable with no measurable difference in the circuit?

Step inside Chaos Theory or whatever for a moment and indulge us...all answers accepted other than "this could never happen."

 

[Evil Emperor]

You are basing your argument on what has been done in the past. My question is based on the assumption that irrefutable evidence could, one day, be presented. Just because that hasn't happened to date, doesn't mean that it might not happen.

If indisputable objective evidence was presented at some point, would a sceptic then be obliged to hear a difference? It's not a hard question.

Doesn't this strike you as pretty thin?

It's not as if power cables grow in the wild. Someone, somewhere 'makes' the power cord. How can that someone not know why their own product does what it's supposed to do?

Ask the designer of a set of brakes how they work, and you'll get a lot of discussion about thermal properties of materials and circles of forces. Ask a brewer how beer is made and unless they have been sampling too much of their own handiwork, they will give you a thorough explanation of the process. They understand the physics or the chemistry involved. Whisky distillers might delightfully call evaporation 'the angels share', but they know it is a predictable effect that doesn't involve any drunk angels.

But not cable makers, apparently. The real reasons why cables make a difference are still to be clearly defined. Well, if that is the case, shouldn't you wait until these reasons are clearly defined? I would imagine defining how a cable definitively does what it's supposed to do would introduce a new renaissance in cables that really make a difference, instead of today's 'um, er' cable design.

 

[Evil Emperor]

...or what would an objectivist say if he heard a cable sound different (consistently and repeatedly) from another cable with no measurable difference in the circuit?

Step inside Chaos Theory or whatever for a moment and indulge us...all answers accepted other than "this could never happen."

The chances of a difference in sonic performance that passes a stringent set of listening tests not having some sort of correlation to measurement is practically nil. We can determine differences in lab performance that are - to all intents and purposes - too subtle for our ears to detect, but finding things we can hear that do not register in the lab is essentially unheard of.

So, if you heard something under stringent listening conditions that didn't have a measurable correlate, you would attempt to determine where the difference in sound was coming from and why from an objective viewpoint.

 

[dave]

Good answer EE.

One additional question for clarification...do you personally believe everything that can be heard can currently be measured or simply most things that we hear can be currently measured?

regards,

dave

 

[Joe P]

wwelly,

If indisputable objective evidence was presented at some point, would a sceptic then be obliged to hear a difference? It's not a hard question.

Measurement is necessary if you want to understand what lies behind audible differences between cables — the stuff engineers and scientists are concerned about — but if you're simply trying to determine whether audible differences exist listening tests are more than sufficient.

The proviso, of course, is that the listener (and the tester) must not know what they're listening to, especially so when the differences are subtle.

This really isn't the correct term for it, but I call it being an objective subjective. Your ears are still the ultimate arbiters, but when you compare you do so blind.

Joe

 

[dave]

Joe,

What would you do if under blind conditions you heard no difference but sighted you did? ...repeatedly.

1. spend the rest of your days trying to convince yourself it's all a delusion and The Test rules 'cause it's scientific. Several decades later (and after applying the same logic to everything else in life) you find the cable thing no longer matters that much because you're about to walk The Last Mile towards the gas chamber after shooting up the local mall all because that nagging cable-differences-R-reel voice in your head ate away at your brain.

2. buy the one that sounds better when listening without pressure and argue on hifi Internet forums 'til your fingertips get a bit numb.

3. same as #2 except keep quiet on Internet forums.

4. I'll have a large Coke and fries with that please.

5. < Pull a Kirk and Kobayashi Maru my ass>

regards,

dave

 

[Joe P]

Dave,

Up until my big Tannoy 'n' toobs conversion, I pretty much ran the same system for more than a decade. Since my big Tannoys 'n' toobs conversion about three years ago I've run the same system. I'm not a serial changer or into the flavour of the month.

I just listen to music — I rarely dem anything these days — but if I were to buy something new (like a DAC) I'd do an objective subjective test, since it's so easy for the eyes to overrule the ears. If something is better, I have enough faith in my hearing to choose the better component, but I also know enough about my biases that I'd want to control for them.

The short answer is I'd defer to my ears, but do the dem in such a way that my choice was truly for sound reasons.

So the answer is option 6 — I'd chill and jam with Spock, all Spock-like.

Joe

 

[dave]

You'd make an excellent politician Joe (and the first I'd trust;-)

 

[Joe P]

Dave,

Thanks... I think.

Joe

 

[dave]

It's a compliment in every way.

 

[Joe P]

Phew!

Joe

 

[dave]

LOL....

