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Cable elevators - conventional wisdom wrong?

Reluctant to put any considerable money in them, the reasons for using cable elevators seemed intuitively correct to me: decouple cables mechanically from vibration and insulate them from the carpet's static. I have therefore built cheap elevators myself using Lego building blocks. (Plastic with a more or less complex internal structure; moreover, there is enormous shaping flexibility, for instance you can also build gates with suspended strings on which to rest the cables)
In their advertisement/report on the Dark Field elevators, Shunyata now claim that conventional elevators are actually (very?) detrimental in that they enable a strong static field to build up between cable and floor causing signal degradation.
Can anyone with more technical knowledge than I have assess how serious the described effect is likely to be? Would there, theoretically, be less distortion with cables lying on the floor? Has anyone actually experienced this?
karelfd
trelja
3,215 posts
 
Rushton is 100% right - try getting your cables off the floor, and give it a chance. I have personally heard the effects of lifting a cable off the carpet exceed the differences between cables themselves.

From an electrical standpoint, carpet serves as an enormous dielectric - and normally one of very low quality (nylon or polyester). Audiophiles spend enormous sums on cabling, accepting as fact the dielectric component, along with metal composition and cable geometry, add together to represent the sonic signature of the cable itself. Letting the cable sink down into the carpet, and take on the charactertistics of that dielectric equates to a significant amount of the money, effort, and benefit of purchasing better cable being wasted.
ozzy's avatar
ozzy
3,650 posts
 
I use some Myrtle blocks , Cardas and Ayre makes them. They are actually fairly cheap.
To get more height, I cut a little block out of some Maple wood and then place the myrtle blocks on the wood.
Heck, I think I have seen the Myrtle blocks cut with a V in the center to hold the cable.
You can stain or paint them any color.

Anyway, I own all Synergistic Tesla Cables and they recomended for some reason not to use the porcelin elavators I had.

I actually think they do sound better with the wood.
rodman99999
3,557 posts
 
Read the section of this article that deals with wire and resonances: (http://www.soundstage.com/maxdb/maxdb011999.htm) To the lithocephalic: Don't bother!
twb2
125 posts
 
Having visited a fellow audiophile with a highly evolved and revealing system, I was intrigued by his insistence on the benefit of elevating his cables. It was done with stiff construction paper cut and formed into 5" vertical cylinders with tape, and then baggies filled with kitty litter for mass (to remove resonance) that filled 90% of the cylinder. I thought of it as an extreme tweek that I would never accept for esthetic reasons, but gave it a try in my system to see. The improvement was major, and I never looked back! Varying their height also allows separation of IC's and PC's. A suspended cable can be affected by room sound, and can transfer the vibration to the equipment, so use as many as necessary to prevent this. The cost is next to nothing. The benefits major. Try it for yourself. Listen!
kbamhi
39 posts
 
Mike VansEvers once demonstrated that a rather generic IEC connector on one end of a powercord could be made to sound different by tightening or loosing a short machine bolt that had been substituted to go through and through the connector at the ground wire location. A few observers could recognize "a difference" however the difference was so minute that no one could indicate which way was better. Virtually everything seems to make a difference but these 55 year old ears have trouble telling one from another.
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