Why use Monster as the reference cable?

[tsig]

Ivor, the £116 seemed to me expensive, but I paid it to end the hassle of not being able to get the audio system working properly in the new house - thick black sugarally hawsers cluttering the place up, and one speaker sitting in an inconvenient place, were not a permanent proposition. I didn't pay it in any expectation of a better sound. (If I'd back-converted the speakers and returned to single wiring I might have been half-expecting a poorer sound, but I didn't - the new cables retained the biwiring configuration of the old ones.) I can't remember now what the Linn cables cost, but they weren't cheap either.

I can't explain the nature of the difference. Just - my ideal would be for my system to sound like St. John's, Smith Square, at an actual concert. Or even better, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. Not going to happen. But the system now seems to be closer than it was before, and further away from the portable tranny.




If the improvement had been simply a comparison between the old house and the new one, I wouldn't necessarily have been all that surprised. One way and another it had been nearly a year since I left the old house. who knows how many explanations for things being different might have been found. Speaker placement in particular.

However, I'd tried the system in the new house with the old cables. The only difference was that the right-hand speaker was about a foot or two further forward than it should have been, due to the length of the cable. And I was fairly underwhelmed by the sound quality, just not particularly surprised.

In fact, speaker placement isn't that different. One on either side of the fireplace, about the same distance apart in both houses. The reason the old cable wasn't long enough was simply that in the old house the gas fire was wall-mounted without a hearth, and the cable ran neatly along the skirting board, while in the new house there is not only a marble hearth protruding into the room but a chimney breast about 18" deep as well, and the Linn cable was not only too short but too inflexible to run neatly round this.

So the main differences are that the speakers now have a chunk of masonry sticking out of the wall between them (while before the wall was flush), and as I haven't yet bothered to fit the wall-mounted speaker stands they are just sitting on a couple of low tables - same distance from the wall, as they're intended to be wall mounted, but a little lower.

The tables were constant between the recent test with the old speakers and the new setup, but the chunk of masonry wasn't entirely - as I said, because the cable was short, one speaker was positioned forward, in front of the line of the chimney breast.

I'm doubtful that the presence of the chimney breast between the speakers is capable of having a strikingly positive effect on sound quality - especially as I was still struck by the sound quality last night when I turned on Radio 3 at my mother's request - as it happened, she was sitting in the optimum listening seat, while I was in a bad position, much closer to one speaker than the other. But I still thought, wow, that's terrific.

The tables, rather than the speaker stands? Well, let's just say I'm not rushing to screw the speaker stands to the wall. However, when I tried the system in the new house with the old cables, the speakers were on the tables, and I wasn't impressed.

I think it's more likely that there was some sort of fault with the Linn cables. I just don't know what it could have been, given that nothing seemed to be broken and they were apparently very robust. But since I threw them away when I bought the new ones, who knows - and further testing isn't going to happen either, for that reason.

Just a final thought. Supposing they'd been plugged in wrongly before, with the treble output connected to the bass and vice versa, on one or both speakers? I'd be dubious about the possibility, but who knows - it's a long time since I wired the system up in the old house, and when I threw it together in the new house originally, perhaps I wasn't as careful as all that. (I was certainly careful when fitting the new cable.) Could that have made a noticeable difference, caused poor sound reproduction? I could reproduce that simply by switching the banana plugs round with the system as it is. Might be worth a try, just to satisfy my curiosity.

Rolfe.

Wire is wire. Any losses in the cable are beyond the threshold of detection by the human ear.

The mind however is a different thing and that is where we evaluate what we hear.

 

[tsig]

Thought so.

So, it just introduces the opportunity to make it worse by doing something stupid.

Rolfe.

We all do stupid things.

If our parents were smart we might not be here.

 

[Rolfe]

I can see no advantage to biwiring if the drive units in each speaker still use passive crossovers and both are driven by a single power amplifier channel. Cables and connectors do not introduce distortion.

If the drive units in each speaker were driven by a separate power amplifier channel (so for a 2 drive-unit per speaker stereo system, 4 power amplifier channels are required), then it is possible to make some improvements. I'm not sure they would be audible, though. Usually the passive crossovers in the speakers would be removed if this was done.

Yes, the passive crossovers in the speakers were removed when the biwiring was done. That's why it was easier just to get some new biwired cable than to back-convert the speakers.

