I want to buy decent cables for my speakers and was wondering on how the setup should be.
The speakers in question (Infinity Alpha 40) is biwirable. My amp has two pairs of speaker outputs. In this case which one is a better idea: to use biwiring cables or use separate wires using both of the speaker outputs on my amp? If I use separate identical cables, does the length make difference?
And about the cable diameter, are the thick ones necessarily better? If so how much? I am planning to spend around $80 for my cabling. 7 feet cable for each channel is sufficient. Do you have any suggestions on quality but cheap cables? What do you think about the ones here (http://www.knukonceptz.com/search_results.asp?txtsearchParamTxt=&txtsearchParamCat=4&txtsearchParamType=ALL&iLevel=1&txtsearchParamMan=ALL&txtsearchParamVen=ALL&txtFromSearch=fromSearch&btnSearch.x=9&btnSearch.y=8)?
Please let me know what you think. Your help is much appreciated.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm (http://home.earthlink.net/~rogerr7/wire.htm)
I can't vouch for the validity of the information in the above report, but I think it's pretty impressive. Spending more doesn't necessarily equal greater audio quality, and the things you should really be paying attention to isn't what the marketing hype is always about. This isn't to say that "any old wire will do", but if you know what you're dealing with, you can look past the hype and buy something (that is much less expensive) that is very appropriate for your situation.
Hi Atici, you have to be careful about articles like the one in the above link. Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment.
The article above starts off, and never strays away from judging speaker cable by its measured resistance, which has absolutely nothing to do with its fidelity. The resistance of any speaker cable would be negligable relative to the audio circuit, unless, of course, you did something exceptionaly mismatched, like using 24 gauge intercom wire to hook up a 200 watt/ch system.
The difference between zip cord and "good" speaker cables comes from a phenomenon known as the "skin effect". Audio frequencys travel through the skin, or outside edge of a wire. So, good wires are made up of many small wires, braided in such a way as to maximize phase-coherency that might be smeared by inductive interaction in larger wires.
I can't really do the subject justice here, but if you put "skin effect" into your favorite search engine, you'll get many hits on the subject. Keep in mind however, that even this is still arguable as "the" reason one cable sounds better than another. I simply know that some do by virtue of having been in a position to hear the differences. You also must keep in mind, the difference will only be noticeable on a system that is of sufficient quality to make a difference. It isn't going to matter much what speaker wire you use if your playing a Pioneer reciever through JBL's.
But, to get back to your original question, if you can, try your setup both ways, and see if you can tell a difference. If you can't, it doesn't matter. If you can, go with the setup that sounds best to you. Always trust your ears.
Dex
"Audiophile grade" copper cable is bunk. Dex4now seems to have missed the statement that ears were used in the blind listening tests performed by Gordon Gow. McIntosh imanufactures high grade equipment and one would think would have a vested interest in convincing consumers to wire things up with the highest grade of components available. Instead their engineers write articles describing how speaker cable makes no difference as long as you use an adequate gauge for the distance you're running.
wirehttp://wiring.svconline.com/ar/avinstall_designer_cables_critical/index.htm includes some data collected by John Dunlavy's labs where "golden-eared" listeners were invited in to listen to cable differences but instead listened to the same 16-guage zip cord the entire time. Afterwards they described the "incredibly huge" differences they noted between the pricey esoteric audiophile cables they never heard and the "inferior" zip-cord they listened to. Sounds like conclusive evidence that high-priced cables are worth the money to me.
I personally own a set of Synergystic Research Alpha speaker cables that I paid $6/foot for. It's a silver/copper mix which I'm now convinced does nothing more than insignificantly reduce the resistance of the cable since it's already 14 gauge wire. My speaker cabling costs as much as my main speakers and if I'd saved the money from cables I could have easily purchased a better pair of main speakers; something that does make a more audible difference.
My advice, save the money, bi-wire if you want with a heavier gauge (16AWG seems to be good enough for everything) speaker cable that's flexible and makes it easy to identify your positive and negative side so you don't have phasse issues.
For bi-wiring, use cables of the same length and unless your amp has outputs designed for bi-wiring (not an A/B selector section) don't worry about it. The sales guy at the store where I bought my B&W speakers informed me that simply stripping more insulation back and running the cable through both sets of binding posts is a good idea since you use the same cable as a connection rather than the connection plates usually included with the speakers so you have the same conductive properties across the portions of the crossover circuit. Whether or not that's true I don't know. However, it cost me nothing but three inches of stripped back insulation so why not do it?
If I had to do it again I'd spend more on my speakers and keep the 12 gauge speaker cable I got from the leftovers of a pro-audio install done at my church rather than shelling out massive amounts of money for speaker cable that looks pretty but sounds as good as what I had.
Is thicker cable necessarily better? I got a 10 gauge speaker cable (2 pairs for each speaker for bi-wiring using the Speaker A/B outputs of my Amp) from http://www.knukonceptz.com (http://www.knukonceptz.com) it was $1.10/foot which I think is quite okay. I stripped the wire and attached gold banana plugs and used electric tape to cover them (ugh, don't they look unprofessional!). Although it looks like my high school electric experiments I think it'll work ok (I don't have the speakers yet ), but do you think how the banana plugs are attached to the cable makes a big difference? Do you think I should shell out lots of money for Monster ones that claims that it's very easy to attach and provides closer contact?
The cable stands are individually tinned by the way, they claim it helps reduce the skin effect.
Doesn't Ohm's Law cover all of this?
Buy the cheapest stuff that sounds good. Unless you want to look good by spending money conspicuously.
Even biwiring is vodoo audio. From an electrical point of view, there's no reason why biwiring should be better.
As to if thicker cables are better, they are, up to a thickness. I mean, once you use a big gauge enough, there's no point in going thicker. Reputed people consider 12 gauge enough for all means.
As to skin effect, its effect is negligible at audio frequencies given that you choose an adequate gauge, as explained.
Edit: gdougherty, nice link, it rebutes most misconceptions about cables.
I personally own a set of Synergystic Research Alpha speaker cables that I paid $6/foot for. . . My speaker cabling costs as much as my main speakers and if I'd saved the money from cables I could have easily purchased a better pair of main speakers; something that does make a more audible difference.
Hi gdougherty, you couldn't have reinforced my point better than this. Your $6/ft. wire cost more than your speakers! Lets see, if you have 20 ft./ spkr that means you have about $240 tied up in the set. And you expected to hear a difference???
The system I listened on were closer to $20,000, with an equally expensive Krell, then a Classe' amp. And it was done in a home with material I was familiar with. I did read the part about the listening "tests" and it didn't sound like the author had the time to really listen with either material or equipment that he was familiar with.
Besides, the article lost all credibility when it used Stereo Review as its "technical" source. Go back through their back issues as far as you want. They've never said anything bad about anything. Thats because they're an advertising source, NOT a serious magazine. Why didn't the author reference more reputable magazines like The Absolute Sound?
Look, I'm not here to sell speaker wire, and I myself don't use "esoteric" wire, simply because my system doesn't warrant it. But the right wire, in the right system
can make a difference. But ONLY if the rest of the system is up to snuff. And, the evaluation of audio is NOT an area that lends itself to conventional scientific principles. Its NOT scientific. If someone thinks their system sounds better with pink wires over green then it does.
