the truth shall set you free

[Barista]

For anyone interested, I found an excellent web page written by Roger Russell. He covers some interesting tests conducted by Gordon Gow (President of McIntosh Laboratory) as well as some of his personal tests and conclusions. Good read, and directly relating to this discussion.

http://www.sundial.net/~rogerr/wire.htm

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Barista T. Bill

My Rig

[j-malotky]

YAAAAWWWNNNN.

I just waisted 20 minuits of my life reading this thread. I wish I did something else.

Kind of like talking politics - You will never change anybodys position on a topic like this so why bother.

JM

[Allan Songer]

Yes, this is VERY boring I agree.

But, you CAN change people's minds and I am living proof. I used OEM junk interconnects and zipcord for 25 years and LAUGHED at Monster Cable from the day I saw it in my favorite Berkeley, CA hi-fi store almost 20 years ago.

A few years ago I become friends with the owner of a "high end audio salon" in Newport Beach. We became pals because he was a customer of my wife's business and one day he gave me some $$$$$ speaker wire to try "for the hell of it." I hooked it up and my jaw dropped and I came to BELEIVE. Wire is NOT wire, no matter what the "data" tells us. WHen you talk to an E.E. he also can't explain why a 2-watt tube amp with measured high distortion sounds better than a 200 watt SS amp with almost ZERO measured distorion.

[HornEd]

Well written and thought provoking post, mdeneen. An illustration of your point was the shock recording execs got when Elvis was first recorded in a quality studio. The initial panic was caused by the inferior quality and subsequent coloration that made Elvis' voice stand out better in their recollection than it was with good equipment.

Once they hit upon the reason for the difference, they put fresh attention into building on the distinctive voice quality through electronics. Unfortunately, Elvis preferred Monsanto's line about better living through chemistry. -HornEd

[Clipped and Shorn]

mdeneen's articulate post mentioning euphonics illustrates how and why a certain amount of mystery and personal subjectivity is a big part of what keeps this hobby interesting and at times heated with interpersonal friction.

Since there are only vague parameters that would predict why certain collections of "distortions" (1-3+% ? etc.) in various equipment set-ups make for euphonically appealing results, the door* is wide open for conclusions and choices based on how someone feels about what one hears as opposed to what the physical specifications indicate.

When these two things get mixed up, which is the standard parlance, you have the makings for all kinds of circular misunderstandings and double talk justifications.

Both sides of this communicative polarity are valid, interesting, and essential. It is important to understand the physics and it is convenient to have the benefit of someone's extensive experience having listened to many kinds of equipment. The danger here is making the assumption that one person's preferred euphonics (distortion etc.) will necessarily be that of another person, or that one's own euphonic preference is backed up by the physics more than another person's euphonic preference. That is what I mean by circular misunderstanding or double talk.

For example: the science says there is no differerence between A and B. The ear says it thinks it can hear a difference between A and B. Therefore let's finds some hidden "science" which explains the difference or discredit the science which "proved" there was no difference.

Post Modern "science" is then subservient to the all powerful dictates of the marketplace. Eg. McIntosh sees a conflict of intere$t in their uninhibited statements about the "truth of speaker wire", so instead of including interconnects they provide some evasive statement in their literature about getting with your dealer to see what he recommends. Is McIntosh questioning the science here or are they only being business smart. I don't know for sure. Many years ago "chaos" and "randomness" was not thought to be codifiable, now there is a new mathematics for it.

All I know is if I want to shop for some equipment that sounds good, I am either going to have to hear it in the store (which is much harder to find these days), or I am going to have to trust someone else's endorsement and then shop "mail order" . Either that, or take my chances with the "descriptions" of the online retailer which interestingly enough are more toward the listing of the physical specifications than a bunch of personal endorsements.

maxg stated:

"He pressed the button - and I jumped out of my chair. The difference was night and day. We repeated the test just twice more and I handed over a ludicrous amount of money on the spot."

