Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?
I agree Albert. After reading a thread like the one that Trelja started and thinking about the other disasters and turmoil that is taking place in Florida and other places around the world, all of this is petty bullshit. My heart goes out to those people suffering through those situations and i'm sorry for not having my priorities right. God Bless Us All... Sean > |
Oh, look. Everyone got together and worked things out. Very nice! A couple days ago, I was certain that some kind of 'everyone gets a timeout, and if you all play nice after that, maybe some milk and cookies too' post would be called for. Actually, there are some thoughts that came to mind during the episode above that might make a little more sense to interject now- 1) While I'm as frustrated as anyone else by Robert's tendency to talk around design points rather than be specific, I can completely understand why he's doing it. Any way you look at it, the 'cable business' has extremely low barriers to entry. Basically, any Tom, Dick and Harry can decide to become an audiophile cable manufacturer by making a few phonecalls to Goodfellow, Alfa/Aesar, etc. for 'interesting' wires as well as to McMaster-Carr etc. for 'interesting' tubing, etc. Spend a little additional money on shims, threading devices, soldering, online ads, commisions for a few shills, etc. and you're in business. NOTE: I'm not saying that the above actions will allow someone to make good cables, nor am I insinuating that folks who get into the business do no more than the above (or all of the above, particularly where the shills are concerned)- I'm just pointing out that from an economic perspective, it is an easy, and relatively unencumbered thing to do. You don't need to license a huge number of patents from entrenched industry players, you don't need to spend a small fortune in startup research and engineering, and you don't need to establish a large, complex business organization. The point I'm driving at, and may eventually get to, is that for a small player to divulge its strategy or trade secrets in such a business environment is suicidal. Anyone doing so is likely to get eaten from above (the 'shark' attack) if their product offers new technology that a big established player has easy access to, and can appropriate. At the same time, anyone doing so is likely to get eaten from below (the piranha swarm) by a bunch of hungry small competitors who have just had their job made easy for them. Basically, someone like Robert has no choice to be cagey, unless they are willing to spend very significant amounts of time and money generating an intellectual property strategy and securing patents on whatever new design or technology they have come up with. Successful execution of a patent takes multiple years and costs somewhere between $5k and $10k- not small potatoes for a small business. Then, there is the entire aspect of defending a patent from infringement... Even if someone were to try protecting their technology by patents, the bar is very high for anyone to successfully patent anything in the cable area, since so much has already been tried, or discussed. This prior art will ensure that any patent is likely to be so narrow that 'workarounds' are easy to develop. This gets us back to the option of being cagey and playing the cards close to one's vest. Justifiably annoying for those of us interested in the science and engineering of what is going on, but the only reasonable course of action for someone in the business. Personally, my hat is off to Robert for communicating at all outside of the realm of advertising copy. 2) Sean, a couple of quick points on dielectics- your comments on teflon are good as far as they go. However, if dielectric constant is the only thing that matters, one can do much better by simply using air (or a vacuum, for that matter.) Of course, this is difficult to implement, although I've seem a couple of examples of folks building cables with positioning pieces that 'suspend' a wire in the middle of a plastic tube. Practically speaking, foamed dielectrics are the better way to go- teflon (in its various flavors) polyethylene, polypropylene etc. all can be foamed to yield mostly-air matrices with a fair bit of mechanical integrity, with much lower (bulk) dielectric constants than pure teflon itself. I can see a few drawbacks to this approach- even if the foam is closed-cell (i.e., the trapped bubbles don't connect physically), a foamed dielectric will be a much poorer barrier layer for a conductor- surface oxidation will be faster. Then, there is the issue of homogeneity on the necessary size scales- if bubbles are too big/too small, then the conductor will see local variations in dielectric environment (low for actual bubbles, high for the plastic bubble walls) that are significant in audio frequency signal propagation. On the other hand, teflon itself isn't a very good barrier for oxygen permeation- having it there is better than being exposed to air directly, but the rate of gas transport through the teflon isn't insignificant. If one really wanted a barrier layer, then poly(chloro-flouroolefin) polymers are significantly better (however, their dielectric constants are higher). To get to the point where no oxygen reaches the conductor, one needs inorganic barriers such as a glass layer (again, this would be a higher dielectric constant material, but a few microns of coating will suffice). In all likelihood, I'm barely scratching the surface here- there are probably lots of additional tradeoffs that I'm not even aware of. It boggles my mind that someone would design a cable with a plasticizer-containing coating. Anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge in the area knows plasticizers move around, degrade, and are freqently reactive with other kinds of materials. The same goes for a lot of UV stabilizers and anti-oxidants present in plastics- once they work their way out of the plastic, they can attack metals. Silly, silly, silly. 