One for the audio physics deniers

Ransos..

I have a good friend who earns a living reviewing cable (amongst other things) for a highly respected leading UK Hi-Fi magazine..

he’s a good bloke.. very honest and enthusiastic about music and hi-fi and enjoys his work immensely..

aside from the fact that I’ve heard the differences myself time and again when he’s reviewing kit back to back.. and ignoring the fact that this well meaning friend has made personal recommendations on the most cost effective ways to upgrade my own system.. I still simply cannot believe that he has just made all that stuff up off the top of his head each month when he submits his pieces to the editor..

as I said earlier in the thread.. ignorance is bliss.. or not, as the case may be..

Just for fun, can anyone explain (scientifically) why bi-wiring is better than single?

there is a technical reason why it is suppossedly better – that article above may allude to it – the guy who used to run Spendor explained it to me but I forgot it pretty quickly.

However he also pointed out that it is very unlikely that the speaker designer ‘voiced’ the speaker with it biwired, so it is probably best to use it single wired as he did, and just strip the wire back to it reaches between the terminals.

Once a cable isn’t noticeably degrading the signal, that’s your plateau

+1

the cable I went back to when I had problems was the blue Van Damme stuff, which is similar to the cheap studio cable mentioned above.

I actually use some Kef stuff which to my ears is the same, but it looks better against the floorboards as the jacket is brown whereas the Van Damme is blue.

Plus if used the white stuff it would stain badly when the cat decides to behind the speakers for a cr8p…

I still simply cannot believe that he has just made all that stuff up off the top of his head each month when he submits his pieces to the editor..

Just like high-end bike reviews for MTB mags? 😉

I still simply cannot believe that he has just made all that stuff up off the top of his head each month when he submits his pieces to the editor..

I’m sure he believes it. People also believe in homeopathy.

But the fundamental point is that no-one has ever demonstrated a difference under double-blind conditions. Speaker cable is a pretty odd thing to have faith in.

Just like high-end bike reviews for MTB mags?

ooh, are audio mag forums rull of;

“What cable for Dark Side of the Moon”

type threads?

So, cheap cable inside speakers … yet expensive speaker cable and interconnects make a noticeable difference. Riiiggght.

So you can’t see any inherent difference between a couple of inches of wire inside a shielded chassis and a several metre cable run passing through who knows what?

I’m not disagreeing with you, incidentally; I’ve explained my views earlier. I just think that some of your arguments are a little tenuous.

Good for you. Are you going to try for the $1 million prize?

it would have to be with my cables, speakers and amplifier – and all it would demonstrate is that my amplifier is sensitive to the load on it. Something about those 4mm stranded cables causes it to perform badly.

I also spoke with the guy who used to run Spendor about this and he said that they used to have problems with Quad 606s being unstable into certain loads.

So you can’t see any inherent difference between a couple of inches of wire inside a shielded chassis and a several metre cable run passing through who knows what?

Studios are electrically noisy environments, cables heaped in coils, passing over each other, close to power supplies and so on. Remind us what sort of cable they use?

ooh, are audio mag forums rull of;

“What cable for Dark Side of the Moon”

type threads?

I remember looking for some advice last year on audio forums about how to get my Linn audio multi room stuff hooked up in the house I moved into. Those guys take things quite seriously.

I ended up asking on here in the end, and got a better response 🙂

Is there anything that STW doesn’t know? 😉

it would have to be with my cables, speakers and amplifier – and all it would demonstrate is that my amplifier is sensitive to the load on it. Something about those 4mm stranded cables causes it to perform badly.

I suggest you contact James Randi. Let us know how you get on.

i love STW.

a bunch of cyclists have almost tonned arguing about wire.

again.

🙂

You’ve repeated the joke several times ransos, but I still don’t get it.

No-one willing to defend this then?

VALHALLA Reference Power Cord from Nordost redefines the standards of performance in this category. The Valhalla offers a dramatic sound stage, tremendous dynamic range and superb articulation of the musical event. When used with video components; clarity, detail, and the natural depth of colors are revealed. Valhalla Power Cord uses our new proprietary ‘Dual Micro Mono-filament’ technology to enhance audio and video performance.

I suggest you contact James Randi. Let us know how you get on.

