John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

Pbb, I do not have the least difficulty with your argument. Besides I think it is very well written and thought out. My experience is, that people who have trained their ears to judge the performance of live or reproduced music,.i.e. in judging the performance of a given system, generally "hear" pretty much alike, although their emphasis on the parameters given for their judgements may differ. Of course, you could use tone controls instead of selected wires to fine tune a system. Only tone controls mostly degrade the sound over a broad spectrum, whereas a well chosen IC or speaker wire may in fact enhance it.
In reading your lines again, I am wondering what your basic hypothesis or assumption is, which you are building your arguments on. Would you assume, that a well designed music system, built and devised to the state of the art of accepted scientific knowledge, would, apart of the vagaries and uncertainties of room influences, be able to reproduce the original musical event in your home, provided the software is of the very best quality? And.... again, say in a truly SOTA system, how much is there "science" in its design and how much "intuition" and "art"? Or in other words, is there sufficient measurement savvy, to design a truly first class system through measurements alone?
Regards,

I was a sceptic until I recently did my own tests. On interconnects I did repeated testing playing the same 1 minute section of music over and over. I was swapping the $4 per pair generic black interconnects you get with most cheap stereo gear, with Kimber Select KS-1030 silver interconnects $800 per pair. The effect was quite pronounced. In particular, with the cheap stuff, a section with a tambourine on top of a drum which was being hit, was muffling the drum and blending in with it. The drum was just a "thumping" sound. With the great interconnects, the entire effect was different: the drum was hit first, it was nicely pronounced and tonally rich. A fraction of a second later, the tambourine rattled and jangled... it was clearly subordinate to the drum. Here is an example where the entire sonic precedence of instruments changed by varying the interconnects.

Are the Kimbers 400 times better than the el-cheapos? No. But they are much much better.

Speaker cables: last night I decided to experiment with ultra-cheap 20 gauge zip wire speaker cable. (I lived with this stuff all through my twenties. :-) I removed my 12 gauge thick copper speaker cables with gold plugs and replaced with the cheapo zip cables. Did repeated swapping on a well memorized 2 minute section of classical music.

With the cheap stuff, the imaging was much blurred. There was no crip 3D soundstage either. Many instruments congealed together into a fuzzy, ill-defined image. Bass tonal richness was gone (color, as they say, went from bronze to grey). I repeated the test over and over and it was clear that the thicker cables we much improved.

I will repeat the test soon with some nice Nordost Blue Heavens, which have more silver content.

It's pretty obvious to me now that the material of the cable (silver versus copper) can make a big difference. I cannot really quantify the effects of wire topology or biwiring without more experimenting.

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Methodology. It seems to me that the best way to test all this stuff would be to put a computer on the end, next to a speaker, and to AtoD what comes out of the speaker cable. Swap the cables. Then compare in the digital domain the differences. It would be pretty possible then to have a quantifiable way to measure what is going on.

I say to put the AtoD in parallel with the speaker only because speakers create demand on the current that will affect what comes across, whereas replacing with a computer will have completely different current characteristics.

Is there some nice hardware and software for a PC that can do this? Must be.....

Testing is a good idea but no pratical computer test equipment has a noise floor exceeding 96 db. Our hearing has a dynamic range of about 110+ db. That makes our ears many times more sensitive that any test equipment. Chris

You can invert the polarity of one channel and measure accross the positive leeds at the speaker, with a mono source you will then be measutring the difference between channels. Then with different cables on each channel, you will be measuring only the difference caused by the cable and since the differences will be very low you can add amplification to bring the signal above the noise floor of your sound card. An intersting variation of this descrived by Hafler allows you to listen to the difference signal directly.

Sqjudge,
Can you suggest any components for doing this measuring and testing.
Only 96db sensitivity?
What about taking an A/D converter from someone like dcs which is really high quality and take the digital out of that and do the measurements?

Is there a PC interface for TOSLINK or ST link????