3) Twl- I think I agree with the specifics of everything you said upthread, but come to a different conclusion- when you say, 'You can't "spec" or "measure" your way to audio nirvana,' I have to agree on the experiential level. Where I disagree, or perhaps emphasize things differently, is in being upfront about inadequate measurement techniques. (You mention this as well- I view it as a really central point.) As I mentioned above, an in-depth look at the technical literature where one would expect to find information about cable measurement and measurement techniques, reveals that there isn't really much there! (Please, someone correct this impression if I'm wrong!) That being the case, I'm willing to bet my $3 in disposable income that whatever measurement techniques are being used aren't sufficient to reveal the physical processes behind how cable properties affect the human auditory organs, much less how the psychoacoustics work. There are a lot of currently un- or under-investigated connections to be made. Sean did an excellent job upthread in categorizing cable properties and how they can degrade specific parts of an electrical signal- I'd love to see it formally detailed someplace, preferrably in a peer-reviewed technical journal. Still, going from there, there are many additional gaps until one reaches an understanding of how any one of us experiences 'audio nirvana'. Until I find those gaps investigated and understood, I'm not willing to concede that 'good measurement' and 'audio nirvana' aren't ultimately the same thing. It's just that the good measurements, and ultimately the predictive models one can derive from them, don't currently seem to exist in any systematic form. (Again, someone please correct me if I'm wrong!) Simply throwing in the towel and saying 'it can't be scientifically explained' ends up in the same place as medical quackery of various sorts- nobody with a rationalist bent or any appreciation at all of human intellectual development wants to end up there. Happy Labor Day, everyone. |
My point is not to say that engineering doesn't count. My point is that the sonic results AT THE EARS and in IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SYSTEM BEING USED is the ultimate "test". As I have been involved in the cable business on the sales end, I have seen many situations where very expensive cables have fared poorly and were replaced with inexpensive cables, and vice versa. In all cases, the cables had good anecdotal reputations in other systems. Nothing is perfect in every application. The fairest method is offering a trial period for the user to asess the performance in his/her system context, for his/her preferences in sound. We do this, and so do some other cable makers. In some cases, what we thought "should have been better" was not better in the views of the user. Was the user wrong? No. The user must decide for himself what he/she likes or dislikes in conjunction with their other components. It is impossible to say that any particular cable will be preferred in any particular system. Too many variables involved, including user preferences which cannot be predicted. When someone calls me to try our cables, I never say that our cable will be sure to beat out whatever else they are considering. I only say that our cables are very good, and stand a good chance of being the best ones that they audition. If this doesn't turn out to be the case(with them as the sole judge), they can send them back for a full refund within 30 days. I don't know how to be any fairer than that. DISCLAIMER: I work for a company that manufactures audio cables, vibration control devices, racks, stands, audio electronics components, and speakers. All have a 30-day money back, 100% satisfaction guarantee. |
I agree wholeheartedly with the intent of Sean, Tommywall and others above. There is a huge need in my view to finally get some of this cable craziness over with and down to a set of rational scientific models that are testable and verifiable. $6000 power cords are simply an unsustainable bubble, and despite the audibility of differences, I start agreeing with the many who become disallusioned and contemptuous toward audiophiles. There is enough knowledge and data to do a research program that would sort out many of the questions and assertions above. No theory will account for every case or describe all of the fine detail, but you should certainly be able to get the main points right - cables are not black boxes. That includes the contributions of line impurities, filters, and break in. Any valid studies have to be done as peer-reviewed white papers; it is the ONLY way they will be respected or accepted. Further, given the true complexity of electromagnetic field theory and electron flow models, it is pretty certain that anyone doing such work needs to have academic help or have advanced background themselves. Despite all of the arguments about the importance of ears and preferences, I predict that if a series of good papers came out documenting the best construction techniques and best approaches to power handling, most audio design would follow along quickly. |