When I got the biwiring done way back when, it was such a hassle wiring it all up with that stiff, inflexible cable, and of course the speakers being modified as well, that I realised there was no way I could do a reasonable comparison. Unless you can listen to the two alternatives quite quickly one after another, differences have to be quite marked to be appreciable. And I couldn't do that. (I don't know when I managed to swap the connectors of at least one speaker, but I think I must have done at some point.)

The amp is a Linn Majik integrated amplifier which is all set up for biwiring when you buy it, and as I said, while the Toukan speakers were supplied single-wire ready, the modification to get them biwired was there, with the intention that owners would probably do that.

Are Linn peddling woo here, or is it at least theoretically rational?

Rolfe.

 

[Dan O.]

The biwiring is entirely reasonable. It allows the crossover circuits to be implemented at lower power levels in front of the amps which also eliminates the electrical interaction between the speakers near the crossover frequency.

Now, if the amp doesn't have separate amplification sections for the biwired outputs and just used an internal crossover circuit to generate the two outputs then it is totally woo and could not be better than the crossover circuit designed for the speakers using single wiring.

 

[sol invictus]

You should distinguish between bi-wiring and bi-amping.

In audiophile lingo, bi-wiring means using two pairs of speaker wires per speaker rather than one - but both sets are connected to the same pair of amp terminals. This has no effect on sound. Bi-amping is when the woofer and tweeter sections are each driven by their own individual amp channels. For a pair of two-way speakers that requires four channels of amplification.

My speakers are four-way and quad-amped - the pair uses a total of eight channels of amplification . There are actually several good reasons to do things that way...

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Yes, the passive crossovers in the speakers were removed when the biwiring was done. That's why it was easier just to get some new biwired cable than to back-convert the speakers.

When I got the biwiring done way back when, it was such a hassle wiring it all up with that stiff, inflexible cable, and of course the speakers being modified as well, that I realised there was no way I could do a reasonable comparison. Unless you can listen to the two alternatives quite quickly one after another, differences have to be quite marked to be appreciable. And I couldn't do that. (I don't know when I managed to swap the connectors of at least one speaker, but I think I must have done at some point.)

The amp is a Linn Majik integrated amplifier which is all set up for biwiring when you buy it, and as I said, while the Toukan speakers were supplied single-wire ready, the modification to get them biwired was there, with the intention that owners would probably do that.

Are Linn peddling woo here, or is it at least theoretically rational?

Rolfe.

If you can give me the part numbers of your system components I'll be able to tell you whether it is likely to be woo.

If the passive crossovers in the speakers were removed then there is almost certainly an active low-level crossover circuit driving 4 power amplifier channels, 2 per speaker.

In terms of measured performance, active low-level signal processing can be much more accurate than the best passive crossover could ever be. This is because a passive crossover's frequency response is dependent on the load it is connected to which, being a loudspeaker, varies as the coil moves in the magnetic field. Then there is the practical reality that electronic components that can handle the voltage and current levels required to drive a loudspeaker cannot be made to as tight a tolerance as those for use with small signals.

The other advantage of using low-level electronics to implement the crossover function is that it is possible to design a circuit to split the signal into two frequency bands in such a way that, when summed back together, the output is exactly the same as the waveform input to the circuit. The passive crossovers in speakers can not be designed to do this.

Whether you can hear a difference given all the other things that colour the sound, such as room resonances and reflections, absorbtion by items of furniture and the characteristics of the drive units themselves, I'm not so sure. I've built a pair of active speakers trying out all these techniques (plus motional feedback on the low-frequency drivers) and they do sound good. But the thing that makes the biggest difference by far to the sound is which room in the house I use them in and where they are positioned.

My next audio project will use a cheapo Integrated Circuit based power amplifier rather than a discrete transistor design, but have a digital signal processor (DSP) implement the crossover rather than analogue electronics. This will enable the use of a measurement microphone to adjust for the frequency response of the drive units in the speakers and some of the effects of the room they are being used in.

 

[Speedskater]

Doug Self the amplifier designer and author wrote, that in bi-wiring if the passive crossover is removed from the speaker enclosure and the components spread out over a larger area (mostly the inductors) the cross-talk and distortion should be reduced. But few people do this.

 

[Gonzo Skeptic]

You can get 16 guage speaker wire in large rolls at home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowe's, Menards) for cheap.

Or get some battery jumper cables from the local auto parts store and solder some pins on them.

That should work just fine.