48 hrs til the weekend and off call...will I get to sleep tonight or will my pager awake me from dreamy cable delusions...offline now to test.

 

[wwelly]

Doesn't this strike you as pretty thin?

Not Really. It is just a question to provoke discussion.

It's not as if power cables grow in the wild. Someone, somewhere 'makes' the power cord. How can that someone not know why their own product does what it's supposed to do?

I understand where you are coming from. Cable makers are notorious for not supporting their claims.

Ask the designer of a set of brakes how they work, and you'll get a lot of discussion about thermal properties of materials and circles of forces.

And if you ask an average driver, he'll tell you that "some pads are pressed on to a disc and the car stops"

He'll also tell you that the brakes on car A are "spongy", whereas those on car B are "secure and responsive" Both subjective measures. He will almost certainly not talk about the thermal properties and circle forces of the braking system.

I'm not getting into the brewing argument becasue it is not that different from the car brake analogy. But wine tipplers are notorious for using extermely subjective terms to describe the taste and texture of the end product.

But not cable makers, apparently. The real reasons why cables make a difference are still to be clearly defined. Well, if that is the case, shouldn't you wait until these reasons are clearly defined? I would imagine defining how a cable definitively does what it's supposed to do would introduce a new renaissance in cables that really make a difference, instead of today's 'um, er' cable design.

Threads like these invariably revolve around the pseudo scientific claims of certain manufacturers. I have to agree that there are many manufacturers that hide behind this waffly pseudo science to disguise their lack of engineering knowledge. However, as I've mentioned previously in this thread, I have had positive results in my system with commercially available parts from Belden. They are primarily an engineering company and do not supply power cables specifically for the audio community. This has not stopped their cables form having positive results for me and numerous other users.

 

[Evil Emperor]

And if you ask an average driver, he'll tell you that "some pads are pressed on to a disc and the car stops"

He'll also tell you that the brakes on car A are "spongy", whereas those on car B are "secure and responsive" Both subjective measures. He will almost certainly not talk about the thermal properties and circle forces of the braking system.

I'm not getting into the brewing argument becasue it is not that different from the car brake analogy. But wine tipplers are notorious for using extermely subjective terms to describe the taste and texture of the end product.

Yes, but I'm not necessarily talking about the buyers. We buy stuff and nonsense, because we are consumers and that helps switch off the sensible parts of our brains. All of us do that to some degree or another, maybe not in hi-fi, but no-one's completely immune to a brainless, marketing-led purchase or two.

What troubles me with cables in particular is the justifications for why cables make a difference differ wildly from company to company. If one company says the purity of conductors is vital, another says the construction of the dielectric is key, another says it's how you construct the cable that counts, while others say it's down to the terminations, avoiding skin effect, ensuring the cable delivers signals at close to the speed of light, avoiding microphony or EMI, whether using passive boxes in line with the cable or powered active shields straight out of Star Trek and so on ad infinitum. Maybe I'm being excessively cynical here, but if there was a predictable and noticeable effect going on, there would either be more convergence, because all those people doing cable 'research' would be finding consistent elements that make differences, or at least that difference X occurs consistently under condition Y when cable design Z is deployed.

Without some kind of consistent, observable and repeatable baseline to work from, how do cable designers know what elements alter the sound in a positive manner and, if it's all down to luck, how do you repeat that luck? A designer of braking systems will know the elements to factor into a brake to make it stop that design of car, and balance the performance between having a brake pedal like a rock that stops the car like it hit a wall and a softer depress that makes it feel more manageable in round-town use. But it strikes me this whole "it's magic" approach to cables cannot provide consistent results, despite the protestations by the faithful.

 

[stevec67]

That's the point exactly. Ask brake designers or wine makers why it works and they all come up with the same explanations. It's a friction material that modulates it frictional force in a linear fashion according to pedal pressure, at the expense of wear rate, or it's a material that performs the same cold as hot, or it performs very well when hot but isn't recommended for shopping cars because it's a bit noisy, etc. Same with wines, all the flowery language doesn't detract from the fact that the winemaker is trying to exclude oxygen from this stage of the process (and he knows very well why) and allow a bit through at a later stage (and he knows very well why). Even the mysterious bits of winemaking, like noble rot (pourriture noble) in Sauternes, are known about. OK you rely on specific weather conditions that only land 8 or 9 years every 10, but when they land the winemakers all know them, and they all know whether this year's grapes are going to go the way they should.