My ultimate advice to atici was to listen yourself . . . if
you hear a difference then decide on that criteria alone whether you think its all "worth" it.
Dex
And, the evaluation of audio is NOT an area that lends itself to conventional scientific principles. Its NOT scientific.
Why not? Both sound and hearing are physical phenomena, even interpretation of what you hear or feelings can be subjected to a scientifical approach, by means of blind tests. Properties of audio equipment can be evaluated scientifically, there's no magic in them.
If someone thinks their system sounds better with pink wires over green then it does.
To him, you must add. There's no reason why this should be true for any other person. And if it sounds better to him is due to other reasons different to the actual sound that is reaching his ears.
And, the evaluation of audio is NOT an area that lends itself to conventional scientific principles.
Wrong.
This notion can be proven wrong by simply taking a look at a few key scientific fields that have direct ties to audio in some form or another, and their level of technological advancement and continued progression through scientific principles. These fields range from DSP (audio compression, all sorts of audio manipulation for recording/playback, communications, etc), audio engineering (acoustics, speaker/equipment design, modeling, analysis, etc), advanced physics (theoretical/R&D work, breakthrough technologies, etc), to even fields like psychophysics (psychoacoustics). If it were not for the ability to scientifically model, evaluate, and predict the behavior of audio through scientific principles, many of these things would not exist in the state they do today.
As KikeG pointed out, audio is a physical phenomena. It has already been well established that physical phenomena can be evaluated and modeled though scientific principles -- if they couldn't be, again, we wouldn't have anywhere near the level of technology we have now (including all our nice audio equipment..).
Saying that the evaluation of audio (which by the way is a rather vague statement indeed) cannot be scientific -- especially without providing any good arguments as to why -- is rather ignorant and incredibly naive, and you won't get very far with that notion on these forums. You might try rec.audio.opinion though...
Its NOT scientific.
No, it
can be and
should be scientific. Most people just choose to take the pseudoscientific/mystical route because it requires less knowledge and can be manipulated to fit in line what their preconceived notions better. Translation: a scientific view of audio equipment performance and analysis doesn't give most people the "warm fuzzies" like pseudoscience does. It doesn't sell as well either, I mean.. who could sell a $6000 power cord, a green marker, or a 'quantum clip' through being objective?
If someone thinks their system sounds better with pink wires over green then it does.
No. This is begging the question. The difference must be shown to be present outside of one's own personal whims for it to actually exist in reality.
People can think a lot of things but that doesn't necessarily make them so. I can choose to think I'm a billionare for example, but that doesn't make it true, or make all that money exist.
Yes, the person may
feel that they hear a difference (you could perhaps even argue that they do actually perceive a difference through purely psychological factors), but that has no effect on what the person standing next to them hears if the difference does not exist in reality. If their colored wires happen to make them feel better, or give them a better case of the "warm fuzzies", then that's fine an dandy -- more power to them, but when they start discussing actual performance with another person, this is irrelevant.
I believe that there are some things in the audio world that can be measured scientifically, and some that cannot.
For example, one cannot measure the quality of lossy encodings with scientific methods. Looking at the frequency response of an MP3 will not tell you anything about how good it sounds. It may give you some parameters, but at the end of the day, it can look horrible in the spectrum display and still sound "transparent".
On the other hand, amplifiers, preamps, wires etc CAN be measured scientifically. Why? Because their job is to be REALLY transparent. At least, that is one school of thought. I don't care that my MP3 is throwing out data that I can't hear to begin with. But I DO want my amplifier to output the exact same thing it sees on the input, only bigger.
So for audio equipment, scientific measurements and proof are needed. For other things they might not. And as a closing, wires are a non-issue. It has been beaten to death in the past. Bi-wiring MIGHT provide a quality increase, but only if your amplifier is crappy to begin with. A good amplifier will work across the entire spectrum equaly, at all times. If your amplifier is running out of current when pumping out the bass, and that is hurting the highs, then it is a crap amp and using TWO amplifiers might work. But just wiring one amplifier using four cables is not going to improve anything.
I believe that there are some things in the audio world that can be measured scientifically, and some that cannot.
For example, one cannot measure the quality of lossy encodings with scientific methods. Looking at the frequency response of an MP3 will not tell you anything about how good it sounds. It may give you some parameters, but at the end of the day, it can look horrible in the spectrum display and still sound "transparent".
Do you think double-blind tests (like ABX) aren't scientific (statistical) methods?
ABX (http://www.pcabx.com) is a proven method of evaluating lossy audio quality.
ABX is a statistical method... it is a scientific process... but the "data" is not scientific... it is very subjective. ABX is a means to isolate the cause from the effect. First of all, it is the person who is under test when using ABX. We all know this, since some people think OGG 0 sounds nice and others cant go below OGG 9 (I am exagerating, I hope). So really, all that the ABX tests are telling you is how good your hearing is when compared to your peers and to the encoder you are listening to.
And that is the way it should be, since lossy encoders are all about exploiting the limits of our senses. MP3 exploits the limits of our ears just like JPG exploits the limits of our vision. All of these are subjective things, because they are all measured with regards to the SUBJECT. They are not scientific measurements, since they vary from subject to subject. The way it is performed with ABX gives it the scientific process, which validates it.
Bi-wiring MIGHT provide a quality increase, but only if your amplifier is crappy to begin with. A good amplifier will work across the entire spectrum equaly, at all times. If your amplifier is running out of current when pumping out the bass, and that is hurting the highs, then it is a crap amp and using TWO amplifiers might work. But just wiring one amplifier using four cables is not going to improve anything.
AFAIK It is not related to how good your amplifier works in high and low frequency, it is more about how these frequencies interfere on the wire to the speaker. Biwiring reduces this problem because high and low frequencies follow different paths based on Ohm's law (resistance for low and high frequencies are different at high and low connections of the speaker end). Therefore biwiring should always (in theory) increase the quality.
But this difference is not hearable and is hardly measurable in normal setup. (No one ABXed that.)
If anybody could ABX it using correct cables and it would be verified,
then we could state that this is better.
@LoKi128: I think you wouldn't care if your amp cut frequencies not hearable by any man.
(Like it surely does )
AFAIK It is not related to how good your amplifier works in high and low frequency, it is more about how these frequencies interfere on the wire to the speaker. Biwiring reduces this problem because high and low frequencies follow different paths based on Ohm's law (resistance for low and high frequencies are different at high and low connections of the speaker end). Therefore biwiring should always (in theory) increase the quality.
Lets be careful about the pseudoscientific rationalizations. When biwiring, you are connecting two sets of wire to the same outputs of your amplifier and then to different posts on your speakers (one for "higher frequencies" and one for "lower frequencies") on the other end.
Of course this could possibly make a difference in the sound/electrical signals: you are theoretically reducing resistance between the amp and speaker by doubling the cross sectional area of the conductors (2 wires vs. 1). However, you are also changing the capacitance and inducance of the circuit as well. All three elements play a key role in the signal transfer - heck, your passive crossovers in the speakers are made up of resistors, capacitors and inductors too. So to biwire simply to reduce resistance is to be (blissfully?) ignorant of what the capacitance and inductance are doing. It would be very difficult (impossible?) to say that biwiring is "always" better than single wiring. For all we know you are using highly capacitive cables that affect the stability of the amplifier and biwiring may make it worse. Or maybe the crossover is tuned in a way that happens to work better with single wiring - but that would also be hard to tell given manufacturing tolerances and the huge difference in the RCL (resistance, capacitance and inductance) of "speaker cables."
