Hi-Fi Magazine Recommendation

[djk]

"No, no it's not the connectors,"

If you're just going to mock a serious contribution and not contribute anytning worthwhile yourself, just keep quiet, please.

And FYI, the color of the insulation on twisted pair inside the balanced interconnects can affect the measured CMRR of the cable.

[Don Richard]

So I see you are agreeing with me about wire colors[].

[NOSValves]

I have a subscription to Stereophile (aka Stereo-pile by some), and find some articles and reviews interesting; but alot of it is bull. They tend to shill for their advertisers, especially those selling tweaks which are high priced and diffiicult to evaluate objectively. Too bad that The Audio Critic is no longer available on news stands. The editor-in-chief, Peter Aczel, has a sarcastic yet humorous style which some find irritating; especially when he tells them that the $12,000 pair of cables that they just purchased are no better than 16 gauge lamp cord. He still has an on-line webzine, and a link for you to obtain free .pdf files of his back issues. Pay special attention to issues #16 and 17. Mr. Aczel believes in electrical tests and double blind tests to back up subjective listening impressions. The more I read him, the more sense he makes. He is a very well rounded individual and is knowledgable of music and recording (mostly classical) as well as electrical engineering and acoustics. Here are the links:------ http://www.theaudiocritic.com/------- http://www.theaudiocritic.com/cwo/Back_Issues/------ Here's another one from Roger Russell of McIntosh labs:------ http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm-----

Mr. Aczel is definitely a good read and my type of writer....but a good portion of his comments are complete engineering block headed BS to the oposite direction of say Stereo phool mag... some where in the middle the truth is found.

Yes, I will agree with you. I just did a five day stint with Monster XP 16 AWG wiring replacing my Nordost Blue Heaven cables. The result was better than I expeccted, but compared to the NBH cables; the bass was reduced and the general sense of clarity, transparency, and illusion that the music was coming from behind the speakers were missing. My ability to measure electrical properties of the cables is limited. However, the DC resistance of the NBH cables repeated measured 0.0 ohms, whereas the Monster XP repeatedly measured 0.1 ohms. The Monster was 7' long, whereas the NBHs were 14'7" long. I have no ability to measure inductance, which is supposed to also be important. So here is an expensive cable which to my ears is definitely better than 16 gauge stranded wire with LPE insulation. I have owned them for 15 years and see no reason to change.

Well cables can absolutely change the sound and in some cases a bad cable can sound better then a truly transparent cable... or the reverse. It is totally reasonbably and technically explainable that a system can be tuned with cables. The big question is should it be? Resistance in and of itself is not a huge factor. Resistance coupled with capacitance and inductance is the true enemy of transparency. It sounds to me like the 14'7" cable is masking a problem else where in your system or room.

[Don Richard]

There are some cables that can change the sound coming from the loudspeaker because they are designed to do exactly that. Remember, all that a wire placed between the components of a sound system can do is to damage the signal. If there are deficiencies in the components of a system the wire may compensate for some of these deficiencies by EQing the system. When placed in a system with fewer or no deficiencies it may cause a sound change that someone likes, even though the sound has been damaged. Someone who claims that a cable or other component made their system sound better should be saying that the cable or component made a change that they like. Someone else listening to their system may not agree, or that same cable on another system may not elicit the same response.

Then there is the matter of perception. After a sound is detected by the ear it transmits electrical impulses to the brain, where the impulses are interpreted, creating what we percieve as noise, speech, music, etc. Wrestling promoter Vince McMahon said, "Perception is reality", or words to that effect. Almost everyone knows that professional wrestling is "fake" but it has legions of fans, and it has made Mr. McMahon hundreds of millions of dollars. Human perception is subject to bias. Differences in perception is why we measure things, to get an accurate, unbiased evaluation of changes made by components in a system. When tested, most cables perform nearly identically in their effect on the output of a system except for the ones designed to cause changes.

The big objections I have to the cable situation is the blatant false and/or misleading advertising practices of some of the cable companies along with the "one size fits all, this wire will improve any system" claims made by those companies. Coupled with exorbitant pricing, it is no wonder many people consider this to be fraud. And then the magazines push these cables in their reviews, recommending a cable that applies an unspecified correction (maybe) to an unmeasured system based solely on the perception or bias of the reviewer.

