First of all I must apologise for what I am about to say. My first comment is! 'obscene' my next comment 'unbeleivable' It appears to me that the pricing of some of these cables (wires) is beyond belief. For all the claims that are made as to the performance and benefits to hi fidelity, you may as well throw away all your equipment and just buy the wires. Never in the world of pig's pudding could a piece of wire cost so much, and no way would you get £22,500 worth of extra hi fidelity. I am looking forward to, with anticipation Mr. John Fisher's comments on this piece of equipment.
Hans, Even if you where an extremely wealthy individual there would be no reason whatsoever to waste your money especially if you were prudent on £22,500 of cabling.
Yet is EVERYBODY who claims to hear a difference on buying this kind of stuff a demented fool?
Do members of The Cult of The Cable accept that their beloved wires are governed by physics defined in terms of L (inductance), C (capacitance) and R (resistance) - or do they believe that as yet undiscovered forces are at work?
Most attempts to 'hot switch' speaker cables for test purposes are condemned by The Cult of The Cable on the grounds that the test equipment introduces a fatally damaging "levelling of the playing field" that prevents special cables from shining through. But can a couple of high quality relays totally destroy the qualities that give rise to the superlatives that expensive cables are supposed to unleash?
Is it possible to design an ABX test to "hot switch" speaker cables that would not make members of The Cult of The Cable complain that the test equipment itself was causing the magic to disappear?
My knowledge of electronics is pretty much nil but I'm not so stupid as to think a piece of wire can make such a vast difference to the sound quality of hi fidelity equipment be it budget or high end. Though I do agree that if possible it is best to use a well made quality product, and how much is a well made quality product? Well, I should hope it isn't £22,500. Also why don't manufacturers manufacture their own quality leads to sell with their various products. To me this would make more sense than the hit and miss proceedure which seems to take place in the audiophile market. Why do you think this is not the case? (I know Naim produce their own cables) but it's the only one that I know of. By doing this, they would be able to match cable to the varying prices of their products, ie high end, low end. This is all that I know about the subject and I'm certainly not going to spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds to find out.
My next door neighbour who is an electrician (Industrial) who is now retired, says that to have nil resistance you have to freeze the cable down to minus 50/60 degrees centigrade. They tried this with liquid nitrogen and found it allowed no resistance whatsoever to the wire in question, but we had better not say too much about this as these wire merchants will be trying to flog the population tanks of liquid nitrogen (that could be fun). Let them put a plug on that if they can.
Mick. You need to freeze cable allot more than 'liquid nitrogen' temperatures to gain zero resistance, maybe 3 deg Kelvin, then through a quirk of physics it suddenly drops to zero, I never did understand that. But the difference between 0.01 Ohm and zero is pretty insignificant when you realise that the speakers themselves will have many Ohms of resistance in their copper/aluminium speech coils, quite apart from the ohmic losses in crossovers etc. No I think these companies are 'just having a laugh' and any deranged individual who buys their stuff is a bonus. For this sort of cash you can buy some serious equipment, so why waste it on lengths of wire. IMO the order of spending should be first, speakers, then listening room, then amplifier, then player. As for cables use whatever came in the box, they are hardly going to give you something that detracts from their equipment performance! I know that I am out on a limb here, but connecting cables have been around for more than a hundred years and if any significant improvements could be made then I'm sure they would be, and people like telephone companies would have made them, and used them. After all they do put audio down many miles of cable, and the 600 Ohm standard does come from the wire spacing used on telegraph poles, and for many years the ’phone’ companies were the only ones to want to improve their transmission quality, many years before ’Hi Fi’ The fact that no scientific papers have resulted from cable research and the fact that no serious professional audio engineers regard cables as an issue, tells me that they are not an issue. IMO if anyone contemplates spending £22k on cables, then they are completely 'barking' and should seek professional advice or mental/medical assistance or throw £21999 of it my way for some serious Hi Fi advice. As I have said on this site before , after politics and insurance then cables are the biggest lie/con this planet was ever witnessed, a world wide lie of monumental proportions greater even than the official story of the 911 collapse, and that is beyond belief. But I suppose that if you believe that planes could bring down two of the strongest and most over engineered buildings on this planet then maybe you could also believe that spending many ’arms and legs’ on cable may bring a result, however wake up to the fact that sound reproduction is a science and not a religion.
