Not sure I entirely agree with that, but mainly because you infer that anything other than ABX is worthless. Blind AB testing surely enables you to hear a difference when the differences are subtle. Short term listening tests are also a bit flawed IMO. Not that I’m particularly interested in that side of things. It isn’t part of my work and I’m very glad of that. I want to enjoy music, not analyse my kit!

Elfin, seriously 😉

OK Elfin you almost had me with your argument but that last post just makes me think you’ve got a chip on your shoulder.

Is it that you resent people with money who spend it on expensive HiFi?

I have a pretty decent one, but I can assure you I don’t feel remotely elevated from the common herd but I do feel elevated when I get the chance to sit and enjoy some music.

Is it OK for me to do that or am I still guilty of being so very bourgeois?

Come on Elfin seriously. You’ve got the talent of a really capable debater but every now and then you blow it with this thinly veiled marxist nonsense.

RichPenny what is it you do at Naim?

Is it that you resent people with money who spend it on expensive HiFi?

Not at all. [Edited following geetee’s apology]

RichPenny; allright mate! 🙂

Don’t leave that vayn unattended round my way… 😮

yeah… what geetee said.. take a valium elf

Not at all, and if you think so then you badly misunderstand and underestimate me.

OK well I apologise then.

take a valium elf

If only! Mm… Valiuum.

Do you know how hard it is to get hold of that stuff? It’s easier to get hold of Crack, Smack and just about anything else!

it’ll only make it worse in the long run…

I know that more money on amps and bigger speakers give you more headroom for high volume listening and that a good source is pretty much essential.

My mate has a load of Bryston stuff and some very large PMC speakers in a huge room and he can do a full orchestra in overdrive at home, pretty much, serious money obviously. It’s impressive stuff and sounds great for regular late night quiet stuff too, speaker cables were 20 quid. Tried a few others and perhaps because we are both cynics we heard no difference at all so he stuck with the Van Damme.

Production Testing, which involves much of the science that elfin thinks we lack. To be serious for a second, I find it very wearing that every time there’s a thread like this I and my colleagues are accused of perpetuating some kind of massive fraud on an unsuspecting public. I’ve worked in pro audio as well, and all the designers I’ve encountered are on a mission to extract the absolute best from their work. The attention to detail here is on OCD levels, so I’d love all those sceptics to come on a factory tour.

The trouble is people like Russ Andrews have spouted huge claims about his wares but he does sell on a basis that if you don’t like it return it and get a full refund. Unfortunately many a poor sap has been drawn in by him and then then whole bullshit just snowballs and is very very sad. Cables do change the sound of a system and so really should be auditioned to see what suits you but I honestly don’t believe in paying huge amounts of money for them even though I run a very high end Naim amp set up. There’s too much bullshit snobbery in hifi just as there is in bloody mountain bikes so find what you like and enjoy – always works for me.

hadge speaks very good sense.. FWIW I use Van Den Hul ‘the bridge’ £8.50 per meter.. it’s ace for my circumstances (even more so cos it was a freebee)

Rich – I was thinking of getting the Uniqute for the living room as I rarely get any time for serious listening in the dedicated music room.

What do you think to it?

Does anyone actually know what specifically it is about different cables which makes one sound ‘better’ than another… I’m quite intrigued.

Is it to do with the stray resistance, capacitance and inductance?

Or are all high-end amps like the Naims with unstable output amplifiers? Actually, I’m a little intrigued about this as well, what does it actually gain them to do this? Apart from selling more speaker cable obviously? Is it less distortion? Greater bandwidth? Flatter frequency response? Anyone?

Also, with this kind of setup, does it mean you have to always use exactly the same length of cable for all installations?

Apparently Bryston recommend Van Damme cables…

Wharfedale did a test once using 3 sets of identical Diamond speakers to a sighted panel, one pair painted red, one white, and one yellow, but told the panel that they had differences. The panels opinions was that the red pair sounded warm, the yellow pair lean, and the white pair bright.