I think that there is a natural tendency to come up with the exotic explanation, I have had this in my work in food manufacture. Hit a hygiene problem and before long someone will have invented a new microorganism that is resistant to heat processing, or the cleaning chemicals have had a chemical reaction, never seen before, and the result is... No. It's a milk drink. That's all. It's going off because there is some filth somewhere or we are doing something wrong. We just don't know where. Now find out where and our problems will be solved. Invariably it is something mundane like the caps don't seal properly or we store the packaging in a damp warehouse and the boxes are going mouldy, or the fish is going off because, surprise, we bought it cheap off a trader and he's had it in the fridge for a week. But that's not exciting. What's exciting is a new organism, a chemical reaction, or a cable that exploits skin effects that nobody ever knew about and I can have it in my hifi for only £250.

 

[Evil Emperor]

Good answer EE.

One additional question for clarification...do you personally believe everything that can be heard can currently be measured or simply most things that we hear can be currently measured?

regards,

dave

I think everything we can hear has been exceptionally well mapped and measured. The output of an audio system has been thoroughly poked and prodded enough that we know what can come out of it that is audible and even what can come out of it that is below our audibility threshold. What we don't fully get yet is the wetware; what happens in processing auditory signals in the brain is rich and complex and only just starting to appear thanks to significant advances in neuroimaging.

There is always the possibility that we are failing to measure the right things properly or measuring the wrong things altogether, or even the chance that the listening test criteria used to deliver consistent results is somehow flawed in design. It may even be as we delve deeper into what the brain does with the output of the ear suggests changes in the way we measure or perform stringent listening tests.

But here's the big point: until there are better, more consistent and accurate models to replace the existing ones, what we have defines how we hear. There is no free pass; you don't get to make statements that appertain to some future set of standards if they don't exist yet, unless you write sci-fi for a living.

Right now, all we can say is that cables fail to produce audible results under stringent test conditions means they fail to produce audible results. If the reason for this failure ultimately points to the electronic equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and radical change to the way products are designed and evaluated comes out of it as a result, it would further our knowledge of what we can measure and how that correlates to hearing.

However, what we have instead is cables fail to produce audible results under stringent test conditions... and therefore the tests don't work say the cable makers, with no reasonable explanation as to why they don't work save for a demand to replace more stringent tests with less precise ones. In other words, if the science doesn't provide us the answers we want, the science is at fault. This is the same reasoning that homeopaths feel gives them the right to side-step basic chemistry.

 

[Mescalito]

Joe,

What would you do if under blind conditions you heard no difference but sighted you did? ...repeatedly.

1. spend the rest of your days trying to convince yourself it's all a delusion and The Test rules 'cause it's scientific. Several decades later (and after applying the same logic to everything else in life) you find the cable thing no longer matters that much because you're about to walk The Last Mile towards the gas chamber after shooting up the local mall all because that nagging cable-differences-R-reel voice in your head ate away at your brain.

2. buy the one that sounds better when listening without pressure and argue on hifi Internet forums 'til your fingertips get a bit numb.

3. same as #2 except keep quiet on Internet forums.

4. I'll have a large Coke and fries with that please.

5. < Pull a Kirk and Kobayashi Maru my ass>

regards,

dave

Apply Occam's razor to the result.

What is the most likely cause of the discrepancy when careful and detailed analysis reveal that there is no change in the output signal, but, when I am aware s to which cable is in the chain I hear a difference, a difference that disappears when I listen blind?

Answer, the difference is in my head. Is there any evidence that this is likely? Yes, shitloads of the stuff.

Chris

 

[Stu_cj]

Maybe I'm being excessively cynical here, but if there was a predictable and noticeable effect going on, there would either be more convergence, because all those people doing cable 'research' would be finding consistent elements that make differences, or at least that difference X occurs consistently under condition Y when cable design Z is deployed.

Up to a point that may be true but that would make cables design different from HiFi design in general. For example different box manufacturers use wildy different technologies and topologies in their products, and there is little sign of convergence. Also for any one manufacturer with a favoured approach, there is almost always some subjective listening tests and tweaks at the end to fine tune the product.
It was interesing to read in the Audiolab thread that John Westlake didn't have a difinitive answer as to why the "new" transformer for the CDQ made such a subjective difference to the sound, when measurements found negligible difference (measurements of mains ripple that is).

 

[Frank_S]

What the point in paying $20,000?

That would only buy you one.

My system needs 6 of them.

Thats $120,000 if you please.

If you only bought one which piece of equipment would you put it on for the best result?

(please don't answer that last question .. )

You'd put it on your £50 CD player, and Bob's your uncle, it'll sound like a £20,050 CD player, surprised you didn't know that.