The Science of Cables

I love finding stuff I do not know. I search for it ceaselessly, like a shark. I never sleep, always moving. When I stop, I know I’m dead, my mind is dying or dead. Never stop moving. Never sleep. Never get comfortable. Never stop exploring the unknowns.

I look forward to not knowing and fighting to figure something out. I know I’ll never get it right and when I figure something out I know I’ve still got some or all of it wrong.

But I ’get off’ on figuring out the new. My high is emergent understanding.

Not the high of negative proofing by dismissal and rejection, which is how most of humanity is wired. This is the fundamental of staying alive in our bodily origins, so it is a fundamental origin of the body issue. Dogma of self, is core.

Engineering is designed around the people who feel safe when they know. The biblical/dogma wiring end of the gene selection and wiring/design pool. This is the bulk of the herd.

Science is designed around the explorer who knows it is all wrong and will always be wrong. Being the type who gets the endorphin high from the exploration and the figuring out of the new and the unexplored.

To win through risk and finding the new (Science), not to win by finding the false and keeping to the norms (engineering).

Science is 100% ~NOT~ engineering. Never conflate the two.

As soon as one touches the new or walks in to an unknown and tries to explore it, engineering and dogma takes a huge back seat. Required!

Once it is figured out,and normed... then engineering and the engineering mindset can dogmatize it for the rest of humanity.

Intelligence and emotional intelligence (that forms mind in act and flow) as an individual variation, can make a ridiculous mess of this complex scenario. and does so in about 99.95% of all the threads on this and all audio forums. Or in almost 100% of all other technological or whatever conversations on the net.

How is your brain wired, dear reader of this post?

Are you a negative proofer (engineering) or a fearless explorer (science!)?

Engineers live by facts and dogmatic texts on all those facts. Science understands that there is no such thing as a fact. That the only fact known to exist is that no facts exist. If a 'scientist' says that facts exist, walk away, they were probably trained as an engineer and are a a poseur, and are not the real thing. No real scientific training school (university that trains and accredits scientists) will ever commit to teaching such foolishness.

Eg, an engineer has a ruler, and they measure with it, inches, centimeters and so on.

The scientist ~KNOWS~ (and is trained/educated in this!).... that we don’t really know what an inch or centimeter is, we can’t nail down what the core item is --- in how we come to making either of them.

That down at the bottom of a length measurement, the reality is all slippery and indeterminate, so we can NEVER define what an inch or centimeter is. Even if we can use them all day to do things and make things (engineering) ... we still don’t know what each of them really truly are. That at the limit of definition (as we skip down into the layers of what each is) in all known reality ---- it is still turtles all the way down (science).

Science is great, but it is built up on observation, measurement, hypothesis, conclusions.


I look forward to seeing this occur more regularly in amp and cable design.


Snake oil sales men on the other hand write long, meandering pieces with claims that either cannot be tested, or have unproven applicability to the subject at hand. For instance, discussing the micro-crystaline architecture of insulators at near absolute zero, and using that to somehow conclude that electrons flow with less friction at room temperature cables.


My favorite take on this, of course, is the long long quacking, followed by not hearing a damn thing different, and then having the quacks claim it’s my ears.


So you spent half a billion dollars developing this new winding technique and only the top 0.0001% of ears can hear it? Wow. That’s a good investment.  Or, just as bad, claims for major engineering or scientific breakthrough, which cannot be described in engineering terms, either by their results ( frequency, amplitude, phase, noise ) or by the characteristics ( resistance, capacitance, inductance, insulation value, common mode rejection ratio).



Best,

E

We need it all, Eric, to be alive and be mutable. To have a future that is not a dead thing where it is all the same.

Too much of any (thing) is deadly. Standardization saves, standardization kills.

the core problem for audio is that the ear is a similar in all..but essentially a blank self built thing in the individual.
that is is possible to agree on sounds heard. But impossible to have each ear be the same as they are not the same. That hearing is a self assembled self built thing. No two are the same and no two brains analyzing the signals are wired the same. 

Importantly, that engineering cannot fully apply as engineering is incomplete. It is specifically VERY incomplete in the analysis of the stuff that is important to the hearing done by the ear.

The trick is to get audiophiles and the engineering analysis of such... to understand this all important simple set of data points.

I wish to avoid charlatans as well, as they pollute the pond.

In my experience there are almost no charlatans in audio.

But there is a huge level of misunderstanding of the complexities of audio and then the misapplication of dogma to this proffered complexity--as a method of sorting it out. It's the simpleton's way out.

Thinking and sussing out out is considerably more complex. But is the only truly functional way forward. Most won't commit to it... and offer up emotional responses instead, that are cloaked as being logic and reason, when in fact they are not.

The vast number of audio threads play out in this exact way.

Not science:

I mixed up a bunch of rare and expensive herbs in my kitchen, and they cure the common cold in 2 weeks, guaranteed! 

The idea that science or engineering block discovery is nonsense. So, make up a batch, cure a bunch of people and then find the method of effect. How and why does it work? When does it not work? How much better is it than chickens soup?


That is science.
Best,

E

teo :

No one is arguing against art.


Just don't come to me with reams of science sounding stuff and then claim your stuff can't be tested or measured, or that you are a maverick.


Best,
E