Another double-blind test pitted a turntable against a CD player, in various combinations. When the combinaton was the CD player versus the CD player at a slightly higher volume, the listening panel liked the higher volume.

Does anyone actually know what specifically it is about different cables which makes one sound ‘better’ than another… I’m quite intrigued

Placebo

OFTLOG

Part of my job is in professional audio – stadiums, theatres etc – some of it gigs, the majority permanent install – I often design the systems.

Not really the same problem domain as hi-fi though is it?

For all those who think I’m some kind of gear obsessed freak with too much money, here’s my setup:

Marantz something CD player, reduced from £300 to £120
Cambridge Audio C500 preamp £99
CA Power Amps x2, one for £99 and one for £30 from ebay
£50 CA interconnect
Some £150 speakers, forget the make but the model is F150. Suspect one of those once-good names recycled by Richer Sounds.
QED Silver Anniversary cable £5/m
Cheapest Apollo rack £80 (bought simply as an item of furniture but did improve the sound)

I’d get laughed off any hifi forum with that lot. But I do like how it sounds and I reckon it’s FAR better than anything else for the money.

As for why bi-wiring works… I understood that there’s a difference between a crossover and a filter… by removing that little link between the two sets of speaker terminals you’re converting the crossover into two filters, one high pass and one low pass.. no?

Plus I seem to remember reading that some drivers will be damaged by being given the wrong frequencies, and some will just ignore them.. so in some speakers there will be no components between the amp and the driver. But it’s all a long time ago. I did the bi-wiring and amping just to see IF it made any difference, not believing it would. And honestly, it was not some subtle change (like the interconnects were), it was dramatic and blatantly obvious to anyone with a good ear.

Anyone near Cardiff can come and listen, from August onwards 🙂

Elfinsafety – Member
take a valium elf
If only! Mm… Valiuum.

Do you know how hard it is to get hold of that stuff? It’s easier to get hold of Crack, Smack and just about anything else!

Ask your GP kindly mate 😉

Does anyone actually know what specifically it is about different cables which makes one sound ‘better’ than another… I’m quite intrigued.

Is it to do with the stray resistance, capacitance and inductance?

I think so, yes. If a cable has resistance, capacitance and inductance (which it does) then those qualities affect the sound. Plus on a molecular level the crystal structure and impurities will have an affect on how those electrons travel. After all they are waves as we all know. Imagine sending waves down a narrow water channel, and then dumping some rocks in the channel. Affects the wave propagation, doesn’t it?

Production Testing, which involves much of the science that elfin thinks we lack.

No I din’t say that. I just said there are those selling snake-oil, as well as people who are deluded as to their genuine ability to hear every tiny nuance of sound. I din’t include NAIM in my condemnation of the purveyors of finest bullshit. Some British hi-fi gear is amazing. Years ago I heard some Quad system some feller had had for years; blew me away how good it was. And were I rich enough, I’ve no doubt I’d have some nice kit myself. What I wouldn’t be doing, is bunging £20,000+ worth of bits in the front room of a cheaply-built Barrat box with thin walls. Would be a complete waste of time and money. Be like buying a spensive bike just to ride to the shops. 🙂

I have a set up not dissimilar to Molgrips, in terms of price. Sounds great in my flat. I’ve heard ‘better’, but what I have does me fine.

I have thought about the bi-amping thing for a while mind. Could do with a better amp anyway, so what Molgrips has sounds pretty much spot-on.

I won’t be spending thousands of pounds on interconnects… 🙂

as well as people who are deluded as to their genuine ability to hear every tiny nuance of sound.

racist

http://www.sonicdesign.se/biwire.html

But Elf is quite right – your room is an often overlooked but vital component of your system. But it’s often one that can’t be changed. Unlike say riding ability or photographic ability 🙂

racist

Not racist, Yunki. 🙁

I had a flat with concrete floors and my hifi sounded pretty good.