 

[Rolfe]

If you can give me the part numbers of your system components I'll be able to tell you whether it is likely to be woo.

If the passive crossovers in the speakers were removed then there is almost certainly an active low-level crossover circuit driving 4 power amplifier channels, 2 per speaker.

The amp is a Linn Majik-I, bought in March 1998 - that is, it is not the same beast as the "Majik" system Linn is selling at the moment. I can't find a "parts number" unless it's on the back.

The handbook says, "Connect your speakers to the Majik-I using 4mm plugs and high quality speaker cable such as Linn K20 or K400. There are two sets of speaker connections on the Majik-I to make it easy to connect bi-wired speakers such as the Linn Index or Keilidh. We strongly recommend bi-wiring speakers wherever possible."

The speakers are actually Linn Toukans, and they state on the back that they are set up for bi-wiring but not for active use, that if you want to use them single-wired or in active configuration, refer to the handbook (which I can't find right now).

Now comes the good bit. Back to the Majik handbook again. "Note that speaker cable is directional and will perform better when oriented in the proper direction. Linn speaker cable is imprinted with a circular Linn logo followed by the model number of the cable. When the cable is properly oriented, the triangle within the circular logo will point towards the loudspeakers."

And elsewhere in the same booklet, referring to the interconnects. "Linn interconnect cable is directional and should be connected such that the arrow points from the source component towards the amplifier."

I remember the guy at Jeffries HiFi, where I bought that kit, going on about directionality, and checking that it was "correct". Of course that was in 1998. To his credit, the guy at James Morrow (the Bose cables, last month) didn't say a word about it, and seemed to pay no attention to which end of the cables got which connector. Has sense caught up with HiFi dealer practice in the last 10 years, I ask?

Now even I can see that there's no way the direction of the cable can have any effect, so Linn has to be peddling woo in that respect.

Which makes me even more dubious of their claims for the superiority of biwiring from the Majik-I. Though I'd still like to know the facts.

Rolfe.

 

[rsaavedra]

And elsewhere in the same booklet, referring to the interconnects. "Linn interconnect cable is directional and should be connected such that the arrow points from the source component towards the amplifier."

:

Now even I can see that there's no way the direction of the cable can have any effect, so Linn has to be peddling woo in that respect.

Some cables have the shields grounded only on one end. Because of that, connecting the cable one way makes the load supply the shield ground, the other way makes the other component supply the shield ground. Whether that makes an audible difference in all cases or even in any case I can't tell. But grounding issues (ground loops, floating grounds...) are indeed complex to "debug", can certainly be a pain in the neck in most setups, whether home-based, at a studio, or at live events.

Search for "directional interconnects" on Google, you can find some accounts written by audio pros and audio enthusiasts in general about grounding issues and their experiences with these "directional" cables.

 

[sol invictus]

Some cables have the shields grounded only on one end. Because of that, connecting the cable one way makes the load supply the shield ground, the other way makes the other component supply the shield ground. Whether that makes an audible difference in all cases or even in any case I can't tell.

It does, sometimes. It can change the amount and spectrum of interference the cables pick up (this only matters for interconnects, not speaker wire).

However many audiophiles believe cables can be directional even when the shield is symmetric. They think electrons prefer to flow one way. The fact that audio signals are AC must cause them some cognitive dissonance...

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

The amp is a Linn Majik-I, bought in March 1998 - that is, it is not the same beast as the "Majik" system Linn is selling at the moment. I can't find a "parts number" unless it's on the back.

The handbook says, "Connect your speakers to the Majik-I using 4mm plugs and high quality speaker cable such as Linn K20 or K400. There are two sets of speaker connections on the Majik-I to make it easy to connect bi-wired speakers such as the Linn Index or Keilidh. We strongly recommend bi-wiring speakers wherever possible."

The speakers are actually Linn Toukans, and they state on the back that they are set up for bi-wiring but not for active use, that if you want to use them single-wired or in active configuration, refer to the handbook (which I can't find right now).

Now comes the good bit. Back to the Majik handbook again. "Note that speaker cable is directional and will perform better when oriented in the proper direction. Linn speaker cable is imprinted with a circular Linn logo followed by the model number of the cable. When the cable is properly oriented, the triangle within the circular logo will point towards the loudspeakers."

And elsewhere in the same booklet, referring to the interconnects. "Linn interconnect cable is directional and should be connected such that the arrow points from the source component towards the amplifier."