Not to cause too much of a stir, but, companies specialise in cd players that produce better sound signals, through the use of funky @rse technology that I neither understand or feel the need to read up. The cost of which is attributed to the masses of R&D that is completed. This is the same for speaker companies and manufacturers of amplifiers. Each individually spending a plethora on achieving musical excellance. My only question here is, why can we all be so sure that speaker cable cannot be made better? Scart cables are better with better construction, materials, etc.. As are component cables, hdmi cables.....So why not Speaker Cables?
I'm not going anywhere near the debate on £22k worth of speaker cable. Lets be honest, the cost is considerably more than 22k. I've not got the best system in the world, but I know full well, that my speakers are a damn sight further away from my amp than 1 metre!
why can we all be so sure that speaker cable cannot be made better? Scart cables are better with better construction, materials, etc..
As John Fisher has intimated, cable technology is not new and has been largely driven by the telecoms companies, for whom every dB lost is a dollar lost. Since the inception of modern communication technology (say a hundred years give or take), serious money has been spent on lots and lots of research carried out by top flight academics.
Now the usual counter argument applied at this point by members of The Cult of The Cable is the one that says 'look at all the mistakes science has made over the years, so how can you glibly state that we know all there is to know about cables'. Scientists today are very aware that their predecessors have made some really bad blunders, so modern scientific method has evolved in ways to ensure this does not happen. For instance - to consider a simple example in electrical engineering - Ohm's Law. This is effectively underwritten by Kirchoff's Laws which approach the same problem by a rather different route and effectively demonstrate the reliability of the former. Modern scientific method is a bit like double entry book-keeping; it's not until you can walk towards a solution by an entirely different approach that results are considered substantiated. It is through this type of approach that nuclear physicists predict the existence of particles that we are as yet unable to verify experimentally.
Cable technologies have no such loose ends - the numbers all add up. Don't forget that this all goes hand in glove with the development of most of the ultra low noise, low distortion devices we enjoy today. It is the same telecom dollar that funds most of the research into high performance audio devices that is also interested in how cables work. It is my contention that, were there holes in our sum of knowledge about cables, the maths would tell us so! The double entry book-keeping would simply not balance.
To get back to your question - of course cables can be made better, up to a point. The ideal cable is one of zero L, C & R which of course is not possible in the real world, but the whole thing is fully defined in terms of L, C, and R. Members of TCoTC would have us believe that there are one or more additional dimensions to cable technology which affect musical performance without there being any causal relationship to the parameters conventionally measured when evaluating AC circuits. What most people don't realise is that the L, C & R components of a speaker cable are typically SWAMPED MANY TIMES OVER by the L, C & R components of a typical passive crossover network and its associated loudspeaker load. Thus common sense tells us that the cable is unlikely to have a large effect in most circumstances, and circuit analysis supports this view. I have run a few circuit simulations and it appears that the only predictable way of shooting yourself in the foot (assuming a decent low impedance source) is by raising the L component to unnecessarily alarming levels. This will cause a marked loss in the HF, typically between 1 - 4dB at 20kHz. There are some speaker cables that DO have a strangely high inductance, so anyone who buys them has taken an important step towards blowing their big toe off. Once you start driving your cable with the vaguely high impedance world of valve amplifiers, all hell breaks loose and it's no wonder that cables do cause sonic differences, but these are entirely predictable and measurable with conventional AC analysis.
So why do so many people follow The Cult of The Cable ? This is the most interesting question of all. I suppose I could rant on how, after the demise of the gramophone, Hi-Fi mags had the rug pulled from under their feet. 30 years ago, such publications were MAINLY about turntables, arms, cartridges and the weird and wonderful things some folks would do to grab the very best possible from their grooves of vinyl. The magazines were of highly variable quality, but the best certainly attempted to base their work on good science as far as they were able. The maths behind vinyl are complex, but nothing a second year student of mechanical engineering (NB mechanical, not electrical) shouldn't be able to grasp.
