2. cables
  3. 984004712

Speaker wire is it science or psychology

I have had the pleasure of working with several audio design engineers. Audio has been both a hobby and occupation for them. I know the engineer that taught Bob Carver how a transistor works. He keeps a file on silly HiFi fads. He like my other friends considers exotic speaker wire to be non-sense. What do you think? Does anyone have any nummeric or even theoretical information that defends the position that speaker wires sound different? I'm talking real science not just saying buzz words like dialectric, skin effect capacitance or inductance.
stevemj
70242241e18c
81 posts
 
Detlof: I'm not clear on what you're saying. Do you actually listen to two DUTs simultaneously? What was your "blind" testing setup?
garfish
1,840 posts
 
Hi Stevemj; ears are connected to brain-- brain does all interpretation (perception) of sound (see your 3/24 post). We all know this-- don't we? I choose to trust my hearing, including perception of such, and my common sense. Respectfully, you seem to want to tie all this up into a tidy scientific package, when personally I think listening to music is much, much more complex and can't be relagated to a neat little "formula" or "procedure".

You (seem to) want to approach selecting wires based solely on science. I want to select wires based on the much more precise, and broader perspective of music appreciation, or "art". I continue to maintain that both are necessary parts of our lives, but I have enough confidence in my own senses that I can select wires without getting too bogged down in engineering. I have strong interests in both art and science. If you value art at all, I think we could get along. Cheers. Craig
detlof
1,899 posts
 
Craig, that was a beautiful post and I could not agree with you more. Wished I would have been able to express my own point of view so clearly and in such a straightforward fashion.
702, I was not listening simultaneously, with rapid switching inbetween, rather I was allowed to listen to the DUT in question (I did not know, which one it was of course)
as long as I wanted to, until I felt sufficiently sure to think to be able to identify it. The DUTS in question were Gryphon and Spectral and a Jadis pre. We also tried MIT and XLO speaker wires. Regards,
katharina
56 posts
 
Detlof, what amps did you use in this setup and what were your sources? LP or CD? Agree with you about Craig's post.
detlof
1,899 posts
 
Hello Kat, in the ecample I had in mind, we used LPs, a Spectral cartrige, made by Scantec I think, with a Goldmund Reference at the time. The amps were old Spectral 200 class A and Jadis 200 monoblocks . The Jadis preamp was easy to discern with both amps. It was much more difficult between the Spectral and the Gryphon, but after a while I could make out specific differences between the two- believe or not, by the way certain cembalo pasages in a Bach Suite were resolved in the background. The XLO excelled with the Jadis gear, the MIT with Spectral, so that part was easy. Speakers were Quads.
More to discover