We then moved to a house with suspended wooden floors and it sounded pants.

We now live in a house with concrete floors again and I am 😀

Your listening room plays a big part in the overall sound.

borderline at best elf..

I went to a hifi show recently. Not a single woman and appaling music in every room.

😀

Quite like the ‘racist’ accusation with absolutely no justification though. Good work!

^^^^

You managed to find some Valium mate? 😆

Not a single woman

Ah, I think it was B+O or someone, employed only women as product testers for their speakers, as apparently women have better hearing on average, than men. Ironically most women don’t really seem to care much about ‘hi-fi’, and leave that to the boys with their toys… 🙂

No Hohum. GPs round here won’t prescribe Mother’s Little Helper™ for a prolonged period, following massive addiction problems throughout the 70s and 80s. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a course for a certain period, then nowt, unless you have severe anxiety etc.

Which is the right attitude, imo.

How many of you have worked as hi-fi designers/engineers?

Thought so.

TurnerGuy – Member
However he also pointed out that the designer would not voice the speaker (for those who don’t just use computers but listen) using the speaker biwired and would also use fairly normal cable like the Van Damme.

Jean Claude Van Damme designed hifi?

molgrips… the impurities in the cable are already taken into account by the resistance, in fact, that is what effectively defines the resistance of the material, along with electron availability/mobility and fun and games like that.

As for the R, C and L being the source of this issue, I’m not convinced. I’d be more inclined to agree if the values of each of them weren’t so darned tiny for a length of speaker cable, and also if the differences weren’t so small between cables. Now, while the cables will most definitely have a filtering effect at some frequency, the point where they’d have this effect is so far outside the audible spectrum that it shouldn’t make any difference, up in the MHz range as far as I can see. There is a possibility that some tiny phase differences might creep back down towards the audio spectrum, but it would be in the region of less than 1 degree of phase difference, which would be difficult to resolve. I’d guess moving your head by about 1mm would make more difference!

There has to be more to it than this…

Good work!

why thankyou! 🙂

Ah, I think it was B+O or someone, employed only women as product testers for their speakers, as apparently women have better hearing on average, than men.

Which is a great irony, given that B+O stuff generally only looks good, and that’s where it’s talents end…

You’re welcome! 🙂

I do like a bit of totally unfounded accusations of racism. Like when I publicly called my own mother a racist because she refuses to have owt to do with computers. 😀

My friends were a bit confused.

‘But Elf, don’t you mean ‘technophobe’?

No, racist.

‘???’

My mum weren’t too bothered. She was too busy tucking into her dinner. 😆

Gave me a clip round the ear later though. 😳

I like the carbon fibre plug housings, that stop resonance or something!

My place does radars that operate at 24ghz, and all they ever use us plain old 7/0.2
I got really sucked into the russ andrews catalogue, a fantastic read, and I especially liked the complete lack of graphs or numbers.

it’s just a lot simpler and less of a mouthful than saying that you were being generally extraordinarily bigoted and making generalisations about the mental capacity of them what likes to spend a long time appreciating the sound what their wireless makes..

racist is quicker and I knew you’d understand..

but yeah ‘racist’ is a good general insult.. especially when hurled at your dog for peeing on the lino in the kitchen..

HiFi systems are just network diagrams, methods of reproducing recorded sounds, of course they all sound exactly the same, how foolish to think altering as much as just one component would make a noticeable difference to the sound reproduced.

That is why this:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSiVWkk5zaQ[/video]

sounds identical to this:

am I right or rong?

I think ‘narcissist’ is a better accusation of Fred here…

Which is a great irony, given that B+O stuff generally only looks good, and that’s it’s talents end…

You’ve owned B+O stuff then have you?

My little Beomaster 3500 receiver is great; has a better sound than amps costing a good bit more which I’ve heard, in spite of having less ‘power’.