The arrival of the CD reduced the variability an hundredfold. Yes, I know CD players sound different but the differences are minuscule compared to that which record players could achieve. The early arrival of TCoTC with its clever American marketing execs. were just what the beleaguered mags needed to pep them up; and thus were planted the roots of the kind of reviewing that favoured style over content - reviews that sounded more like they had come from the pen of Salman Rushdie than an objective investigator. And so it continued downhill ever onwards.
So why do folks say cables sound different?
1. Sometimes they do...a little, but in an entirely predicable way. About a quid a metre will buy you the best speaker cable you will ever need until, that is, you are running a 2kW rig that will require all kinds of special consideration.
2. Improper evaluation techniques and excessive self-belief. Sorry, but that's the way it is. Most so-called audiophiles wouldn't recognise intermodulation distortion or quantizing noise if they were fed it for breakfast. Without proper comparison methodologies, findings aren't worth a toss.
F*****g hell man, that is one hell of a ramble. As for the 'emperor has no clothes' I have read this many times before, and it does appear to fit the situation completely. However I am prepared to be the innocent child, the unashamed thicko, the toss pot who does not believe any of this unmitigated crap. The believe that the science that decodes a serial bit stream from a CD, then D to A it, then amplify it to some 100 Watts is creditable, and done with remarkable precision, this is a feat in itself, a far greater feat than getting a few volts down 2-3 metres of cable Again if the manufactures want to sell their equipment, they would at least offer a suggested list of ‘quality’ cables, or even supply them. There is no great R&D that can go into cable design, apart from what may be dreamed up over a few pints, a new fancy idea, that euphoria may appear to produce ‘sonic results’ but in reality a cable does have deficiencies, whatever it is made of, and whatever anyone would like. These are called ‘physical’ limitations , not by the manufacture, not by the materials, not by desire, but by REALITY. Fortunately they are of no consequence to the audio enthusiast, as they are not applicable, measurable, or even audible. There are cables that take phone signals under the Atlantic, there are mains cables that carry 132000V across the national grid, there are coax cables that handle several GHz, there are welding cables that handle hundreds of Amps. As I have stated before there could be a litigious situation here if any of these ‘cable’ companies were asked to prove their wares and equate their prices in a court of law, just as banks will not admit to their outrageous ‘penalty’ fees. Having taken my own bank to task on this issue, after several weeks they did agree to refund all excess charges ’in this particular instance’ and without admitting any ’liability’.
John…
PS If you have in mind to create a 'cable rip off' then why not go all the way to the top, there is always some fool who believes that the more you spend the better you get. So simply by being the most outrages rip off guarantees one a degree of notoriety.
I've read everything you have discussed and it is obvious both of you know your stuff when it comes to electronics. Very interesting but I can't say I understand the technical bits, but why is it that these cable companies advertise on AV Review but take no notice of what their potential customers are saying. They don't come back and justify their design or tell you how you are going to gain by purchasing their products. All you get is silence and don't kid me that they don't read some of this stuff. Is this contempt for their prospective purchasers or is it that they would have to come up with some understandable specifications so that we could believe in the product. Funny isn't it?
Rather than funny I find it sad, there are no plausible explanations for their claims, therefore nothing they can justify, they have no specifications, let alone understandable ones, they do what they do, for one reason only, to earn a living, probably a very good living, in all honesty it is the purchasers that are the gullible and promote these practices. What could they say on a forum like this, some techno mumble jumble, that would be decimated by people like Pluto and myself, or get drawn into the ABX comparisons that we all ask for. That would prove nothing as they well know, so what can they say, particularly on the salaries to be made from fraud. I think, they think, better to stay stum and let the money roll in, at least until the truth comes out. Yes I’m sure they do read this stuff and maybe squirm a little, and maybe sweat a little, just as anyone does who has been sussed. Then remember the earning potential, take appropriate medication, have trouble sleeping, and many minor health problems, then carry on, after all there must be millions of ‘mugs’ out there, just 1% of the market would be good business. I appreciate your reply, and I appreciate your concern, but remember a large proportion of ‘high flyers’ have no concern over honesty or reality, only to find a rewarding result, I personally believe many cable companies fall into this category, despite their loving claims. Note: virtually all claims of subtle differences in cables, be they interconnects, speaker or mains have NEVER been proved, or quantumised, measured or heard, apart from by individuals. One question maybe you or anyone can answer is ‘what is burn in’ with regard to cables, does some molecular structure change, does some aspect of spec. change, or does the listener change, any thoughts welcome.