This puts me in mind of the time I bought a Kirby Vacuum cleaner many years back from a door to door salesman. Man, can you imagine, I can, and, in fact think I may have found my next gig: door to door audio interconnects. I would also have a line of better tubes. It would be easy since all I would have to do is roll the tubes in the prospective customers amp, then let them hear the spectacular difference in the euphonics, another big sale and fat city for me.

If nothing else this would make a cool movie script. For romantic interest, our main character, who makes his living selling door to door audio connects and tubes, goes home to the laboratory and overnight designs and builds a new Amp to offer the girl instead of flowers. I guess I am talking "Revenge of the Nerds Part 4" here....sorry about that..

-peeweed and hermaned

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components

This message has been edited by Clipped and Shorn on 04-03-2002 at 03:46 PM

[Randy Bey]

Crimeny,

I don't believe that I'm doing this.

No one will be convinced one way or the other about wire from reading anything.

There are clearly two camps, the scientific and the empiricists (if that's a word).

The scientists want to measure something, because one of the fundamental truths of science is that if you can't measure something, it doesn't exist. Since clearly wire has few distinguishing characteristics, it is easy to measure and come up with scientific absolutes.

The empiricists (all too often, in my opinion) embrace almost mystical properties regarding sound reproduction, and ignore any scientific evidence that is contrary to their experience. Despite the lack of differentiators (except those dreamed up by an enthusiastic marketing department) they ascribe a litany of unique characteristics for wire.

I myself like to think of myself as a scientific moderate, or maybe a conservative empiricist.

I had 14 gauge zip cord as speaker wire for more years than I can easily count. At some point in time, I decided to try something different, just to say I did, more than anything else. I didn't go batsh*t and buy a $1000 speaker cable, I wasn't that sure of myself, but I did buy about $50 worth of telfon coated cat-5 network cable, tore it all apart, and braided it per a long 'accepted' recipe for speaker cable.

I noticed no difference whatsoever. I did not go back to the zip cord, since that would have not resulted in any other improvement, either. And I kind of liked the technicolor braided wires, much fatter and prettier than the butt-ugly brown stuff I used for so long.

Then a friend brought over some new IC cables (interconnects). To date I was using the stock stuff that comes with the component, the ubiquitous red/white stuff with the plastic coated RCA jacks.

He put in a cable that was similar to the speaker cable I had, that is, twisted pairs braided together. I had conflicting expectations -- mostly that nothing would change, but possibly that it would somehow, miraculously, sound better.

Well, it sounded worse. By worse, I mean, transistor radio compressed/tinny/rolled-off-lows worse. This was a shocker, as I really didn't expect any change at all.

The rest of the afternoon we spent moving between a) my red/white numbers, the braided one, and c) a pair of Wireworld Atlantis cables. The Wireworld, IMHO, had a fuller sound, no compression, no loss of bass, well balanced for lack of a better word. Mind you, these cables are sniffed at by the botique cablers of the world, and saying you have them is akin to saying you like ketshup on your filet mignon.

So I bought a pair for $50 and have been happy with them ever since.

Then, much later, I went to seperates in the digital domain -- that is, a transport/DAC combo, which necessitated using a digital cable.

Now if anything classifies as 'wire is wire', then digital cable must be it. They're just stinking 1's and 0's, after all. No 'highs', no 'lows', just a stream of bits that are either received or not received, via the wire.

Well, low and behold I ended up with three different digital cables. The first one I got with the DAC, and used for quite a while. The second one I got a while later from a pro audio store (Guitar City) and the third I made out of coaxial cable, teflon tape, and copper stained-glass-window tape.

I'm here to tell you I heard a difference. And it wasn't 'rolled off lows' or anything explainable like that. I heard what I define as 'soundstage', the ability to pinpoint where the sound of an instrument is coming from.

I had the pleasure of going to a live performance of Stravinsky's Firebird at the Minneapolis Orchestra Hall. When I got back home I realized I had the same piece (different conductor) same venue on CD. I spun that baby up and listened. The pro-audio digital cable ended up sounding 'bright' and yet having poor (well, poorer) soundstaging than the original digital cable I started with. Oddly, the original cable had somewhat less bright tones, and much better soundstaging. This is not what I would call obvious, because I always associated high frequencies with the human ears trait of pinpointing source. The DIY cable I made was somewhere between the other two, with neither bright touches or fuzzy soundstage.