In any event, you would need to know the electrical paramaters of the speaker, amplifier and the cables to model what affect biwiring might have - everything else is wild speculation and pseudo-science. The next question is whether the affect would even be audible (have to do ABX test on that) and then the next question is whether the audible difference is "better" or just different.
If you want to reduce resistance, capacitance and inductance you could just try shorter speaker cables - hard to argue that less cable has less affect than more.
If you are looking for better sound you are better off spending time placing your speakers properly in the room and tuning the resonances / nulls of the room's acoustics (if you haven't already). Remember that room acoustics can cause 20dB frequency response variations routinely, especially at lower frequencies. Biwiring will not even begin to approach the impact of acoustics in your system - I would be surprised if it made a difference of more than 0.2dB at any frequency. Moving a speaker 10cm can have a measureable and audible affect in some situations. Better to invest in an SPL meter and some books on acoustics.
Having said all this, I once biwired my Mirage speakers because it looked really cool.
Well, unfortunately, much of the criticism of my comments is due to a poor choice of words on my part. (And I apologize for being lazy.) However, I would have thought that taken in the context of everything else I said, that the phrase " . . . evaluation of audio . . ." would have been understood to mean, "listening to music." I was trying to keep my comments relevant to Atici's original post. My point was, that he, (or she), should simply try both configurations and decide by their own ears which sounded better, a concept I still stick to.
I agree with much of what has been said, but not all, and I'ld like to just make two points.
I imagine that most of you have seen these "audiophile speaker wire" debates before, as I have, and the one aspect of this that I don't get is, why there always seems to be such vehement disagreement as to whether or not the same construction technique that connects a light-bulb to the power company, wouldn't necessarily be ideal for transfering the fragile, phase-coherent, audio signal from amplifier to speaker. I too, of course, am guilty of this. I don't think any of us would argue, that we shouldn't use zip-cord to bring the satellite feed down from the dish, or romex to connect our network together. Gauge considerations aside, different cables are constructed for different purposes. Is it so hard to imagine that a purpose-built cable might make a subtle difference that test equipment simply won't measure? Can we just dismiss EVERYONE who buys expensive speaker wire as hapless dupes? Surely some, but not all.
The other point is, that I think there is a mixture, in the above comments, of technical and subjective considerations. Which is, of course, natural given the subject matter. But I think its important that we understand that they are, in fact, two different animals. We can no more scientifically determine what "sounds" best to us, than we can measure what the best wine is. What smears the distinction here is that they CAN be measured together to some extent. A glass of wine with a tablespoon of salt in it could probably be determined to "taste" bad, with the proper chemical analysis. And an amplifier with 25% THD could probably be said to sound "bad" without ever actually hearing it. (Unless you play a guitar through it, but thats a whole 'nother ball of wax.) My point here is, this all this adds up to why "everyone" can comment on the percieved quality of audio equipment. We all know what sounds good to us, or bad. And THAT, makes for some lively debate.
One last thing, I hope I didn't start a "flame" thang here. I realize my ". . . evaluation of audio . . ." comment certainly WAS inflammatory. But I still find this whole "wire" discussion to be interesting and informative.
Cheers all, dex
1) single wire:
preamp->amp->passive crossover built in speaker->appropriate freqs to low/mid/tweeter
2) biwiring/biamping...
|->amp for mid/tweeter
preamp->ACTIVE crossover->amp for bass/woofer speaker
Seems that one forgot the active crossover (if only using A/B posts on the back of the amp that is not designer for bi-wiring) to separate the appropriate frequencies for the proper speakers...
Anyway... one would get fullrange signal on both woofer and mid/tweeter by bypassing the internal passive crossover in the speaker so that person should let us know when the tweeters get fried
Hi lucpes, just so you know, Bi-amping and bi-wiring are not quite the same thing. Bi-amping is as you describe. Bi-wiring is something that a speaker has to be designed for. The manufacturer will include "straps" on the speaker binding posts that allow the high-pass and low-pass portions of the passive cross-over to be separated. So one runs separate speaker wire to the hi and lo sections without an
active cross-over. Sort of a poor-mans bi-amping. You don't see too many speakers built this way though. (Or I should say, I haven't.)
Discussions of the audible advantages of this can be referenced above.
Dex
Responding to original question:
It has been my experience that there can be a major difference between speaker cables. Especially really long ones like mine - 5-8 meters from amplifier to speakers.
You can buy very expensive speaker cables. Be aware that some are designed to manipulate the sound. These might sound better depending on the accoustic condition of your listening room and your other audio components. These types of cables are not neccesarily the best.
When buying cables, consider the following points:
* Thickness and length
* Inteference and shielding
* Connections
A thin long cable cannot carry as much power as a thick short one. You need a proper thickness or multiple thin cables in parallel. If you go with my suggestion at the end of this post, simply add another cheap cable and listen/compare.
Interference from power cables can affect sound very much. It is possible worse in USA than EU, because of the 110V/240V difference. Lower voltage = higher power, but don't kill me if I'm wrong. Anyway, keep all your signal and speaker cables away from power cables. Do not roll long cables up or tangle them together. An induction effect can be created and it does not sound good. If it is impossible to keep signal cables away from power cables, use shielded cables. Either shielded power cables or shielded signal cables or both (might not be needed).
Connecting the cables is the last step, where things often go wrong. Good conductors rust - bad conductors do not. Putting golden banana plugs on the cables is generally a bad idea - gold is a bad conductor. But they are very flexible and that matters sometimes. I use them myself, because I don't like spending hours hooking up the cables. The standarrd connectors, where you remove isolation from the cable, put it in and turn a plastic screw takes a long time, but generally connects well. Bear in mind, that you need to snip of the ends and remove more isolation if you take the cables out after a a little time. The exposed ends have rusted and cannot provide a proper connection if reused. Whether to use A+B on the amp for bi-wiring or just A probably depends which way gives you the best connection. It has been my experience that A+B does that.
I have tried several cables over the years. I tested the the cheap ($4/meter) thick cobber cables with hundreds of thin cobber threads inside some 10 years ago. I did not like them, but they were very easy to install. I used some expensive ($30/meter) solid cobber core cables from AudioQuest for years, but threw them away when I discovered something better: Cat5 twisted pair cables used for computer networks. It must be the installation type with the solid core - not the soft core cables with plugs. This cable is very cheap ($0.30/meter) and it sounds very well in my ears. It is however vitally important to connect it properly (I do not know the details of why it needs to be done). The cable consists of four wire pairs. The four pairs each have two wires - full colour and half colour - twisted around eachother. The four pairs are twisted themselves. You must connect the full colour to one pole and the half colour to another pole. You can in theory biwire your speakers with one of these cable. Use two pairs for high-range and two pairs for low ranges. But the cable is very thin. I use six cables per speaker - two for upper frequencies and four for lower frequencies. If you connect all 8 wires in a cable to one pole, you are doing it wrong. If you use multiple cables, connect all full coloured wires from all cables to one pole and the rest to the other. This cable is not shielded, so it is very important to keep it away from power cables as written above.