I remember the guy at Jeffries HiFi, where I bought that kit, going on about directionality, and checking that it was "correct". Of course that was in 1998. To his credit, the guy at James Morrow (the Bose cables, last month) didn't say a word about it, and seemed to pay no attention to which end of the cables got which connector. Has sense caught up with HiFi dealer practice in the last 10 years, I ask?

Now even I can see that there's no way the direction of the cable can have any effect, so Linn has to be peddling woo in that respect.

Which makes me even more dubious of their claims for the superiority of biwiring from the Majik-I. Though I'd still like to know the facts.

Rolfe.

Is this your amplifier?

If so, it is a stereo amplifier with 2 power amplifiers, one for each speaker. This would still require passive crossovers in each speaker.

What they might have done is split the input to the high-pass filter (used to drive the tweeter) from the input to the low-pass filter (used to drive the woofer), and terminate them to four separate connectors on the back of the speaker. If this is the case, I'm confident in saying this will have no effect on the sound. The small series resistance introduced by the cable may very slightly affect the crossovers in the speaker, but this would be swamped by variations in the tolerance of the components used in the crossover circuit and the drive units themselves from batch to batch.

The only sensible reason to bi-wire speakers used in the home is so the crossover can be implemented before the power amplifiers driving the speakers, which allows some improvements in the accuracy of reproduction I mentioned in my previous post.

A piece of wire connecting a power amplifier to a speaker, if of a suitable gauge and not ridiculously long, is the quietest, least-distorting (i.e. most-linear) part of the entire audio system.

You've already sussed that the claim for speaker wire being directional is nonsense. It does make me wonder how many people are convinced by it though.

 

[Rolfe]

Is this your amplifier?

It doesn't look like it at all. However, given that nearly 10 years have passed since I bought mine, it would be surprising if the same innards didn't look cosmetically different.

Nevertheless, some brochures I have for Linn Products seem to suggest that they have recently re-invented the Majik-I name to use for a new amp, which could well suggest the two products are not the same. Honestly, I don't know. Is there anything I should look for in the handbook for my amp which would be of any further guidance?

Sounds to me as if Ifor Tiefenbrun may well be making claims that are covered by the JREF Challenge though!

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

<snip>

Nevertheless, some brochures I have for Linn Products seem to suggest that they have recently re-invented the Majik-I name to use for a new amp, which could well suggest the two products are not the same. Honestly, I don't know. Is there anything I should look for in the handbook for my amp which would be of any further guidance?

<snip>

Do the connectors at the back of the amplifier specify which drive unit (i.e. woofer or tweeter) they should be connected to? Or do they just give the polarity (i.e. + and -)?

I would be very surprised if it did contain 4 separate power amplifiers, as this would be plastered all over the brochure.

 

[Dan O.]

Is there anything I should look for in the handbook for my amp which would be of any further guidance?

A schematic or block diagram of the internal components of the amp would answer the questions.

 

[Rolfe]

Do the connectors at the back of the amplifier specify which drive unit (i.e. woofer or tweeter) they should be connected to? Or do they just give the polarity (i.e. + and -)?

I would be very surprised if it did contain 4 separate power amplifiers, as this would be plastered all over the brochure.

I'm not home just now, but as I remember they are marked treble and bass. I'll have a closer look.

Rolfe.

 

[krabapple]

I thought using Monster cables as a comparison to Pear was a good choice because it is available everywhere and comes with connectors. The disadvantage of using cheap lamp cord is that the connectors need to be added later. Some people could then accuse Randi of using 'trick' cables in the test, which is what some people fear Pear would try to do Randi!

Most gear doesn't require 'connectors' for speaker wire. Most accept bare wire too.

 

[krabapple]

And that is precisely why I think Randi should not accept this challenge any longer. One of the cheaper Monster cables will not alter the sound quality in any way detectable by the human ear, and neither would 16-gauge lamp wire. But an expensive cable will definitely change the sound quality in some way discernible by the human ear (in a detrimental way though).

No, you don't know that; some almost certainly do, but you don't know that ALL expensive cables do (and btw, compared to what is actually sufficient to do the job right, the Monsters
are somwhat 'expensive' too)

 

[Rolfe]

I'm not home just now, but as I remember they are marked treble and bass. I'll have a closer look.

Rolfe.

Oh, I'm getting even more confused here, but this is getting interesting. Please forgive the derail.

