Now I think I will begin another forum concerning manufacturers supplying measurements and testing. WHY DON'T THEY?
Embarrassment?
Audio Science Review = "The better the measurement, the better the sound" philosophy
"Audiophiles are Snobs" Youtube features an idiot! He states, with no equivocation, that $5,000 and $10,000 speakers sound equally good and a $500 and $5,000 integrated amp sound equally good. He is either deaf or a liar or both!
There is a site filled with posters like him called Audio Science Review. If a reasonable person posts, they immediately tear him down, using selected words and/or sentences from the reasonable poster as100% proof that the audiophile is dumb and stupid with his money. They also occasionally state that the high end audio equipment/cable/tweak sellers are criminals who commit fraud on the public. They often state that if something scientifically measures better, then it sounds better. They give no credence to unmeasurable sound factors like PRAT and Ambiance. Some of the posters music choices range from rap to hip hop and anything pop oriented created in the past from 1995.
Have any of audiogon (or any other reasonable audio forum site) posters encountered this horrible group of miscreants?
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Interesting that it wasn't always that way. I noticed after joining there around Christmas time that new members with a neutral or subjectivist leaning could be criticised in almost any terms. I'm pretty ambidextrous on that divide but was attacked early on for being "nihilist" and "woke". Impressively oxymoronic! Responding didn't work out of course, as moderation is asymmetrical. Two-week ban from the thread. Later on I reported a couple of bigoted posts from a pair of high post count old timers with many 'likes'. Rookie mistake, earned me a two week holiday from the forum. These days, ASR is a self-confessed Nazi bar. Moderator claimed they didn't really want to shut down and erase an innocuous LBGTQ+ artist discussion thread, but couldn't manage the old-timer backlash. I'm sure they could have corrected the drift to intolerance, they just didn't want to hard enough. |
Regarding the cables discussion. A couple of plausible theories, assuming that neither confirmation bias, nor slick salesman-induced hypnosis are at play.
(A) A cable is also an antenna. I observed mobile phone interference with a studio monitor once. Manifested as a periodic crackle in one of the monitor's three transducers. Moving the phone from ~1 feet to ~3 feet from the studio monitor resolved the issue. A well-shielded cable, especially with carefully twisted identical wires, is less of an antenna. Thus, at a location with a strong RF field, it could theoretically provide a protection from the interference, which could otherwise induce distortions. To test this hypothesis, the cable and equipment would need to be moved and turned around, let's say several feet away and ninety degrees, to potentially change the interference effect.
(B) A cable is also a heat sink. Imagine a thermally-challenged piece of equipment. Could be a compact tube apparatus. Or perhaps a vintage solid-state amplifier with a dried-out thermal paste between the power stage transistors and regular heat sink. Massive enough cable, made of materials with high thermal conductivity coefficient, and with a tightly inserting connector (perhaps even slightly lubricated with electrically and thermally conductive paste), may cool off at least the power transformer coil to which the power supply wires are connected. Cooled off power transformer coil would then "extract" heat from other transformer coils, which are connected to rectifier on the printed circuit board, from transformer core, and so on. Also, some heat could be extracted by convection from the air circulating inside the case shared by the transformer with other amplifier components, cooling down even components situated far from the transformer. In effect, such a cable could serve as an auxiliary heat sink, analogous to a transmission cooling radiator on certain high-performance cars and trucks. The analogy extends to potential positive effect from increasing air flow around the auxiliary heat sink. In case of the cable, it could be achieved by lifting it off the ground. To test this hypothesis, one would need to measure change in equilibrium amplifier temperature at the same settings and audio material with one cable vs another. The equilibrium temperature is the one that no longer rises, after some time since the test was started. |
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