What does that tell you? What it tells me is that

a) speaker cable doesn't count for much.

IC cables have frequency response characteristics, and

c) digital cables convey information related to focus of instrumental sounds.

YMMV, of course.

f>

[Clipped and Shorn]

I just posted the following to the Website category:

What is going on with the Forum structure?

Postings have suddenely become too large for my iMac screen and too inconventient to utilize. I do not know how to fix this. Also it has been very sluggish lately and I have a fast DSL. Anyone else have problems or anyone know how I can fix the screen thing. Just started happening in the last few days.

-vistavisioned and cinemascoped

NOW IT SUDDENLY SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN FIXED. IS IT ME OR IS IT THE KLIPSCH FORUM WEBSITE?

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components

[Clipped and Shorn]

The entire first page of this thread is too big for my screen, but the second page is not. Is this because chambers 1517 computer caused the rest of the page to be big. This is confusing, but it is too inconvenient to read pages that are that big on my screen, anyone else notice something?

C&S

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components

This message has been edited by Clipped and Shorn on 04-03-2002 at 04:41 PM

[Ray Garrison]

Mdeneen, Ed, et al...

That guitar amplifier used by Hendrix or Vaughn is a sound PRODUCER. The characteristic sound of Stevie, Clapton, or any other electric guitar player is a combination of their technique, their guitar, the amp used, the degree to which the amp is driven into distortion, and a bunch of other factors. The distortion, in particular, plays a VERY significant role in defining their sound "signiture". Distortion on top of the fundamental is an integral component of someone's specific sound. This is why there are (to my knowledge) NO major players using solid state guitar amps - the awful, awful sound of sand amps driven into hard clipping, a result of significant levels of higher order odd harmonics, is totally nonmusical.

However, our home systems are music REPRODUCERS, not PRODUCERS. The goal (uh, oops, one of the goals...) is to REPRODUCE a musical event with as much fidelity as possible to the original. In this context, it would seem to be obvious that the less distortion, the better.

However, I'm of the opinion that, while it might be true that zero distortion is the ultimate goal, I do not believe that less measured distortion always equals more "perceptual acoustic accuracy". I believe that we are not fully cognisant of how we perceive different types of distortion (harmonic, inharmonic, transient intermodulation, phase shift, correlated and uncorrelated noise, etc.) and that simply assuming that 0.01% "Total Harmonic Distortion and Noise" is better than 0.1% may be too simplistic. The reason that your tube preamps with highish levels of low order, primarily even ordered distortion products sound "better" than others with lower measured distortion might not be the PRESENSE of the ADDED distortion, but rather the LACK of OTHER KINDS of distortion that are ADDED by the very circuits (ie, negative feedback) that eliminate the low order components.

That is, maybe the tube preamp doesn't sound good BECAUSE it has 0.5% 2nd harmonic, but rather because the ELIMINATION of that distortion causes more problems than it fixes.

------------------

Music is art

Audio is engineering

Ray's Music System

[Ray Garrison]

Clipped -

Not that this is going to help any, but just so you don't think they're out to get you...

I used to run a website that had very, very complex dynamically generated pages (not much graphics, but many levels of tables nested within tables) and I found that the Mac browsers, as a rule, were very, very unpredictable in the way they rendered the pages. IE, in particular, seemed to have a horrible time on a Mac. Things that rendered with no problem on any Windows platform were unusable on the Mac. I never did figure it out. We had so few Mac users that we just gave up trying to support them.

I'd NEVER suggest anyone who was going to do a lot of serious web browsing even CONSIDER a Mac platform. You're just asking for trouble.

------------------

Music is art

Audio is engineering

Ray's Music System

[Clipped and Shorn]

I cannot imagine anything more subjective and difficult to "measure" than "soundstage" which is an illusion that the mind puts together from the stuff coming out of the speakers in a particular room and to a particular set of ears etc.