Never mind the electronics - I'm far more interested in the social engineering that causes many people to believe in this rubbish. John Fisher has previously written how fancy cables, along with politics and insurance, are amongst the biggest cons in life. I'd like to add one more to that list: BURN IN.
The implications of this lie are far more profound than many realise, for the following simple reason. The human ability to remember a sound (NB an actual sound, NOT the information contained within the audio wrapper) is very short indeed. Some academic work has been done in this field and the critical number is a matter of seconds - perhaps up to a minute with training and effort, although phenomena such as perfect pitch clearly do not conform to the usual norms. Nature and evolution have made our auditory systems flexible and adaptable. For instance, we are very good at recognising voices on the phone. A baby quickly learns to recognise its mother's voice. We learn that a big growl means 'run away'! But we have no evolutionary reason to analyse the character or quality of sound - merely to interpret its content and meaning. Think, as a really naff example, of the way AM radio works. We only care about one small component of the composite signal - the modulation. The rest of the signal has no ultimate purpose. So it is with sound; as a species we are very good at analysing the content within the audible 'carrier' - we are awful at analysing the carrier itself because there is no evolutionary need to do so.
By perpetuating the myth of burn in, the human inability to 'remember' a sound in the long term is being exploited to the full. A marketeer might as well tell you to come back in a weeks time when you've forgotten how bad the product sounds. At least that would be honest - in a week you can get used to nearly anything. I'm sure John Fisher can explain why, in the context of modern electronics, the concept of burn in is total pants. Once everything is at its operating temperature and the system has reached a steady state, that's it. The bottom line is that if a machine has not reached the steady state within a few minutes, it's clearly an unstable design not worth bothering about. An interesting exception is obviously thermionic valves which are subject to continuous decay throughout their useful life, but once again good designs allow for this.
For these reasons I nominate BURN IN as the con of the century. Persuading the gullible that every nut and bolt is subject to a long and arduous burn in before it will perform as it ought, is in itself a wonderful marketing ploy. But to do so in the world of audio with our notorious inability to remember what we heard five minutes ago with any kind of accuracy, simply beggars belief.
Your question ‘why can we all be so sure that speaker cable cannot be made better?’ I think can be answered quite simply, cables have been made for many different purposes over the past hundred years, research has gone into them, conclusions have been made. In the same way R&D is always going on with Speakers, CD players, DVD players, LCD screens, Plasma screens and amplifiers, like class ‘D’, but cables have ‘matured’ there is nothing new to learn, therefore no R&D, no one is going to fork out millions to research a subject that has already been researched completely in the knowledge that there is nothing to gain or learn. If you think otherwise then begin the research, look at what’s known, find the missing link, and create the definitive cable, if you can do that then you are the winner. Personally in my life of electronics, I have never even seen what could make a cable ‘better’, or have found any reason to believe that they are the ‘weakest link’ most are far more perfect than the equipment they connect together. The average 50p nickel plated interconnect has a bandwidth of greater than 10MHz and zero harmonic distortion, so what more could you ask for ??
If you believe otherwise then go out and prove it.
You know how to open a can of worms, burn in maybe is the greatest lie of all in the Hi Fi industry, (next to politics and insurance) I would be interested to know it's history. or is it like the 'ploughman’s lunch', a marketing ploy by ‘Watney Beer’ based on nothing more than a marketing idea to get people into pubs at lunchtime, probably, but still around now thirty odd years on.
The concept of burn in with cables is a complete ‘non starter’ as there is nothing that can change the make up of a piece of copper by running a few Amps through it, be it AC, DC, or music, what possible change can take place?
