John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

I had great difficulty in blending bass and midrange in my admittedly complex system. I got most of it right by experimenting with speaker placement and room treatment but the final touches on bass rendering were only achieved by finding the right interconnect and speaker cables. I don't care if its against the law of physics or if I am hallucinating as long as my ears keep on telling me, that it sounds right now. As Greg so aptly put it: Cables are both personal and system dependent!

Geez...

It's hard to follow threads on a non-threaded heirachy site!

Anyhow JHunter suggested the pink noise method for testing cable "differences." I certainly do like to use pink noise for discerning very small effects. You can use pink noise when tweaking a crossover, change a *very small* resistor value and *hear* a change. You can forget about hearing the change using any sort of music.

So, does it matter if you can't hear the change when using music? You bet! The resulting sound when the improvments have been made are almost always subjectively better sounding and most often objectively test better with test equipment.

this is a follow up to Jhunters post back 5-31-01

sorry for the delay! :- )

_-_-bear

It's amazing how many responses to the Dunlavy piece have been posted. It just goes on and on and on. Going against my own personal grain, I will make it brief: no you can't always believe your eyes and ears. You have to find objectivity somewhere or else you're just groping in the dark. Does anyone out there honestly think that Dunlavy could produce the speakers he does using the anti-scientific mindset exhibited by most cable promoters? Do you guys really believe that measurement and double blind testing is a waste of time and that some audio guru can conjure up the perfect whatever in a magical, mystical golden ear trance? There's a big difference between building something and sitting on one's duff listening to it and haphazardly commenting using buzz words. Science is what got us here, as we say in French; "don't spit in the soup".

Pbb, in my opinion, you are missing a slight point, which I find surprising, since you seem to play the guitar:
Many audiophiles are avid concertgoers and if a piece of wire brings them closer to the experience of the real thing, who would bother then about measurements and double blind testing. For me, the only thing close to some objectivity here, is the live event and how I remember it and if science helps me along this goal, fine, je ne crache pas dans la soupe !

And p l e a s e , lets not start up this argument again. Its futile and leads to nowhere.

Pbb, measurements, multiple testing, etc., probably are useful for manufacturers. For users -- i.e. most of us here -- Detlof's summarised it all IMO.

Between you & I, how many of us can explain audible differences b/ween pieces of, say, active amplification based on (visible) differences in the design? Not I!

Cheers!