The fact that we all want it and feel it is a desirable thing to have motivates us to do whatever to get it.

Science does NOT say that something doesn't exist if you cannot measure it, it mereley says you can't measure it if you cannot measure it. It then seeks a way of defining "something" to be measureable. How might one define "soundstage" so it is measurable? Maybe you have to bring in the psychologists and the statisticians. There are ways to define a phenomenon by correct application of statistical methods, the physics might still be incomprehensibly complex to be specifically defined but the phenomenon still might exist.

Who knows what science/mathematics might later be developed to actually define and measure directly.

-chied and squared

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components

[Barista]

Boring? What are you talking about? Terrific post everyone! I'm enjoying the many different views, ideas, and experiences.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this stuff. Reading all these posts really makes me want to do some serious study on Perceived Sound Quality.

It really makes me wonder about the kind of data you could turn up with some well done blind tests, well experienced Audiophiles, and quality equipment.

Randy Bey, the fact that you can perceive a difference in digital cables totally blows me away. There simply is no way any analog medium can alter the sonic characteristics of 1's and 0's without first converting the signal to Analog. That is unless your previous cable was dropping actual packets of data and/or changing the states of the actual 1 or 0. Which I assume could be possible, though highly unlikely.

I have a VERY open mind and will give anything its fair chance. Though, like many of you, I'm also plagued with very analytical reasoning and judgment. It just totally bakes my noodle to think you could have higher sonic qualities in a speaker wire without any scientific explanation or any measurable difference in input vs. output signals of the wire. Very reminiscent of something I read recently.

quote:

---

There has been a myth going around for a long time (thankfully, its begun to subside) that there are mysterious, unmeasurable, analytical invisible attributes to music that vacuum tubes magically magnify into brilliant blossom, whereas solid-state amplifiers stomp them in the mud. Such claims are nonsense. Randy Slone - The Audiophiles Project Sourcebook P. 126

---

Great posts! Keep them coming!!

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Barista T. Bill

My Rig

[Clipped and Shorn]

"Boring? What are you talking about?"

I was addressing the previous post which said science asserts that something does not exist if you cannot measure it. That was discrediting psychology as a science, and assumed everything that exists must have an explanation in terms of the physics. Some phenomenon exist which are too complex to explain with equations, but which can be shown to have statistical reality. In fact this approach is even used within Physics, eg. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

-seeyum and noseeyum

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components

[Barista]

Oh, sorry C&S. I was talking about the two Yawn-ers at the top of the page.

IMHO, nothing here has been boring thus far. Great minds, great discussion!

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Barista T. Bill

My Rig

[Clipped and Shorn]

you don't like Mac platform, Ok I am outtahere.....

enjoy this place.

-noided and paranoided

Please come back Clipped. We miss you.

Ok, I am back.

good thing my memory is a sieve, comes in handy.

-platted and formed

(I just now edited my signature)

ps. what just happened, I already forgot.

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components

This message has been edited by Clipped and Shorn on 04-03-2002 at 08:27 PM

[maxg]

Ray,

"However, our home systems are music REPRODUCERS, not PRODUCERS. The goal (uh, oops, one of the goals...) is to REPRODUCE a musical event with as much fidelity as possible to the original. In this context, it would seem to be obvious that the less distortion, the better."

Whilst I understand exactly what you are saying about the difference between a music producer and a music reproducer there is a problem in trying to reproduce exactly a live event in your home.

If nothing else you are sitting in your listening room in front of a stereo system of whatever make and type with a whole lot less people around. In other words you are starting from a point where it is impossible to re-generate the original to any degree of realism.

If you were to take the musicians themselves and transplant them into your room the sound would be different from the above mentioned live event by definition.

Therefore, I wonder if the interplay of the distortion generated by your playback system in conjunction with the enforced distortion of your listening room could actually get you closer to the live event music than a lesser distorting system.