Well I’ll tell you this for nothing, there is no change, cable does not burn in or wear out, there is no ‘mechanism’ for any such changes, apart from ‘burn out’ and physically break.
Turntables are a different ‘kettle of fish’ as they are mechanical, and like a car their bearings will smooth out in time.
Speakers are a different ‘kettle of fish’ as they are mechanical, and cone stiffness etc. will change with time.
Valve amplifiers will over time reach their design bias points, transistor amps only have to reach the design temperature, no change after that.
So to sum up most regular modern Hi Fi gear does not have a burn in mechanism, so why do all the magazines talk about it?
Is it all a conspiracy to give our hearing time to adjust to the new experience and ‘come to terms’ with it, I wonder.
I am not trying to teach the converted, but only to open the door, to a full and honest discussion on all sound matters, as I am deeply interested
‘The same rules that are used to choose an analogue interconnect apply to digital interconnects. Despite the fact that digital connectors are only transferring digital data, the construction and design of the digital cable affects the tonal, rhythmic and dynamic performance qualities every bit as much as analogue interconnects do.’
Technically that is a load of B******s, we are in the age of international ‘phone calls’ and one must have noticed that, now, a call to Australia is just as clear, just as readable and just as good quality as a call to the next town,
All because the intervening connection is digital, and only eight bits at that, very often down the same cables that transferred the old analogue signals. That in itself makes the above statement absurd in the extreme and to my mind if any statement from a company is absurd then all others have to be questioned.
A bit like questioning if a couple of planes brought down the world trade centre towers, then answer the question of why did tower seven mysteriously collapse that day. Clearly it had nothing to do with terrorists, therefore the twin towers probably also had nothing to do with terrorists.
I’m sorry Mr Chord, but I see no technical merit in your argument, the whole reason for digital interconnects is that they do remove any subtle differences in cable performances, in the same way that digitally recorded material can be copied time and time again with no signal degradation.
This is singularly the crucial difference between digital and analogue transmission, once we are dealing with ‘ones and noughts’ then the cable either transfers them, or it doesn’t, rarely can it partially do it, also with error correction at the receiving end the data is resolved completely intact. By completely intact I mean the same, no bit difference, no number difference, therefore no sonic difference.
Understand that this is my stance on one of your cables, then by inference all other products are questionable and suspect.
Note: I am not alone in questioning ‘cable performance’ it is now becoming a trend to debunk the many ridiculous claims that cable companies make, and will continue until you ‘charlatans’ are firmly put in your place, and all the cable nonsense is put in it’s place.
This is singularly the crucial difference between digital and analogue transmission, once we are dealing with ‘ones and noughts’ then the cable either transfers them, or it doesn’t, rarely can it partially do it, also with error correction at the receiving end the data is resolved completely intact.
It is an absolute fact that, given accurate data transmission, the sound of a digital audio system is entirely down to the quality of the converter subsystems at either end. How well various converter subsystems work is of course a subject of legitimate debate, but I am becoming aware that jitter is well on its way to becoming the major scapegoat for every perceived problem with digital technology.
What most analogue diehards don't know is that many of the great (non-pop) records of the last ten years of the gramophone era were entirely 'DDD' except for the final cut to vinyl. Even the pop stuff was usually AAD.
Sorry to say, facts don't seem to go down to well here.
As for absolute facts, they must be an absolute non starter in the mind of a cable guru. It never ceases to surprise me the number of 'high end' enthusiasts, who ignore the rules of physics, who ignore the engineers that create their beloved recordings and the equipment, and who ignore the realities of sound reproduction.
If we take sound reproduction away from the voodoo, semi religious connotations it appears to have, and place it safely in the ‘science and physics’ bag along with architecture, aviation, transport, medicine etc. space travel even, and only then we may begin to get a grip on the truths and begin to discount the myths and delusions.
Really is my planet so different from yours, we are all looking for the same result, and we know that improvements will not come from arguing about the purity of copper, so lets all get constructive, and try to quantify the perceived differences.
Only then may a pattern build that begins to explain the unexplainable, and from patterns comes recognition, from recognition comes research, into areas that maybe have never been looked into. After all the above, some groundbreaking new products may emerge.