EQs are a good tool if used properly, and can wreck the sound of a system when improperly used. I remember back in the early 70s when Soundcraftsman came out with a 10 band per channel equalizer that became very popular. I would go into a stereo store and hear discussions between the salesman and customers on whether the "U" curve or the "W" curve was "better". The only proper way to use an EQ is to measure the system and apply an inverse correction so that the frequency response is flatter. If more than 5-6 dB of boost is necessary in any frequency range it is likely that you are trying to correct an acoustic cancellation, perhaps caused by boundary effects or standing waves. This type of frequency response anomaly cannot be corrected by an EQ. That is why the advice to only use cut, not boost is given. However, if 1-3 dB of boost corrects the FR, the anomaly is likely a minimum phase event and in that case the EQ not only corrects the frequency response but also the phase response.

[Chris A]

Well cables can absolutely change the sound and in some cases a bad cable can sound better then a truly transparent cable... or the reverse. It is totally reasonably and technically explainable that a system can be tuned with cables. The big question is should it be? Resistance in and of itself is not a huge factor. Resistance coupled with capacitance and inductance is the true enemy of transparency. It sounds to me like the 14'7" cable is masking a problem else where in your system or room.

Perhaps if the amplifiers used have high output impedance relative to the speakers' input impedance that they drive (IIRC, the Khorn minimum input impedance is 3.8 ohms at ~200-400 Hz), I would think that the effects of changing to cables adding or subtracting their own impedance, that is, capacitive, inductive, or even resistive would necessarily affect the output sound much more than using an amplifier say with an output impedance of a tenth of an ohm or less, i.e., a damping factor or greater than 10 for driven audio frequencies.

I don't believe that a lot of SET-ophiles and OTL-ophiles, and certain early First Watt JFET amplifier owners consider this problem. Specific cable characteristics are an issue under this, IMHO, undesirable situation but not nearly as much with a system having a "high damping factor".

Right?

Chris

[philipbarrett]

Someone who claims that a cable or other component made their system sound better should be saying that the cable or component made a change that they like. ...The only proper way to use an EQ is to measure the system and apply an inverse correction so that the frequency response is flatter. If more than 5-6 dB of boost is necessary in any frequency range it is likely that you are trying to correct an acoustic cancellation, perhaps caused by boundary effects or standing waves. This type of frequency response anomaly cannot be corrected by an EQ. That is why the advice to only use cut, not boost is given. However, if 1-3 dB of boost corrects the FR, the anomaly is likely a minimum phase event and in that case the EQ not only corrects the frequency response but also the phase response.

And I hear choirs of Angels singing Amen! If a system is functioning within it's design limits there is no "better" or "worse" sound, just different sound.

Equalizers are almost exclusively used in professional environments to correct room anomalies that due to time and engineering constraints can not be solved acoustically. In other words "the show is tonight!" Engineers understand they are treating the problem, not the solution, the tuning is done because they have to, not because they want to.

Loudspeaker manufacturers are constantly evolving their products to lessen the interaction between them and the room specifically to allow the engineers to apply less eq to a system precisely because adding eq is in itself undesirable.

In a domestic environment solving the problems will be generally cheaper and certainly much more satisfying than fixing the symptoms.

If it's determined that eq is needed, the solution of last resort is the venerable 32 band graphic. It's highly unlikely that the fixed frequency and bandwidth filters will correspond to the problem areas and producing a large slope requires the combing of lots of smaller ones. Most engineers have long abandoned them for parametric eq units which allow full control over all the parameters rather than a stab at the closest available. For myself, I haven't specified a graphic eq for one of my systems in over a decade.

[Don Richard]

Loudspeaker manufacturers are constantly evolving their products to lessen the interaction between them and the room specifically to allow the engineers to apply less eq to a system precisely because adding eq is in itself undesirable.

Except CD waveguides that require the use of EQ by design. Constant directivity designs dominate pro sound loudspeaker designs these days. AFAIK that correction is applied in the crossover or processor, along with HF boost on the "long throw" elements to compensate for HF loss over distance.

[philipbarrett]

Correct & I should have qualified. I automatically associate system processing (eq, crossover, phase, limiting and what-not) as an integral part of the loudspeaker design and not part of any room correction.

[Don Richard]

Just out of curiosity, are you mostly using line arays these days or point source FOH arrays?

[philipbarrett]

Just out of curiosity, are you mostly using line arays these days or point source FOH arrays?

Typically a mix of both. Most of my work is high-end corporate and entertainment one-offs (awards and the like). I'll generally look to main line-array clusters augmented with distributed systems for frontfills, centerfills, balconies, delays and the like.

The difficulty for sound design these days is wall to wall, ceiling to floor virtual scenic. The show I'm staring at now has a 120' wide, 20' tall main screen flanked by two 32' x 22' screens and the ceiling height is 26'!

[Don Richard]

Cool! That's impressive.