I woudl suggest that he would say his $1 million was safe as I was not demonstrating a difference between cables, just amplifier performance.

You’ve repeated the joke several times ransos, but I still don’t get it.

it is not a joke – some guy has put up a bounty if anyone can demonstrate that they can hear cable differences, under DBT conditions.

EDIT:

http://gizmodo.com/305549/james-randi-offers-1-million-if-audiophiles-can-prove-7250-speaker-cables-are-better

he mentions specific cables.

there is some other guy who is offering a bounty as well, but less and not linking it to the supernatural.

It appears those who believe in uber cables are a bit like those who believe in homeopathy.

Studios are electrically noisy environments, cables heaped in coils, passing over each other, close to power supplies and so on. Remind us what sort of cable they use?

Remind us what that has to do with wiring inside devices?

Wonder how many electronic engineers there are here with some of the guff that’s being spouted.

Cables do make a difference, whether a £1k cable is a significant (or any) improvement over a £40 cable is another matter.

Also, the cable part of the transmission line is only one element, just as important are the connectors. For real quality you need impedance balanced termination. AFAIK Linn are the only major consumer hifi company that make this kind of stuff and they are correspondingly expensive.

In my lab we use cables that are as short as possible and terminated with 50 ohm connectors, some of these can be >£1k for a 10cm semi-rigid. Sometimes, you get what you pay for…

it is not a joke – some guy has put up a bounty if anyone can demonstrate that they can hear cable differences, under DBT conditions.

So the $1 million prize is for anyone who can tell the difference between a stupidly priced ‘audiophile’ cable and its equivalent reasonably priced high-end cable from another manufacturer. Not, as ransos has alluded to several times, good quality cables versus wet string.

Bit of a house of cards you’ve got there, really.

Shall we have a closer look at this “cheap cable that recording studios use” next? What cable is that, exactly, anyone know?

Thanks – I kept seeing links to paranormal stuff. Couldn’t find the actual hifi cable quote.

It seems specifically directed at a couple of people though (reviewer from Stereophile and one other guy).
If it were open to anyone (like the paranormal stuff is), then someone would have done this. After all, they have no reputation to lose and $1m to gain!

Been reading through some of the paranormal challenge applicants. Some of them you just want to succeed – like this one: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=89877

Shall we have a closer look at this “cheap cable that recording studios use” next? What cable is that, exactly, anyone know?

From Sound on Sound – probably the most respected music production magazine around. Paul White runs his own studio and has written dozens of books and edited various audio recording and production magazines….

Hi fi purists make a lot of fuss about speaker cables, sometimes spending several hundred pounds a metre on specialist cables. The main function of a speaker cable is to provide a low-resistance path between the amplifier and the loudspeaker, so thin bell wire is obviously a bad idea — not only will thin wire take some of your amplifier power and turn it into heat, it will also reduce the damping factor of the amplifier. Without getting too technical, the damping factor of an amplifier is its ability to sink the current produced when a loudspeaker overshoots its position and starts to function as a generator rather than a motor. This mechanism effectively damps the speaker movement, keeping it under control, thus producing a tighter, more accurate bass end.

The most pragmatic approach is to use the shortest speaker leads you can, make sure they are both the same length, and choose heavy cable. I’m unconvinced that there’s a difference between multi-strand cable and solid-core cable, and I’ve yet to hear the difference between the oxygen-free copper and ‘virtually oxygen-free copper’ that most stock cable is made from, but if you think it’s worth the difference in cost, don’t let me put you off. If you’re on a tight budget, 30A cooker cable works perfectly well, albeit a trifle ugly.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1996_articles/feb96/cables.html

A very sensible article and no real surprises there.

It doesn’t really answer the question though. What do they use in recording studios, what is this “cheap cable” Rasnos keeps talking about? I have no idea what a studio uses.

The other question on the back of that of course is relevance. Assuming we’re talking about speaker cable, would a recording studio care about high quality speaker cable? It’s recorded at source as far as I know, the only speakers would be monitor speakers; sound engineers use headphones. Is that a fair comparison? An audiophile home user’s primary aim is sound reproduction; a studio’s primary goal is sound recording, reproduction less so.

Perhaps a better question would be not “what do sound engineers use in a studio” but “what do sound engineers use at home”?

