John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"


Food for thought...

http://www.verber.com/mark/cables.html
plasmatronic
Frap, Floyd Toole has done more to determine what audio quality means than all of us here put together plus the fine fellows at all of the hi-fi magazines.

Sean, the "blind test in less than familiar surroundings" is a red herring. What do you think of blind tests in familiar surroundings, with the listener's own gear (most of it, except for whatever different is being tested)? Are those invalid, too? The fact remains that ABX testing still is the most accurate and sensitive means of detecting audible differences between audio devices.

Jaykaypur: What would you think of a guy who puts in a new $1,000 power cord and actually gains no improvement whatsoever, but merely thinks he gained 1 dB somewhere? Would he be better off as he is, or would he be better off more knowledgeable and $1,000 richer?

Bmpnyc: The quality of the copper will have an effect on the resistance of the wire. However, the difference in resistivity between "pure" copper and standard commodity-grade Cu is infinitesimally small. Lamp cord, if the overall resistance is small enough, can be as acoustically transparent as any "single crystal" or other hyped-up wire. Some people will give you all sorts of baseless technobabble about the quality of the insulation or the wire geometry. Yeah, right. The characteristics of wire can be boiled down to three electrical parameters: resistance, inductance, and capacitance. In speaker wire, because it's part of a low-impedance circuit, the resistance is the most important factor, so short and fat rules the day. The capacitance of even zip cord is so low that it doesn't begin to affect signals until you get up into hundreds of kiloHertz.

Bear, someone might hear a difference if they separated the lamp cord as you suggest, but would they hear a difference if they didn't know if the lamp cord was separated or not?

Abe, I'll answer your question. No, using power cords as tone controls is silly. For that matter, I think using interconnects as a tone control is silly, too.
Besides this being "the topic / thread from hell", here are some more comments.

7, if electrical measurements "dictate" what a cable sounds like, why don't people just buy zip cord and "duplicate" their "favorite" cables measurements via electrical components ? It would be WAY cheaper, wouldn't it ? After all, you could simply measure the characteristics of a specific cable that you liked in your system and go from there. Once you factored in the amount of inductance in the "el cheapo" zip cord ( which you forgot to mention ), you could then simply add series resistance, capacitors, inductors, etc.... as needed. Why don't people do this ? Because it doesn't work !!!

The bottom line is that "lumped sums" do NOT equal the sonic characteristics even if they DO match electrical characteristics of the other cable. If you think that the differences between having electrical values "spread" amongst the cables or "lumped" is not measurable, detectable or audible, you need to do some checking. Borrow or find access to a TDR ( Time Domain Reflectometer ) and see for yourself. Slight kinks in cables are QUITE measurable in terms of impedance bumps, voltage to current ratios, velocity factors, etc...

Just as cables DO alter the sonics of a system, it would be nothing less than SILLY to NOT take them into consideration when building a "system". After all, ALL of the signal IS passing through the speaker cables along with the majority of other cabling in the system.

There would be NO questions asked about any of this stuff if we were talking about building a high performance car. Since most every aspect of an auto's performance ( from BSFC to horsepower / torque curves, to acceleration to braking, etc... ) can all be verified with hard numbers, we would be left with nothing "subjective" to deal with other than how the car "feels" or what our personal preferences were in terms of "ergonomics".

Unfortunately, audio is almost 100% subjective due to the various electrical characteristics involved and the differences in how we hear as individuals. This is true REGARDLESS of how something measures on the bench. If you haven't seen "unexplainable" differences between components that measure similar in identical installations, you've spent WAY too much time in the books, theory and "drawing board" and WAY too little time with hands on experience. Sean
>
This is a very interesting thread. And very timely because I just got an e-mail that the Audio Engineering Society in LA is having a meeting tonight and they're going to talk about cables and controlled listening tests. They have a guest from Sound & Vision magazine, Tom Nousaine. That should be really interesting. Hi, I'm new.
I personally know Tom. I would be interested in his comments on cables and controlled listening. I have done some controlled listening with him. Plus4dbu, please give us a report.
Welcome Plus4dbu, I look forward to hearing your report. Great post Sean, not so great 7.