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Damned audiophiles

marting said:
Sure it does though not by much. In WWII many silver coins in circulation were removed and redirected for the war effort. A lot of silver went into the Manhatten Project simply because it was a better conductor than copper. It isn't much better though.
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This isn't why silver was used and I don't think silver coins were removed from circulation. Silver was used because copper was in short supply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver#World_War_II
 
marting said:
About 10 years ago I captured a couple revolutions of runup blank from a vinyl lp. By adding a repeating segment to a CD's ripped wav file the result is a very pleasing (to those of us used to vinyl) sound.
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And if you do 2nd and 4th order distortion on the 's' part of the signal (m=l+r), s=(l-r), recovering with the inverse (which is kind of obvious), and 3rd and 5th on the 'm' part, after oversampling by 5, and then downsample, and fiddle with the polynomial coefficients, it will sound even more like an LP, right down to the nonlinear increase in loudness vs. SPL that results from broadening the spectrum (see the loudness tutorial for that).

All trivial in Octave, Matlab, or simple 'C' program.
 
dlorde said:
Judging from the difficulty some audiophiles have in distinguishing an expensive cable from a coat hanger, copper is probably overkill :D
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You folks don't know the half of it. Not your fault, there was a huge debacle concerning the relative merits (or not) of expensive speaker cable that Randi got involved in about 6 years ago. For most here, that is probably exceeding the time that they have been participating members in these forums.

Anyway, what eventually happened is that Randi (and rightly so) was willing to put the MDC money up against one of these audiophiles named Michael Fremer. He claimed he could tell the difference between Monster cables, and this offering from Pear Cable (costing in excess of $7000). You need a forklift to carry these babies around, and also a forklift-worthy amount of money to pay for them.

In the end, Fremer did a blind test at home with some of his friends over a weekend, and wisely decided not to go through with the formal MDC (and Pear backed down as well. Some woo-meisters obviously know that money rolling through the door from gullible rubes is better than being found out for what you really are. Same as psychics, but I digress...). Anyway, best summary I could find of the whole sorry story without searching through the forums for the 6-year old posts is here:

http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/pear-cables-worst-tech

Myself... an EE by education, and I always swear by 16-gauge lamp cord :-)
 
metzomagic said:
You folks don't know the half of it. Not your fault, there was a huge debacle concerning the relative merits (or not) of expensive speaker cable that Randi got involved in about 6 years ago. For most here, that is probably exceeding the time that they have been participating members in these forums.
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Don't forget there is useful information on these things outside of JREF. Joining JREF isn't necessarily the start of learning about them.
 
There were some stunts with the Kramer years when somebody who had a cable with passive elements in a box at the end was trying to get the prize, too, and Kramer had to have it pointed out to him that the box at the end WAS making a simple, but obvious difference due to well-known physics.
 
jj said:
And if you do 2nd and 4th order distortion on the 's' part of the signal (m=l+r), s=(l-r), recovering with the inverse (which is kind of obvious), and 3rd and 5th on the 'm' part, after oversampling by 5, and then downsample, and fiddle with the polynomial coefficients, it will sound even more like an LP, right down to the nonlinear increase in loudness vs. SPL that results from broadening the spectrum (see the loudness tutorial for that).

All trivial in Octave, Matlab, or simple 'C' program.
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Lol. I do recall trying an "observer" model to track wow and flutter between the vinyl and a matching cd. Good results. Not so good on the phase/frequency corrected signal. Vinyl produced some prettty distorted signals compared to the same location on the signal from the CD.

Your comments about the distortion in vinyl are not surprising.
But wait, that's not distortion. That's the real world of analog mechanisms responding "naturally."

We don't need no stink'in math. ;)
 
metzomagic said:
You folks don't know the half of it. Not your fault, there was a huge debacle concerning the relative merits (or not) of expensive speaker cable that Randi got involved in about 6 years ago. For most here, that is probably exceeding the time that they have been participating members in these forums.

Anyway, what eventually happened is that Randi (and rightly so) was willing to put the MDC money up against one of these audiophiles named Michael Fremer. He claimed he could tell the difference between Monster cables, and this offering from Pear Cable (costing in excess of $7000). You need a forklift to carry these babies around, and also a forklift-worthy amount of money to pay for them.

In the end, Fremer did a blind test at home with some of his friends over a weekend, and wisely decided not to go through with the formal MDC (and Pear backed down as well. Some woo-meisters obviously know that money rolling through the door from gullible rubes is better than being found out for what you really are. Same as psychics, but I digress...). Anyway, best summary I could find of the whole sorry story without searching through the forums for the 6-year old posts is here:

http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/pear-cables-worst-tech

Myself... an EE by education, and I always swear by 16-gauge lamp cord :-)
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And the JREF team almost blew it and wrote it in a way that would have lost the million. I brought up at the time that any idiot could make a cable that sounded different (read, not as accurate) than a good cable. It would be a trivial matter to detect the cable in question when compared to a regular cable.
 
padego said:
I'm a goldsmith/gemmologist by trade, I draw my own wire etc. so making my own silver interconnects is amazingly inexpensive which is why when I look at ads pushing them for horrific prices I feel I'm in the wrong business...:)


[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_22641509e85ff4a2aa.jpg[/qimg]
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You must love these ...