No, the amp has no indication of which outputs are which other than red and black and left and right. It's the speakers that are labelled "treble" and "bass". I just assumed the upper outputs should connect to the treble and the lower to the bass.

This brings me back to my original suspicion, that the two sets of outputs might be identical. Which was the basis for my question about whether there was any benefit to the bi-wiring. To be honest, when I was checking out the system in the new house with the old speaker cables I was suspicious enough that that was so that I didn't make any effort to wire top-to-top and so on. That's what I was later thinking I must have done wrong.

However, having believed I heard better sound with the new cables, and being unable to see how different bits of wire could have made any real difference, I began to consider that maybe that had been a mistake.

When I said I switched the connectors on the speakers, I meant I swirched them top and bottom - so that the top set of amp outputs went into the bass and vice versa. That's what I was prepared to swear made the difference. That's what I thought people meant by connecting "out of phase". Did you think I meant swapping red for black? No, I've always had the red and black wired up right, I'm not colour blind!

So, what I thought made the difference, was switching round the top and bottom amp outputs into the speakers. Which, if the two sets of outputs are identical, should make no difference at all. In which case I was wildly mistaken, and it's another excellent example of how the ear can be fooled. I'll have to try it again, but really, I did think I perceived a difference.

There's no schematic or block diagram to help. The handbook does say, "The pre-amplifier and the power amplifier in the Majik-I are completely separate. This means you can upgrade your system by using an external power amplifier of even higher performance such as a Klout. To use the Majik-I as a pre-amplifier with another power amplifier, remove the two links connecting the pre out and the power in sockets, then connect the pre out sockets to the input sockets of the power amplifier. To use the Majik-I as a power amplifier, remove the links and connect the outputs of your pre-amplifier into the power in sockets on the Majik-I"

This has not been done on mine, I use it as a stand-alone amplifier. The handbook goes on....

"An external active crossover (e.g. Linn Kaber Activ) may be connected by connecting the pre out sockets to the input sockets on the crossover. Connect the treble out sockets from the crossover to the power in sockets on the Majik-I and use additional power amplifiers for midrange and bass. The Linn LK100, Klout and Majik-I power amplifiers are all compatible, as they have the same gain (28.5dB). Alternatively, Linn Activamp modules may be fitted inside the Majik-I. Contact your dealer for more information."

This last paragraph is the only place it starts to talk about treble and bass separately. I don't know enough about this to tell whether this means it really does have separate treble and bass capacity as it is, or whether the fact that the links connecting the pre out and power in sockets are still in place means there's nothing there.

Unfortunately I don't have the facilities to do a blind test switching the banana plugs top-to-bottom, so it's hard to know if I really fooled myself, if there is really no difference between the top and bottom speaker outputs. If there isn't, then I really must have fooled myself. I'm intrigued enough to try to get to the bottom of this.

When I bought the Majik and the Toukans, I didn't realise audio woo existed as such. I thought that once you were past a certain point the audible improvement for lots of extra money was likely to be so marginal that the price almost certainly wasn't worth it, but I didn't realise people were peddling "upgrades" that really and truly made no difference at all.

Now, however, I've seen a lot more that is obviously woo. And what Linn is saying about directionality of speaker cable is so obviously woo that I don't trust the rest of it. (Ivor, what's your opinion of the possibility that interconnects might be directional to some extent?)

So I'd love to know one way or another whether these two sets of speaker outputs are really identical or not.

Then I'd like to hear Ifor Tiefenbrun explain himself....

Rolfe.

 

[bjb]

Most gear doesn't require 'connectors' for speaker wire. Most accept bare wire too.

It's better to keep things as equivalent as possible. If you compare Monster cable with bare wire ends to Pear cable, which have spade lugs, some will say Pear sounds better because of the magic lugs! Similarly, if you cut off the Pear connectors and stick them into a bare-wire terminal, Pear will complain that someone 'tampered' with their cable.

In the old days, screw terminals were the way to go. Some people used banana jacks and plugs in the 70's, then came the amps with those spring-loaded pushbutton terminals. These days, the better amps and speakers use binding posts, which can take all three types of connectors. Audiophiles, however, seem to like their spade terminals so they can torque down on them with the binding post nut for a 'gas-tight' fit:

http://www.needledoctor.com/Kimber-Kable-PM-25-PostMaster-Precision?sc=2&category=427

Maybe they need to be gas-tight to keep sound from leaking out of the end of the wire?