If you choose this cable, you might want to consider banan plugs. It is hard to remove the teflon isolation from the wires. And it takes some time to do it on the 16 cables I have used for my 5.0 surround...
I'd like to add a comment:
Audio is a physical phenomena and so is perception of music and the feelings it can invoke. But humans have no idea of how the brain works yet.
If you like to look at your expensive thick blue cables, then there is a chance that your music experience is better than some plain grey cables etc.
I believe it is of vast importance to feel good about the audio components you select, how they look, how they are installed and so on.
Connecting the cables is the last step, where things often go wrong. Good conductors rust - bad conductors do not. Putting golden banana plugs on the cables is generally a bad idea - gold is a bad conductor.
Annuka,
I agree with several points in your post, but not this one.
Gold is not a bad conductor - actually it is pretty good. It is the third best common conductor with silver being the best followed by copper and then gold. The reason that gold connection surfaces are often used and are generally desireable is that they don't oxidize (or "rust") easily, keeping electrical contacts performing well for a long time even under adverse conditions. Both silver and copper oxidize relatively quickly making gold an excellent/preferred choice for connectors. For cost reasons copper is an excellent choice for conductors (the actual wire), with some high-end designs affording silver conductors.
Some data:
A brief summary of comparative properties of metals suitable for current carrying applications and required features of the connector follows.
Silver, Copper, Gold, Aluminum and Magnesium have comparable properties, for current carrying applications and required features of the connector. The above mentioned pure metals all contain relative electrical conductivity which can be defined by Percentage of Volume Conductivity. Silver has 108.3% Volume Conductivity. Copper contains 100% Volume Conductivity. Gold assumes 73.4% Volume Conductivity. Aluminum has 64.9% Volume Conductivity. Magnesium contains 38.0% Volume Conductivity.
...poor-mans bi-amping. You don't see too many speakers built this way though. (Or I should say, I haven't.)
My point exactly... though biwiring with no crossover may sound better... especially if you have 2-way speakers you can melt ear wax and FEEL the treble...
Biwiring reduces this problem because high and low frequencies follow different paths based on Ohm's law (resistance for low and high frequencies are different at high and low connections of the speaker end). Therefore biwiring should always (in theory) increase the quality.
Right... use thicker cable for bass and thinner for treble?
[edit]sorry for spamming this thread but at least with the Alpha 40 biwiring without using a proper amp that's built for this would do no good IMHO[/edit]
Oh man... biwiring is *useless*, has no sense from an electrical/technical point of view. The only thing you do biwiring is double the capacitance and half the resistance. Capacitance is negligible in case of speaker cable. And resistance, well, once you are using a thick enough cable, there's no point in halving it.
About high and low frequencies going through same cable, this is fine, cables are perfect linear devices from an audio point of view, so can carry all frequencies without interfering each other at all.
If anyone can give me an alternative technical explanation of why could it be better, I'll be pleased to read it.
Responding to original question:
It has been my experience that there can be a major difference between speaker cables. Especially really long ones like mine - 5-8 meters from amplifier to speakers.
You can buy very expensive speaker cables. Be aware that some are designed to manipulate the sound. These might sound better depending on the accoustic condition of your listening room and your other audio components. These types of cables are not neccesarily the best.
Yes, there can be major differences in speaker cables, due to inadequate gauge size, not due to any kind of construction differences though. Read through the article I linked to originally. The subjective side of audio and people's expectations has more to do with differences heard than any actual difference. These non-existant differences were heard and raved about in the labs of John Dunlavy who engineered some terriffic speakers and I'm sure demo'd them in acoustically treated rooms hooked up to some top end amplification and playback units.
Long and short of it, your comment that if somebody thinks their colored wire will sound better, that the person will enjoy listening more over that wires is very true. I personally don't find that a good argument for running out and spending $6/ft or more on speaker wire. You're far better off investing in speakers, accoustic treatments, or a decent pair of shielded interconnects (though I don't buy into the idea that there is $3000 worth of difference between radio shack's shielded gold-plated interconnects and the ultra high-end interconnects available in snake oil stores). I do own Monster Z Reference S-Video cables and I have actually seen a difference between those and the Video-2 cables, predominantly in image noise. I do believe that good quality and shielding is worth paying a few bucks for. Cost wise, wherever I can I'd run $20 optical cables into my receiver and dump money into getting a good pre-amp section with superb DAC's so I don't have to worry about my interconnects.
I have tried several cables over the years. I tested the the cheap ($4/meter) thick cobber cables with hundreds of thin cobber threads inside some 10 years ago. I did not like them, but they were very easy to install. I used some expensive ($30/meter) solid cobber core cables from AudioQuest for years, but threw them away when I discovered something better: Cat5 twisted pair cables used for computer networks. It must be the installation type with the solid core - not the soft core cables with plugs. This cable is very cheap ($0.30/meter) and it sounds very well in my ears. It is however vitally important to connect it properly (I do not know the details of why it needs to be done). The cable consists of four wire pairs. The four pairs each have two wires - full colour and half colour - twisted around eachother. The four pairs are twisted themselves. You must connect the full colour to one pole and the half colour to another pole. You can in theory biwire your speakers with one of these cable. Use two pairs for high-range and two pairs for low ranges. But the cable is very thin. I use six cables per speaker - two for upper frequencies and four for lower frequencies. If you connect all 8 wires in a cable to one pole, you are doing it wrong. If you use multiple cables, connect all full coloured wires from all cables to one pole and the rest to the other. This cable is not shielded, so it is very important to keep it away from power cables as written above.
If you choose this cable, you might want to consider banan plugs. It is hard to remove the teflon isolation from the wires. And it takes some time to do it on the 16 cables I have used for my 5.0 surround...
As for using CAT5 for speaker wire, it's certainly a decent option since it's not that expensive in bulk, tends to be decently flexible, and naturally gives you a positive versus negative differentiation with the white/color versus solid color strands. As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too. The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal. However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.
Interference from power cables can affect sound very much. It is possible worse in USA than EU, because of the 110V/240V difference. Lower voltage = higher power, but don't kill me if I'm wrong. Anyway, keep all your signal and speaker cables away from power cables. Do not roll long cables up or tangle them together. An induction effect can be created and it does not sound good. If it is impossible to keep signal cables away from power cables, use shielded cables. Either shielded power cables or shielded signal cables or both (might not be needed).
Shielding on speaker cables is generally unneccessary, unlike shielding on interconnects. Unless I'm mistaken, speaker cables carry a high enough current that any noise picked up across the run is many dB down from the actual signal level and is probably at a current that I doubt would set most tweeters vibrating, much less the woofers and mid/bass drivers actually cable of generating the 60Hz hum you'll pick up off inductance from a power cable. Most certainly, route your interconnects away from power lines and use a good shielded cable, but you don't have to worry about speaker cabling. If anything, keep your speaker cabling further away from your interconnects.
While we're on the subject of cabling, can someone explain how 6ft of a super thick "audiophile grade" power cable can negate the "negative" effects of the miles of transmission lines between the power station and the electrical outlet in my home? Or, how it can suddenly increase things over the performance of the in-home electrical wiring running through my walls? Assuming that I'm not using a power cable with 24 gauge copper running down the middle and am instead running something closer or equal to the gauge of in-home wiring, I'm going to have to go with the "I'm being gyped" answer here too if I'm spending more than $20 on a standard 3-prong removable power cable like you find on a PC.
Well, that's enough ranting for me tonight. I do find it very interesting that some of the people around here or elsewhere that demand ABX results on the understanding that our brains will trick us into hearing differences and therefore we must statistically divorce our brains from our expectations could possibly argue against the evidence borne out in blind tests that most of what we hear over "audiophile" cables is exactly this mental trickery. I'd be willing to bet that many of the people subscribing to the expensive cable is better theory are also those who would refuse to spend the time ABX'ing the output of audio encoders because they already insist that what they use sounds best.
[edit, diced up the quoting and positioned it for relevance]
gdougherty, I agree on nearly everything:
About interconnects, I think that unless you have special EMI (interference) problems at your house, regular interconnects will be fine. Even a better shielded interconnects don't need to be expensive at all.
As to CAT5 braided cables, the effect of doing such a construction is to decrease inductance and increase capacitance of the cables. Capacitance is not a problem with any decent amplifier. Inductance can have slight audible consequences in case of very long cable runs and/or very low impedance exotic speakers. For usual lengths and most speakers, I think inductance of regular speaker cable doesn't have audible consequences.
When a single 4 mm2 cable is used and a 1000 Hz sine is played at 1w, there is 1w in 4 mm2.
When bi-wiring with two 4 mm2 cables and a 1000 Hz sine is played at 1W, there is still 1W in 4mm2 (the woofer cable only).
The current being cut into two parts by the passive crossover of the speaker, the effect of the resistance of the cable on the speaker response will be the same mono or biwiring. The only difference is that the cable will heat more in mono cabling.
Thus, if I'm correct, it is wrong to say that the resistance is divided by 2, it is the same in mono or bi wiring.
Thus, if I'm correct, it is wrong to say that the resistance is divided by 2, it is the same in mono or bi wiring.
Yes, you're right, in practice resistance remains the same.
I studied electronics for a short while many years ago. I shall be the first to admit that many aspects of audio cabling sounds crazy. But when the audioble difference is more than obvious then I choose to trust my ears and my fellow audio nerds.
Here (http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html) is an advanced version of the cat5 cable I suggested. It use 7 cables per speaker and it takes forever to braid the cables. Several people has made this cable and reviewed (http://www.venhaus1.com/webreviews.html) it.
But when the audioble difference is more than obvious then I choose to trust my ears and my fellow audio nerds.
Still, I remain skeptic, there are many factors that could have an influence in your tests: with "exotic" amps (Naim for example) those high capacitance cables can make an audible difference (for worse, in theory). Maybe if capacitance is high enough, it can have an audible effect even on properly designed amps, but always for worse (post-ringing due to amp unstability).
With very hard to drive speakers or very long cables, there might be an audible difference due to the reduced inductance. At last, all possible differences should be possible to measure.
Of course, It is very important the way the tests were performed (you know, double-blind, without movig speakers at all, etc).
Several people has made this cable and reviewed (http://www.venhaus1.com/webreviews.html) it.
Sorry, I don't believe in "audiophile" reviews, and less if they are of cables. Not to say that among those reviews there are some of silver interconnects or power cords... I've read enough absurd reviews of these kind not to take them seriously at all.
Sorry, I don't believe in "audiophile" reviews, and less if they are of cables. Not to say that among those reviews there are some of silver interconnects or power cords... I've read enough absurd reviews of these kind not to take them seriously at all.
Well I do not believe in self-proclaimed "experts". Every expert has holes in his/hers knowledge. And for every statement made, you can find another self-proclaimed "expert" claiming the exact opposite. Many experts get paid for being an expert. That can influence their judgement a lot.
If you dismiss every statement made by so called "audiophiles", then you are being blinded by your knowledge.
If you assume that all 46 reviews comes from your so called "audiophiles", then you are generalising without proper cause.
If you assume that every audiophile relying on his ears instead of trusting the generally accepted knowledge is crazy and writes absurd reviews, then you are again generalising without proper cause.
It is very hard to evaluate the statements of audiophiles against the statements of "experts". I rarely make specific recommendations when it comes to audio. I believe that people should read the posts and draw their own conclusions. In this case I have made an exception by suggesting a very cheap cable that I use and like myself. Most people should be able to afford the $10 and a few hours for experimenting. Everyone can hear for themselves on their own stereo how bi-wiring sounds, how using A+B instead og A for bi-wiring sounds etc.
Well, when I call somebody an expert (which I don't consider myself), is because he has worked on that issue for long time and has real technical knowledge over the subject, not just "this sounds awesome" and "this sounds crap" type of audiophile comment.
Said that, I prefer to support technically-based opinions than purely subjective-subject to placebo ones. Depending on who talks, I will trust him in regards to his subjective opinion on how something sounds, but classic "audiophile-type" opinion regarding sound of audio equipment is not trustable for me.
I want to buy decent cables for my speakers and was wondering on how the setup should be.
The speakers in question (Infinity Alpha 40) is biwirable. My amp has two pairs of speaker outputs. In this case which one is a better idea: to use biwiring cables or use separate wires using both of the speaker outputs on my amp? If I use separate identical cables, does the length make difference?
[span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%']The two sets of connectors on your amplifier are for two different sets of speakers. They are
not for bi-wiring[/span]
(I appologise if someone already said this - I read this thread for as long as I had the patience to, and didn't see it)
If you are going to bi-wire, bring both sets of wires from the
same connectors on the amp.
I bi-wired once. It sounded better than before at first. But since I was changing from 2x20m of bell wire to 4x4m of real speaker cable, that was hardly a surprise. You can say I was imagining it, but on many recordings it made them sound too bright, so I actually preferred the bell wire. The placeabo effect doesn't usually work that way around! I could swap between both sets of cables, but obviously it wasn't a blind test.
Bi- or Tri- amping is great. But there are probably more cost-effective ways of improving the sound.
Cheers,
David.
Hi Atici, you have to be careful about articles like the one in the above link. Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment.
HA regulars, as soon as you read this, you should have known better than to reply!
Here, we are objectivists. We are now arguing with a subjectivist (who has probably strayed out of rec.audio.opinion). You might as well try to get an athiest and an evangelical to agree with each other!*
"Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment."
And in what way does ABXing use "test equipment" - it uses ears, and only ears!
Leaving aside psychoacoustic codecs (which intentionally trick the ears) some of the smartest people in audio engineering hold the view that everything can be measured. Not all, but most. There are a few of these clever folks who have attacked the weakest link (loudspeakers) with a pure scientific (i.e. measurement based) approach, and have acheived remarkable results. But the results are expensive to manufacture, as well as research.
Some of the richest people in audio marketing know that most people don't understand or trust science. The people who are most artistic (music is an artform!) are often (but not always) least scientific. So they try to find a different way to sell their audio products. They tap into the near-mythical to explain why their brand is better than the rest. Call it nonsense, BS, or wishful thinking.
Even more remarkable is the fact that so few people oppose them. But then, there's no profit in convincing non-scientific people of your scientific facts, because they can't tell the genuine physics from the snake oil. If you can't beat 'em...
My answer is: use your ears. You are probably more discerning than you are allowed to believe, because Hi-Fi magazines want to you think that only they know how to listen - otherwise, why but them? (there are some good ones btw!) If you are not discerning, and can't hear the difference, then look on that as a blessing, and spend your money on something else that will give you pleasure. If you can hear the difference, listen long and hard before spending your money. By long and hard, I mean months, if not years. If you can't wait that long, buy a cheap system in the interim.
After buying your dream system, forget the hi-fi and enjoy the music.
Cheers,
David.
(one foot in each camp: 3/4 objectivist, 1/4 subjectivist!
*100% evangelical, so I hope I can write that without causing offense)
Yep... I'm more of an objectivist, but I try not to be mind-closed (BTW, ABX tests ARE subjective tests, but made with a scientific approach). I believe in things when they are proved enough. But 99.9% of "audiophile-type" reports don't have the conditions to be considered proof of anything.
By the way, I'm 100% of the opinion of that any audible differences can be measured... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.
[ The reason that gold connection surfaces are often used and are generally desireable is that they don't oxidize (or "rust") easily, keeping electrical contacts performing well for a long time even under adverse conditions. Both silver and copper oxidize relatively quickly making gold an excellent/preferred choice for connectors. For cost reasons copper is an excellent choice for conductors (the actual wire), with some high-end designs affording silver conductors.
Silver may oxidize easily, but the kicker is that silver oxide conducts virtually as well as
the fresh shiny stuff.
The place that silver wire may pay off with its high conductivity is where you can't
just bump up the wire size without affecting something else. Speaker coils for instance.
But silver has a pay-off. It weights more than copper, so it should not be the wisest choice for speaker coils. In fact, top Sennheiser headphones are made of aluminium, which is worse conductor than copper but weights less.
[span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%']The two sets of connectors on your amplifier are for two different sets of speakers. They are not for bi-wiring[/span]
(I appologise if someone already said this - I read this thread for as long as I had the patience to, and didn't see it)
Why? It's the same thing physically. It's a parallel connection, but the split occurs inside the Amp rather than on the cable. I heard many good arguments supporting such a connection too (for instance you can run only low(woofer) or high(mid+tweeter) of your speakers separately by turning on/off either of the speaker outputs of your Amp).
Hi Atici, you have to be careful about articles like the one in the above link. Its very similiar to sites like www.pcabx.com that use test equipment instead of ears to measure audio equipment.
HA regulars, as soon as you read this, you should have known better than to reply!
Here, we are objectivists. We are now arguing with a subjectivist (who has probably strayed out of rec.audio.opinion). You might as well try to get an athiest and an evangelical to agree with each other!*
. . . So they try to find a different way to sell their audio products.
My answer is: use your ears. . . After buying your dream system, forget the hi-fi and enjoy the music.
No, I did
not wander out of rec.whatever..., I do
not sell audio equipment, (though I worked as a technician in an audio store, along with a short stint in a recording studio and some years as a "roadie"), but
most important of all, I don't want to "argue" about this. I
do think its a very interesting topic however, and I will be the first to stand up and wave the flag of "enlightenment" if its ever truly proven that there isn't now, and could never be an audible difference in an audio system, with different speaker wire.
My comments about pcabx.com come from my personal experience with site, which I have only used to read about the sound card comparison. I did peruse some of the other pages, but not all. As near as I can tell, all sound card evaluations are based on how they "measured-up" using SpectraLAB softare. I've never seen anywhere where Arny Krueger mentions listening to the sound cards and with what equipment. Arny Krueger is notorious for the classic evaluating of speaker cable based on its DC resistance, which, of course, has nothing to do with how it might sound in a given system. I don't mean to sound like I'm knocking Mr. Krueger here, but he is, as you point out, objective, and while that may be good for understanding electrical specs, it is not necessarily good for "listening to music" tests.
Still, I remain skeptic, there are many factors that could have an influence in your tests: with "exotic" amps (Naim for example) those high capacitance cables can make an audible difference (for worse, in theory). Maybe if capacitance is high enough, it can have an audible effect even on properly designed amps, but always for worse (post-ringing due to amp unstability).
With very hard to drive speakers or very long cables, there might be an audible difference due to the reduced inductance. At last, all possible differences should be possible to measure.
And this is what makes this discussion all the more frustrating sometimes. KikeG is specifically mentioning the type of things that may cause one speaker wire to sound different than another. The "listener" will then decide which is "better",
not some piece of test equipment, obviously except in gross mismatch cases.
... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.
This is so wrong that once again, I have to believe we're talking apples and oranges here. Sure, test equipment can measure THD better than my ears can, but they can never convey which sounds better. Evaluating technical specifications is surely objective, determining what sounds good is purely subjective, but I do agree that many manufacturers and retail stores try to correlate one to the other falsely.
2Bdecided said: "After buying your dream system, forget the hi-fi and enjoy the music."
I think we're so close to being on the same page here, but somehow getting there through vastly different paths.
Dex
I've never seen anywhere where Arny Krueger mentions listening to the sound cards and with what equipment.
Well... Arny Krueger has two sites: pcavtech.com is all about measurements, and pcabx.com is all about listening tests, including actual audio files to download and perform your own listening tests.
And this is what makes this discussion all the more frustrating sometimes. KikeG is specifically mentioning the type of things that may cause one speaker wire to sound different than another. The "listener" will then decide which is "better", not some piece of test equipment, obviously except in gross mismatch cases.
As to measurements, it depends. For example, in case of interconnects, measurable differences are tens or hundreds of times below know audibility tresholds, so measuremens do say something here. In case of speaker cable, frequency response differences below 0.1 dB are very common, being 0.1 dB considered as just undetectable, and higher values may be detectable under optimum conditions.
... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.
This is so wrong that once again, I have to believe we're talking apples and oranges here. Sure, test equipment can measure THD better than my ears can, but they can never convey which sounds better. Evaluating technical specifications is surely objective, determining what sounds good is purely subjective, but I do agree that many manufacturers and retail stores try to correlate one to the other falsely.
Well, what I said is that " I'm 100% of the opinion of that any audible differences can be measured... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago". I didn't say anything at that paragraph about how measured differences relate to subjective preference. Measurements are good to objectively know differences among audio equipment, and to know how relevant are those differences. If there are differences that can be considered relevant, how they relate to perceived audio quality is a much more complex (and subjective) issue. However, if you go for transparency, the better the measurements, the better the equipment.
Addition to my previous post:
Note, I always talk about audible differences, not better or worse sounding. And if at any time I say that something can be "bad" in this context, I mean it deviates from ideal (from a technical point of view) behaviour, or what comes to be the same, from sonic transparency.
(Admins: Edit does not work well, makes strange things. Editing this post works fine, but editing previous doesn't).
By the way, I'm 100% of the opinion of that any audible differences can be measured... Electrical measurement equipment surpassed ear capabilities many years ago.
The thing is...
maybe you can measure everything that you can hear. And you can't hear everything that you can measure.
BUT it's not always trivial to correlate what you're measuring with what you're hearing. Sometimes you're measuring (and hence improving) the wrong thing.
If you think this is nonsense, let me use audio coding as an example. Lots of fair/poor audio codecs sound like they increase or decrease the trebble; but they exhibit a meaurably flat frequency reponse. The cause? It's usually a temporal effect - subtle smearing of transients or somesuch. This is quite difficult to spot in the waveform or spectrogram during real music, even though it's easy using castanets.wav with an mp3 encoder. It's totally impossible to catch using a frequency response measurement. But it sounds like the frequency response has changed.
I give this example because I know why it happens. The point is, with some of the perceived changes in sound, we don't know why the occurr. i.e. we don't know what to measure to find the effect. It's probably already there in the measurements, but we don't know quite where to look. Sure, if we had a system which measured perfectly in every single dimension, they wouldn't occurr. But no such system exists. With a real world system, with many many many known non-idealities, it's sometimes difficult to know which measurement is relevant to what we're hearing.
What really makes life difficult is that some of the biggest measured problems can be inaudible (Try measuring the SNR of mpc standard!), while some of the smallest can have an audible effect (exceptionally quiet "very early reflections" can have a huge impact on the perceived spectrum of a sound, without changing the measured frequency response).
So, yes, if you can hear it, you can measure it. But it's the ears that have to lead the measurements. To say "this measurement says the device is perfect, but my ears say it sounds horrible - I'll ignore my ears" would be a stupid approach!
To say"this measurement says the device is perfect, but my ears say it sounds horrible - the device must be doing something near-magical that I can't measure - I'll never measure anything again!" would also be a stupid approach!
Cheers,
David.
Sorry Dex - I didn't mean to offend, and I know you're not trying to sell us Hi-Fi equipment!
I probably disagree on "subjectively better". Or maybe I don't... If you mean "sounds nice to me" then I don't care what sounds nicer to you - I want something that sounds like the original event. If we accept that this can't happen, then I guess we all buy whatever sounds like the lesser evil to each one of us, which gets us back to "sounds nice to me".
I can only bring my experience at university forward in this, because I've never played with "serious" Hi-Fi (of the cost you mention) at home.
1. On a system which was designed so that the measured frequency response was flatter than anything you have ever heard in your life, the results were jaw dropping. We had Ken Kesler in (Hi-fi Journo), and we couldn't shift him - he played CD after CD after CD, and loved it. He wrote it up as the best system he'd heard...
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_...press.html#HiFi (http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_lab/arl_press.html#HiFi)
2. On that same system, it would have good days and bad days. Maybe there was a software fault which meant at was actually different on different days - but this is unlikely. It was subjective, but it wasn't subtle - we'd walk in and agree that it sounded like a dog, using the same recording that had sounded great the previous day, and would probably sound great the next day. It did sound better after it had been left on for hours (even days). It (sometimes) sounded much better at night. What was it? Variable RF interference from several thousand PCs on campus? Temperature changes? Us in different moods (but why all of us?!) We never found out.
The interesting thing is that the response was only "perfectly" flat at one point in space. At other points, it was still better than most systems, but at that one point, it was "nearly perfect". What was amazing is that most people could find that tiny sweet spot. Not just audiophiles, but people who thought their ghetto blaster was good! Whether they liked it was a different matter - some people wanted more bass, and some recordings always sounded too bright. But don't you find it strange that in a world where we go after "what sounds nice to me", objective measured perfection, when nearly achieved, was usually preferable? And even preferable to "very nearly as good but not quite"?
Cheers,
David.
@2Bdecided:
BUT it's not always trivial to correlate what you're measuring with what you're hearing. Sometimes you're measuring (and hence improving) the wrong thing.
I don't think this is nonsense at all, I agree. I'd say that what is difficult sometimes is to analyze the measured (or better say "recorded") differences. It is also difficult sometimes to correlate the differences found with the perceived differences. For example, in recent Pio2001's soundcard challenge, I can definitely hear (ABX)differences in some of the samples. However, analyzing the samples, there are objective differences, but it is difficult to fully know what those consist of. There's a pitch difference of around 0.002% IIRC, which can't account for perceived differences. Due to this pitch difference, it's dificult to perform a reliable "classic" FFT or time analysis. Probably there's something more (DAT resampling?) , but with my actual means it's impossible to see what.
I think, however, that given the proper test signals, the proper equipment and the proper knowledge and time, anything can be measured, analyzed and characterized. For devices aimed to be linear (classic hi-fi equipment), it is not very difficult to know what to measure, in most cases. In case of more complex processes, such as resampling or lossy compression, it can be more difficult and even require complex additional processing, for example. In case of Pio's test, what is lacking is a proper analysis of the play/rec chain using the adequate test signals and an analysis of the results.
....The difference between zip cord and "good" speaker cables comes from a phenomenon known as the "skin effect". Audio frequencys travel through the skin, or outside edge of a wire. So, good wires are made up of many small wires, braided in such a way as to maximize phase-coherency that might be smeared by inductive interaction in larger wires.....
Dex
If this is what you attribute the difference in sound from speaker cable to, then you need some education.
Skin effects have no significant affect at the frequencies used in audio; they only come into play at higher frequencies typically used in video applications where such an argument for more expensive cables might be valid.
If you want to argue about the benefits of expensive speaker cable go right ahead, but don't attribute it to something that can and has been proven to make no difference.
In case you hadn't guessed I subscribe to the, thick enough and that's all that matters camp. I'm sure that some cables sound different to others, but that is most likely because they have been engineered to colour the sound, they are not going to be more accurate or "better", just different.
[Edit] Just for fun I typed "skin effect audio" into google, the very first link gives a resonable explanation of the subject.
http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audiop...fect_Cables.htm (http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audioprinciples/interconnects/SkinEffect_Cables.htm)
I did the same calculus, though using the complete formula for the skin effect in a cylindrical condictor, and came to the same conclusion.
But none of use have calculated the effect of inductance, because don't forget that the skin effect increases the apparent resistance and the apparent inductance.
2Bdecided: As I look back at my post, the bold emphasis did make it appear that I may have been offended. Sorry for that, I wasn't.
KikeG: Thanks for the other ABX link. I'll check it out. One of the aspects of audio that helps "muddy-the-waters" of balancing the objective and subjective parts of all this, at least for me , I can best illustrate by example. I can "tweak" my system to where I think it sounds best, and my wife thinks its too "bright". Obviously, measurement doesn't really play a part here, because were both listening to the same thing at the same time. Something different is happening between the ear and the brain. It is along these lines that I find it difficult sometimes to correlate a "specification" with what I hear, or quantify this to a "good" or "bad" sound.
Daneel: I originaly got that notion from an "engineering note" that I read back in the days when I was a tech at an audio store. I don't remember its source, but there's a very good chance that it was literature from one of the speaker cable manufacturers that we sold. In my defense, I did state in the next paragraph that it was "arguable" to the relevance of this.
You are, however, quite correct when you say I ". . . need some education."
Fortunately, this forum is supplying some.