(warning, please pull fuse from your BS meter, empty your mouth of liquids, have nothing breakable near your keyboard and monitor, and nothing in your hands when you click on the link below)

http://www.thecableco.com/Product/Siltech-Emperor-Double-Crown
 
padego said:
Please don't hate me because I'm an audiophile...
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What do we really want, after all?

A lot of hardheaded scientist/engineer types (I'm one) will tell you that the goal is to reproduce the originally recorded sounds as accurately as possible. From that point of view vinyl is a disaster, expensive cables are laughable wastes of money, all digital sources are identical, etc. You should put your attention (and money) into speakers, the listening room, and the recordings you buy.

But is accuracy the goal, really? For an audio engineer, maybe. But for someone just listening to music, the goal is enjoyment. It's emotional, not quantitative. Candlelight, a glass of wine, an ambience can a 19th century gramophone more beautiful than the best studio monitors in the world. So if turntables - or even ludicrously overpriced cables - do it for you, who's to say no?

Can you hear the difference those cables make? Absolutely.... so long as you know they're there.
 
"A music lover will stop what he's doing and stay glued to a favorite piece of music even if it's coming over a 3" speaker or a public-address system..." - Ken Rockwell

Though as an audiophile, if the sound is really bad, I will get annoyed and then when I get home I will listen to the tune again on my hifi :D
 
I think jaxwired here got it right:

"The Atheists - Measurements and blind testing rule all.
The True Believers - Blind faith. Everything has a sound.
The Denominations - Tubes vs Solid State. Vinyl vs Digital.
The Church Elders - Professional reviewers
The High Priests - Designers (Curl, Pass, Taylor, Wright, Levinson, etc.)
The Lunatic Fringe - Electonic cream, cable elevators, magic rocks, etc.
The Heretics - Julian Hirsh, Peter Aczel, etc.
The Converted - Atheists turned True Believers
The Congregation - Us"
 
jj said:
You must love these ...

(warning, please pull fuse from your BS meter, empty your mouth of liquids, have nothing breakable near your keyboard and monitor, and nothing in your hands when you click on the link below)

http://www.thecableco.com/Product/Siltech-Emperor-Double-Crown
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Obscene.
I made three pairs of silver inter-connects and I would say that the they each cost approx. 30-35.00 a pair in parts. You can push that up by using fancy RCA connectors but frankly, having used both over the years, I've heard no difference. I should add I do NOT have golden ears, way to many loud concerts attended in my youth to claim that...:)
 
sol invictus said:
But is accuracy the goal, really? For an audio engineer, maybe. But for someone just listening to music, the goal is enjoyment. It's emotional, not quantitative. Candlelight, a glass of wine, an ambience can a 19th century gramophone more beautiful than the best studio monitors in the world. So if turntables - or even ludicrously overpriced cables - do it for you, who's to say no?
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This pretty much sums it up for me..
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
I don't think he meant making his own CAT5 cables but, rather, making his own audio cables using CAT5 cables as the raw materials. There's a way I've seen that you can make them by plaiting the innards of CAT5 cables. It's been a while since I looked and I can't remember the specifics, but I looked in to it because at work at one time we had tonnes of CAT5 we didn't have a need for and fewer audio cables than we needed. I briefly considered it, but it didn't seem worth the investment of time.

In truth, I can't imagine many situations where a decent gauge power flex won't do just fine.
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You shouldn't need to "plait the innards" of CAT5 cables. They're already constructed of twisted pairs of conductors.

The thing is, there's absolutely no benefit to be gained by using twisted pair cable in an speaker wire application, and the conductors inside CAt5 cables are far too thin to make effective speaker wires anyway.
 
padego said:
Obscene.
I made three pairs of silver inter-connects and I would say that the they each cost approx. 30-35.00 a pair in parts. You can push that up by using fancy RCA connectors but frankly, having used both over the years, I've heard no difference. I should add I do NOT have golden ears, way to many loud concerts attended in my youth to claim that...:)
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Wouldn't it just be cheaper to make a copper cable that has a 3% larger diameter than the silver cable? Their resistance would then be the same. Or make the copper cable 6% shorter.

Unless the resistance of the cable is approaching the impedance of the speaker, I don't think it'll make a lick of difference anyway, and even then, it should only effect volume, no?
 
RussDill said:
Unless the resistance of the cable is approaching the impedance of the speaker, I don't think it'll make a lick of difference anyway, and even then, it should only effect volume, no?
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In principle it could affect the frequency response too - the cable has an inductance and capacitance as well as a resistance.

But in reasonable scenarios those effects are far below audibility thresholds.
 
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