I do recording work in a studio – I’m not a proper ‘sound engineer’ but have studied production at Uni. I use fairly cheap balanced jack cables to connect up my monitor speakers. I have a friend who is a proper sound engineer, it’s his job and he studied audio engineering at uni – the proper version with physics etc. He is scathing about hifi equipment manufacturers claims – describing it as ‘voodoo’.

the only speakers would be monitor speakers; sound engineers use headphones.

For mixing in a studio, engineers mostly use some decent near-field monitors, often with some large main speakers and something like Yamaha NS-10s to compare stuff on. People do use headphones, but not on their own.

They use decent quality audio cable – but I don’t know of any studio that uses high-end audiophile products – most engineers see it as overpriced bollocks.

a studio’s primary goal is sound recording, reproduction less so.

Errr, really? A tune doesn’t just mix itself you know. I would imagine more effort/time goes into the production of a song/album than recording. The key components there are the producer’s ears and the equipment they are listening to the music on. Also the hardware used in a studio is all about providing a brutally honest representation of the audio being produced, wheras ‘audiophile’ hardware is all about flattering the audio and making it sound nice and deep and all the other adjectives they love to use. Listening to music on a proper quality pair of studio monitors isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience, the highs can really get tiresome and the mid range much more prominent than you would get from hifi speakers.

I think most producers will be using powered monitors too surely? I doubt headphones are used much in production in a studio either.

Paul White knows his stuff, I’m glad he came out with the sensible argument.

In my lab we use cables that are as short as possible and terminated with 50 ohm connectors, some of these can be >£1k for a 10cm semi-rigid. Sometimes, you get what you pay for…

And did you get those for 20Khz signals or 20Ghz signals?
And have you put a gold plated mains plug on the signal generator and network analyser? 🙂

Cool, thanks.

most engineers see it as overpriced bollocks.

I think everyone here is in agreement with that, no-one’s arguing for stupidly expensive cable I don’t think; just that reasonably priced cable is better than any old bell wire you’ve got lying around, rather than “it doesn’t matter.”

Errr, really?

I don’t know, I’m guessing, I’ve never been in a studio. I imagine that the room for auditioning a song is very different from the one used to record it. But yeah, that’s where I was going – it’s not necessarily a directly comparable experience, the home user’s requirements will be very different to a studio’s.

Wonder how many electronic engineers there are here with some of the guff that’s being spouted. Cables do make a difference, whether a £1k cable is a significant (or any) improvement over a £40 cable is another matter. Also, the cable part of the transmission line is only one element, just as important are the connectors. For real quality you need impedance balanced termination. AFAIK Linn are the only major consumer hifi company that make this kind of stuff and they are correspondingly expensive. In my lab we use cables that are as short as possible and terminated with 50 ohm connectors, some of these can be >£1k for a 10cm semi-rigid. Sometimes, you get what you pay for…

we also use silly expensive cables in our lab (in ekg, eeg and related medical grade things). They cost that because they have to deal accurately with tiny signals and/or extremely high frequencies, not the relatively decent level and low frequencies of audio signals. To make a cable that wasn’t fine at audio frequencies,you’d have to really try hard.

Oh and on the studio front, a lot of studio places I’ve seen also hand make their cables, usually in a hurry, cutting things with any old knife that comes to hand and using any old cheap metal jack plugs, no fancy connectors, and certainly no ‘impedance balancing’.

Mr Woppit – Member

Really? Why aren’t you using hedge-trimmer cable from B&Q?

Wrong plugs.

I think everyone here is in agreement with that, no-one’s arguing for stupidly expensive cable I don’t think; just that reasonably priced cable is better than any old bell wire you’ve got lying around, rather than “it doesn’t matter.”

Quite.

Grum…is your penultimate post any different to the crap folk buy re. bikes?

They use decent quality audio cable – but I don’t know of any studio that uses high-end audiophile products – most engineers see it as overpriced bollocks.

this guy is on a yahoo group I am a member of and he does use
very expensive cabling – I would have to search the group archives to see which but they may be some of the Nordost stuff:

http://www.barrydiamentaudio.com/

he certainly seems to believe in cable differences.

the studio he runs is:

http://www.soundkeeperrecordings.com/about.htm

he is very against the modern trend of compressing the heck out of everything to make it sound loud – it seem she puts a lot of effort into making his recordings as high a quality as possible.

