Are audiophiles still out of their minds?
Facten, "ask dracule1 a question , what's the difference in making a decision to purchase an expensive (new or used) DAC like the Golden Gate when there are presumably good sounding less expensive DACs, and someone making a decision to purchase expensive vs inexpensive cables?" Glad you asked, but let me rephrase you're question to be consistent with my original post. Why spend tens of thousands of dollar on wire when other components in your system like acoustic room treatment, speakers, DACs, turntables, amps make more of a difference in sound and often cost less than wire? For example, a 10' pair of Nordost Odin 2 speaker wire retails for $46k. That's close to 3x the cost of the Golden Gate DAC. And more than 12x the cost of my acoutic room treatment. Which do you honestly think makes more of an improvement in your system? IME, the audio wire loses embarrassingly. The GG DAC is hand built, contains components that require in-depth knowledge of engineering, is orders of magnitude more complex in parts and construction, etc. Acoustic room treatment makes the biggest improvement IME. OTOH, there's no rocket science in audio wire construction (I know high priced cable manufacturers will argue otw. E.g. electrons in our wire travel at the speed of light. 😒) . Audiophile wire can be made in miles by a machine unless you're boutique one man operation working out of your home. Most of these high prices wire is copper, not gold or palladium or platinum. There's nothing about audiophile wire that justifies some of the stratospheric prices asked by many of these cable manufacturers. |
Dracule1, unless you are a rocket scientist you cannot say if this kind of science is required or not to design or build a great cable. You simply are not qualified to judge it from this angle. And another point. Some people have enough funds for everything including $70k cables, but I don't think that you do. Nor do I. Yes, wealth distribution in this country is far from fair. I don't like it but I can tolerate it unless it is totally out of control. Can you? |
inna and others here left shaking their heads, I design and build high precision electrical components for folks like Mercedes Benz (S-Series), US Military (M-1 Abrams Tank and F-16 Fighter Jet), and the National Atomic Particle Accelerator (Fermi Lab). I suppose we could discuss Gauss's laws, Maxwell Equations, eddy currents, skin effect etc., but it would serve no purpose here. Get close to the the facts and the OP will revert to anecdotal gibberish or personal insult. The OP just appears to enjoy making others feel bad......period. If you corner him with facts which demonstrate the preposterous nature of his claims, he will retaliate with a personal dagger like his endless insults to Geoff, his comments to folkfreak regarding the SQ of his DCS stack or to me regarding my Nordost cables, the merits of which are laughable on their face. His stock in trade seams to be the nebulous because that allows him to play his game. For instance, when I point out the vagaries of using poorly designed DBT's (i.e., those lacking degrees of freedom, statistical significance or variable control), in his very next posts he references two more DBT's of dubious design and doubles down on their use as justification of an irrational position. Poorly designed experiments are used in marketing and politics; not to determine the truth. This is not the behavior of a person seeking the truth, but rather avoiding it because it gets in the way of his joy ride. There are literally thousands of permutations of a DBT-DOE that can create completely misleading results. Take components with an impedance matching too close to parity. The worse a cables impedance characteristics the better the system is likely to perform. A coat hanger will likely sound better than a Nordost wire and a long coat hanger will sound better than a short one. This proves absolutely nothing. No thoughtful electrical engineer would question that a nordost wire mated with a system designed to work best with the nordost wire will reach sonic heights well beyond a system made with the equivalent design approach using a coat hanger. Yet people get these issues confused, or worse, knowingly use the confusion for devious purposes. |
This post speaks volumes----a lot of butt hurt here. |