In other words could these euphonics really be a way of either getting sound reproduction in a form that it is less affected by your room's distortion, or, even counter-balanced by those distortions (although I regard the latter as improbable).

All this is, of course, a long way from cables. I have no idea why cables should make a difference. All I can tell you is that I perceive a difference sufficient for me to spend half the cost of my speakers on them.

As for the differences in digital cable that someone else mentioned on here - this is not a surprise to me at all. I have experienced the same thing. I think that the issue is jitter (or data stream timing).

As I understand it - and as opposed to computer data - it is the timing of the stream of 0's and 1's that is important in digitally transferring music (in other words there is no built in timing coding to the stream itself). In the majority of systems there is also no buffering of the stream. Therefore with any digital transfer there is a possibility of introducing jitter into the system.

From my limited experience digital cables suffer more or less with jitter, and, unfortunately it is the more expensive cables that seem to perform better.

[Ray Garrison]

Barista,

Regarding how one digital cable can sound different than another, maxg's reference to jitter is right on the spot.

Rather than go into lengthy explinations here, which I'd probably muck up anyway, about what exactly jitter is and how it affects a digital signal an the associated digital to analog decoding process, please take a look at what Tektronix has to say about it at:

http://www.tektronix.com/Measurement/cgi-bin/framed.pl?Document=/Measurement/App_Notes/2R_14264/&FrameSet=optical

If ever there were a company that epitomised the "measurements and solid engineering are what it's all about" position, it's Tecronix. And THEY take jitter very, very seriously.

Ray

------------------

Music is art

Audio is engineering

Ray's Music System

[HornEd]

Thanks to you Ray and your Tech link... the safari to eliminating the "Jitter Bug" has been renewed! -HornEd

[mace]

Hey Clipped and Schorn,

Don't give up on the iMac yet! The statement that if you want to surf the web you should avoid the Mac is simply nonsensical. I use a PeeCee daily at work and there are rendering differences between Netscape and IE under Win2k, i.e. one will give errors on a site and the other won't. Same goes with Win2k IE 5.5 versus Mac IE 5.1, vast majority of sites work on both, some sites only work on one or the other. Web authors who code in their own little world (including M$'s world of proprietary "standards") and don't follow industry standards tend to cause the incompatibility between platforms(Netscape vs. IE, Win vs. Mac).

Anyway, I'd highly recommend IE 5.1 if you are using OS 9.x. I haven't tried Netscape 6.x yet, though, because I've never had problems with IE 5.1.

BTW... I picked up some CornWalls the other week. I'm formulating a sound-off of them with my KLF-30's. I do think euphonics plays a role in the differences between these two speaker models.

As far as the wire debate.. I found the original poster's test interesting.

Mace

[Clipped and Shorn]

The friends who got me started with computer were Mac users. It has taken a pains taking learning curve just to get up to speed on this. I like the iMac and have even edited a little iMovie with some footage taken with a digital video camera. I am not about to change at this point to PC.

Internet Explorer 5.0 works fine for me , but I will look into your suggested upgrade. Netscape 6x totally sucks bigtime, don't go there. Sometimes I revert to using Netscape 4.7. Using OS 9.1. waiting until I have some burning reason to check out OS 10. So far, no reason.

How do you like the Cornwalls? I have yet to set up an ideal system with them regarding Preamp and Amp, although I am running some temporary tube gear at the moment. Some recordings sound good, but many that I have simply do not due to the preponderance of mid/high aggressiveness which translates somehow to an annoying quality with the Cornwalls. This is mostly a problem with the recordings, and I did not notice it with other speakers as much. I had got used to the lower quality speakers since they masked these qualities in the recordings. This is a problem because I have so many of these recordings. Maybe I need an alternate set of speakers for this, or some kind of filtering in the preamp. I will ask mdeneen about that possibility. Then again maybe my ears have developed some kind of particular sensitivity to this, although it seems there are others who struggle with this tedency in the Cornwalls as well, and still others who totally love them. Not sure how I will eventually resolve this, but I am working on it.

-yipped and yorned

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Cornwalls

currently upgrading

to all tube components