pre-charging audio cables

[djk]

I figured out what product the thread was making fun of, the $500 for 1M Audioquest.

If you can hear, and the rest of your system is not the limiting factor, I'm sure than it will sound better.

Is it worth the $500?

Not in my mind.

Why is it so expensive?

The custom made wire looks very expensive to make, and a lot would have to be ordered to defray set-up costs. The 48V battery supply probably adds some costs too, no where near as much as the wire though.

For those that own a tube preamp this benefit of reducing dielectric absorption in the cable is simple to achieve. Remove the output coupling cap in your preamp. Replace the input cap in your power amp with the same value, but rated high enough voltage (same as the output cap that was in the preamp). There may be some other changes needed, I would take a look at the schematic of anyone's amplifier that wants to try this, no charge.

This has long been done in the pro audio field, it's tried and true. It is also commonly used in test equipment and instrumentation.

Intelligent people that actually know about this kind of stuff (Peter Daniel and Nelson Pass) have discussed this subject at DIYaudio. Nelson uses the moniker 'The one and only'.

Some polymers do exhibit the Barkenhausen effect, and are affected by both DC and AC fields. This means that Moray is not barking mad and that most of you may be suffering from the D-K Effect.

In discussing cable burn-in issues with a guest lecturer of physics at the U of I a while back, Jeff Rowland opined that he thought the wire sounded better after it had not been moved for several days, the reason his equipment always sounded its best on the last day at the CE Show. We spent a pleasant six hours with the covers off of a pair of his top-of-the-line mono-bloc amplifier and comparing it with a redesign of the Mark Levinson ML3 that I had just finished doing. He liked some of my ideas, I liked some of his ideas (although I think my amplifier sounded better than his did).Jeff had to call the university and cancel a meet-and-greet scheduled before his lecture, and reschedule it for after the lecture.

The issues regarding wire came up when comparing a $5000 pair of Audioquest Diamond interconnects with a new cable that Jeff had with him that sounded much better. He said that his cost on the unterminated Cardas wire was about $1500. His company did not sell wire back then ( I don't think he does now either), he had no ax to grind. Jeff thought the issue was more from the self-annealing of the undisturbed wire, rather than the Barkenhausen effect.

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The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."[2]

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

A)tend to overestimate their own level of skill;

B)fail to recognize genuine skill in others;

C)fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;

D)recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Dunning and Kruger were awarded the Nobel Prizes in Psychology in 2000 for their report, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".[16]