Yamaha NS-10

They may use these but I am not sure they are the most desirable form of monitoring. Better to use something from Harbeth, I reckon, something where they compare them against real sounds (apparently Alan Shaw uses recordings of his daughters voice for reference) when voicing them, like in the old BBC days.

that said – I am still not a believer in cable sound, only that they can affect the amplifier/speaker/cable ‘system’.

.

studio kit prices 😉

http://www.dv247.com/cables/audio-cables/

http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/category/cables/audio-cables/

I love how people get so worked up and spend so much on audio cables for their speakers, yet don’t consider that the XLR cables, and the patch bays (including the dusty soldering round the back that hasn’t been looked at since it was installed), and the patch cables and all of that used in recording studios is nowhere near the same ‘quality’ that these super-expensive hifi cables are. As seen in the post above mine.

Hilarity ensues.

this guy is on a yahoo group I am a member of and he does use
very expensive cabling – I would have to search the group archives to see which but they may be some of the Nordost stuff:

I’m sure some studios do use expensive cabling, but most don’t compared to ‘audiophile’ gear – and all the sound engineers I know would be extremely skeptical of some of the fairy-dust claims in Nordost’s promotional materials. High-end studios also sometimes spend lots of money on fancy (clean) power supply units – but unless the people running them are idiots they won’t buy £20k kettle leads and plug them into a standard mains circuit.

As someone said above the point in a studio is to have as clear and flat a sound as possible, not to try and make things sound flattering.

I would also be very interested to know how many ‘audiophiles’ have spent much of their budget on sorting out proper acoustic treatment for their listening room.

They may use these but I am not sure they are the most desirable form of monitoring.

Generally people use NS10s for a couple of reasons. 1) Most studios have them, so the engineer will have an idea of what things should sound like on them 2) They roughly equate to the kind of standard hi-fi speakers many people will be listening to music on.

They’re not particularly great monitors, hence why they would use them in conjunction with other, more expensive sets. Genelec seem to be pretty popular – I’ve never worked in a studio that had Harbeth monitors.

There is a lot of bickering here, and very little backing up of arguments.

While it is difficult to argue with someone who says that they themselves hear the differences between cables, if only because you are not sharing the same ears and brain to process the signal received from said ears, perhaps the naysayers could explain the reasons for not believing there to be differences?

Might even help to know what equipment was listened to and perhaps even the style of music? No willy waving, purely for reference.

For example, I can’t imagine anyone could pick the differences in cables while listening to whigfield on an alba…

My stance: I can easily tell the difference between some cables, and struggle to tell others apart. Some amplifiers reacts differently to speaker cables due to the construction of the output stage and available power, amongst other reasons. I do not believe there are any magical noise pixies at work. I do believe that electrical properties and interaction of those properties between various pieces of equipment are pretty much the only reason for sonic differences. Cost has pretty much nothing to do with it.

For reference, I listen to various types of music, from Mark Lanegan to The Dillinger Escape Plan via Radiohead, through a Rega Saturn CDP, Naim Nait 5i amp and Jamo Concert 8 speakers wired together with Rega Couple interconnect and Naim NACA5 speaker cables. I use these cables because they have been designed to work properly with the components of their name sake and are not excessively priced IMO. I have tried others, I moved them all on. Nothing was better.

Oh, and in response to the OP, I can half believe that article. In my experience, Monster products are pretty s4!t ❗

People who give a carp about their wiring are the same as people who believe 29ers are the way forward

Gullible fools

I’d be interested to know if any of the audiophiles have had their hearing tested. Given that hearing degrades with age, and I suspect that audiophilia is more fully indulged by old farts, it would seem to be a reasonable thing to do to ensure you’re not attempting the auditory equivalent of polishing a turd.

I would also be very interested to know how many ‘audiophiles’ have spent much of their budget on sorting out proper acoustic treatment for their listening room.

Yeah its funny really, from the music production perspective its the most important thing to do, before spending even £500 on monitors.

But not as important as

http://www.audiotweaks.com/reviews/cblelevators/page03.htm

http://machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm