Cable fetishists..now face the truth!

[V-bro]

Well I guess they were telling the truth about the bandwidth. Though they don't tell you that with far less bandwidth there would be no difference at all...

Yes the optical cables, first there is electrical signal which is fine, then they convert it to light and then back to electrical signal. Not much wrong with it, though there is no advantage whatsoever. This was just a gimick of technology and later on they started implementing serious optical technologies with multimode and single mode technique. There would be no point in using that for audio for the same reasons as mentioned above though, the only place where these have an advantage is at lengths above 10Km...

The corrosion, or resulting resistance will probably not affect the sound. There is a tiny tiny nomansland in there where it might affect the sound, but that would mean you'd better run to get a lottery ticket as well as the chance is about just as slim. This has nothing to do with cable or connector quality though, as still for this application the demands are very minimalistic.

[V-bro]

Someone emailed me to say that some forum members on a national audio forum mentioned connectors may not contain any nickel, neither should they be made of magnetic materials...

I guess they never actually studied the internals of their equipment....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IDLPn6hxAY

[ported]

interesting thread - totally agree there is very little mileage in spending money on "hi fi" cables..

I used to own a recording studio with a pretty hefty main monitoring > 250 watt per side. This was 20 years ago...someone came in with some enormous QED speaker cable - almost too thick to terminate either end. We spend a whole afternoon swapping between this and the 10 amp domestic cable I was using for speaker cable. We came to the conclusion that at max volume (when my ear drum defender disco lights would flash to indicate permanent damage was on its way..) there was a just noticeable extra clarity to be found... Needless to say I did not invest then nor do I now.. At all but max volumes the basic wire did not change any quality of the recordings tried and we were listening for transients in drum kits - delicacy in cymbals - presence of voices etc.

Maybe someone should come up with a way of classifying or indexing "noticeable" differences - maybe where more than certain percentage of people in a listening test could identify the difference repeatedly thereby indicating the noticeable difference. An awful lot of advertising myths could be dismissed with a process like this... what about decoupling capacitors...love to try that one out..

I am pretty sure I could now spot a Tripath amp against others - certainly my old amp!! but would be interesting to try in controlled conditions... Luckily I spend more time thinking the music sounds great than ever before so either my ears are going or digital music at least sets a similar standard for most (little noticeable differences between systems?) thereby upping the experience for everyone...who knows?

Ported

[amix]

Cheers Krilli! Just noticed there it says 'Responce' above one of the graphs! LOL If they can't spell, how on earth will they ever produce a good cable and be all scientific about it?? Hahah!

I am not a company and so I do not getting any money for stating: I can hear the difference in Firewire cables.

Background: I bought a Mackie ONYX Sattelite (http://www.mackie.com/products/satellite/), because I needed a microphone pre-amplifier to connect to my MacBook. It connects to the Firewire port, but the cable it came with, was too short. So I purchased a longer one at the local electronics discount. I have no special audio hardware on my Mac, just a Logitech Z4 2.1 system for about 80€.

I can hear the difference between both Firewire cables! The old (shorter) one sounds warm and more musical, while the longer one sounds faster, more analytical.

I am not an expert, but as far as I have understood a digital cable not only transmits 0 and 1 but there is also timing (jitter). If we have a look at certain articles over at lampizator.eu we can see, that the digital output of even upper-class CD players is not always clean. It is seldom, that the oscillopscope shows a nice and clean wave. Usually the are interferenced, mirrored, plain dirty. This can, so I assume, also happen due to cables.

[V-bro]

Firewire signal (1394IEEE) is very critical very low voltage (2Vdc biased with about 100mVac signal on top) and high frequency signal, though the effects you describe don't really make sense. It has to be the poorer cable where the signal is deteriorated, yet recongnized. Usually digital signals when deteriorated are not recognized either and the nomansland in between is very very small. Or there may be some kind of effect from the signal wires being poorer shielded and are interfering...

I can't draw such conclusions without a thorough investigation to the phenomenon, but I can grant you that the cable has to deal with much more critical signal than analogue audio signals and that was mainly what I was on about in this thread...

[ported]

Still recon the trick is to get someone to randomly swap the cables while you cannot see - if you can detect which cable is being used well over 50% of the time blind then there is something in it - if not then there is no noticeable difference etc etc.

There may be that with some digital interfaces error correction is used which would probably add harshness to some signals... where digital words are 'made up' or repeated to try and maintain a stream. I once made a very simple spdiff cable using over 2m of worst quality thin screened cable just to test something - thought I had better buy something better for long term - cannot hear any difference on any definition settings I use..it was perfectly adequate.

If you can find someone as mad as you to participate blind testing can be very revealing (of how much some of this is in the mind... or not)

Ported

[V-bro]

My experience is that error correction kicks in at very little margin if it is about cable loss. Usually it either works or not. Error corrections are more for missing bits in the recording. I work a lot with native 4:4:4 HD video material and have eye pattern measurement equipment to see if the signal is getting bad because up to really really bad signal distortion due to cable the picture stays crisp and clear as though nothing is wrong. And then when you add that extra piece of cable the signal is just gone. I reckon it is much the same with any other digital signal, the signal I am talking about here doesn't survive 5 meters of audio cable.... It must be quite a miracle still with digital audio transfer to really notice the difference between cables...

[alexlangberg]

We had this discussion at my university a couple of times and conclusions are not easily drawn. Of course, there are obvious points such as the fact that more expensive cables have better build quality and are thus a better choice for stage audio, festivals and other places where things get smashed up a lot. Not that it has anything to do with audio quality but there certainly is a valid point in not always purchasing the cheap stuff.

I think most engineers can agree that technically, there's really no difference between cheap and expensive cables. Copper is copper and only changes in things such as shielding, gauge etc. can change the properties enough to be audible. These properties are not really related to the price.

However, when you look at other fields, such as neuroscience, there are other possible explanations than just the technical ones. It all comes down to defining what makes something "sound better". While an engineer might say that the less distortion you get, the better it sounds, a neuroscientist might look at it from another angle.

Imagine this hypothesis:
When we hear something we think "sounds good", dopamine is released in the brain - just as when we eat chocolate or play computer games, for instance. Dopamine is a reward from the brain that makes us "feel good". The better we perceive something as sounding, the more dopamine is released. Now, the release of dopamine might not be directly related to the technical properties of the sound system. Just knowing that you have spent extra money on cables might be enough for your brain to generate more dopamine than if you only had the cheap cables.

Thus, people will "feel better" when listening to cables they know are expensive and perceive this as a "better sound system". It would also explain why people insist that they perceive a difference between cheap and expensive cables, while actually not being able to do so in a double blind test. It would also explain why people like us who know that there's no difference will get the same amount of pleasure from cheap cables.

Now, I'm not a neuroscientist and this is just a hypothesis that hasn't been tested anywhere (I think, haven't looked) - I just wanted to note that our brains are crazy things that sometimes just make up stuff to make us feel better or perceive something differently. All this might have a lot more to do with the price tag than the cables themselves.

[Lulu]

alexlangberg, I join your opinion. For me, a cable which has strong and serious conception is simply the right one (the cheapest may look fragile). But there always be cheap cables and overpriced cables because there always will be people who will buy thousands euros of cables, thinking that thousands euros of electronics deserved it. Maybe they're right, but I think they don't.

As you said, double blind tests are enough to show if it's a 'brain' false perception or if really is cables that change sound reproduction (and then better or not is a matter of taste : I don't like Meridian AMPS, because of mediums that are too in the front of the audio area) ; same for cables.

[V-bro]

I guess I am sober enough then as I only go for the obvious sound quality gains, just as all you guys probably do as we all love our Tripath amps sound and I have been able to pick them out flawlessly in blind tests. ( A fun thing to prove those 'disbelievers' wrong!)

I like the way you describe the 'pseudo acoustic' effects there Alex, that's exactly how it works and I too have fooled myself a few times while I was 'growing up'. Having compared so many different audio products and even having owned more than a bunch I may call myself spoiled enough not to care any more about boutique equipment. Especially since their performance is proven to be beated hands down by much less expensive technology. No system is perfect and as long as you can accept that it becomes much easier to be objective. I suppose much of my dopamine has dried up, though I did sometimes catch myself being over enthusiastic when exploring new ground...