One of the last points I want to make is: my view on the whole "audible effect of speaker wire" debate, comes fundamentally from listening to two "audiophile" speaker cables on a friends system about 20 years ago. This was in the analog days. I can't remember all the specifics of his system, (he owned the audio store, by the way), but I remember it was a Sumiko cartridge on a Rabco arm, can't remember the base, played through an Audio Research pre-amp, Classe' amp, and whatever the top of the line Magnapans were at that time. (They were four panels.) Anyway, there very definitely was a difference, albeit subtle, between the two cables. Neither of us had any bias towards either cable, we just wanted to see if there was a difference.
This is why I take the position I do when these speaker wire discussions come up. I can't necessarily state why one cable sounds better, or perhaps I should say, different, than another. I just know they do. But even that statement needs qualification. The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system.
Dex
The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system.
And will only be reliable if done under blind conditions.
Here (http://www.venhaus1.com/diycatfivecables.html) is an advanced version of the cat5 cable I suggested. It use 7 cables per speaker and it takes forever to braid the cables. Several people has made this cable and reviewed (http://www.venhaus1.com/webreviews.html) it.
Annuka, this is exactly what I was talking about before.
As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too. The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal. However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.
I'm seconding KikeG's belief that measurement equiment surpassed human abilities a while back. While I agree it might not reveal which result is subjectively better, it should reveal if there is a significant difference. Theoretically, we could hook up several test sets of cables, run a broadband signal (and probably any number of other test signals) through each, and measure whether there is any significant effect on the signal. Since digital signals can be sent down power cables, I'd imagine it might also be possible to simultaneously transmit a high rate timecode like signal to measure the accuracy of the signal on the other end.
[edit: quoted my previous comment to clarify] (thanks for pointing that out SW)
As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too. The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal. However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.
As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too. The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal. However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.
...Déjà vu? Or is this proof that gdougherty is a robot?
(I eventually figured out that this was an intentional self-quote, sans quote tags. But it really sent my head spinning for a minute.)
Is there a database of measurements taken for various speaker cables? Are the measurements all so similar for any cable better than low-grade that a database would be pointless?
One of the last points I want to make is: my view on the whole "audible effect of speaker wire" debate, comes fundamentally from listening to two "audiophile" speaker cables on a friends system about 20 years ago. This was in the analog days. I can't remember all the specifics of his system, (he owned the audio store, by the way), but I remember it was a Sumiko cartridge on a Rabco arm, can't remember the base, played through an Audio Research pre-amp, Classe' amp, and whatever the top of the line Magnapans were at that time. (They were four panels.) Anyway, there very definitely was a difference, albeit subtle, between the two cables. Neither of us had any bias towards either cable, we just wanted to see if there was a difference.
This is why I take the position I do when these speaker wire discussions come up. I can't necessarily state why one cable sounds better, or perhaps I should say, different, than another. I just know they do. But even that statement needs qualification. The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system.
Dex
I can't really buy into this. I sincerely doubt the results of your tests simply because I've caught myself claiming there is a difference even when I can't put my finger on it or even really hear it, I simply suspect it must be there. Our memory, touch, hearing, taste, smell and even vision are all so easily confounded by what our brain expects or suspects that I simply can't trust them outside of any blind statistical tests. Test after test, as well as real world experience, bears out that what we think we sense is not necessarily there.
I'm not calling you a liar, an idiot, gulible or any other such insult. I'm simply suggesting that it's more than likely that you, as well as many other well meaning "audiophiles," have been tricked by your brain into believing in a false reality.
Having believed the line about expensive systems for a while myself, I look back on it and see it now as the last refuge of the backpeddaling audiophile. Whenever I couldn't get reality to gel with logic or my own limited experiences, I fell back on the idea that only super high-end, super transparent equipment must reveal the kinds of differences I expected.
As a business graduate, and a business owner, I've come to recognize that often the pricing of a product has less to do with the material and labor cost of manufacture and more to do with the overhead that contributes to the end sale. i.e. a $10,000 speaker, amplifier or whatever, likely costs only a few hundred dollars, perhaps a thousand or so to manufacture. You really pay for the name, the R&D, the marketing, the administration and the low volume of sales at this price level. The final price then is set on all of that, plus the intended profit, and what the targeted market will bear/expects to pay for the supposed level of quality. Pricing is a very complex animal, yet our world generally expects that a more expensive product is better. Certainly we also allow for exceptions, but in the absence of any other information the general rule of thumb is that "you get what you pay for." My own personal subjective experience is that in terms of actual value, most high-end audio equipment does not adhere to this common logic. To clarify, I personally don't believe that a $60,000 speaker buys you $50,000 worth of value over a $10,000 speaker, but I also can't currently fathom spending ten times the value of my transportation on a pair of speakers when I'm rather happy with my B&W's that cost one tenth the value of my vehicle.
As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too. The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal. However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.
As to whether using those pairs or doing some of the complicated braiding techniques listed on the web actually makes a difference, I'm going to have to vote that the results are highly subjective here too. The braiding instructions you can find elsewhere certainly make a nicely wound cable that isn't messy and has a unique appeal, not to mention alot of pride marks for the persons patient enough to endure the ordeal. However, after investing several days of my own time suffering through the absolute tedium of constructing these cables on the expectation that they will outperform even the most highly priced speaker cables available, you'd better believe they'll sound better to me.
...Déjà vu? Or is this proof that gdougherty is a robot?
(I eventually figured out that this was an intentional self-quote, sans quote tags. But it really sent my head spinning for a minute.)
Is there a database of measurements taken for various speaker cables? Are the measurements all so similar for any cable better than low-grade that a database would be pointless?
I don't know that such a database exists or that if it did it would contain anything other than resistance and capacitance. The kind of testing I theorized about (if that's what you were thinking) I've never heard of, and I doubt the equipment currently exists to do that kind of testing (though I'm certain the knowledge to create it exists)
whatever the top of the line Magnapans were at that time. (They were four panels.) Anyway, there very definitely was a difference, albeit subtle, between the two cables.
Are not Magnepan "ESL" speakers, as refered in the skin effect article (http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audioprinciples/interconnects/SkinEffect_Cables.htm) ?
Most modern day loudspeakers are relatively benign loads to drive compared to some of the more difficult ESL designs which typically have impedance dips down to about an ohm at 20kHz.
The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system.
And will only be reliable if done under blind conditions.
This is a great example of one of the points I'm trying to make about not getting too caught up in this whole "ABX-blind-testing" thing. Lets take a simple hypothetical situation:
A friend has two speakers, one of which has a small tear in the speaker cone. He invites you over and says, "hey, I want you to listen and see if you can tell if that left speaker has a rip in the cone." You know the rip is there, you know which speaker its in, and you have a good idea what a ripped paper cone is going to sound like. None of this invalidates that you
do in fact, hear the difference. It is not the testing methodology that
creates the variables.
This is part of the reason that I think we're mixing two different subjects into one discussion. On one hand, you may have a cable manufacturer who wants to test whether or not their new product performs like they designed it to. In this case, ABX style, blind-testing is absolutely necessary and critical. On the other hand, you have perhaps, a casual situation where a friend wants to see what you think of his new "audiophile" speaker wire. The fact that its not scientific does not make it impossible that there might be a difference. It just makes that observance invalid so far as convincing others to make the same purchase.
I hope what I'm trying to say here makes
some sense.
I'm not calling you a liar, an idiot, gulible or any other such insult. I'm simply suggesting that it's more than likely that you, as well as many other well meaning "audiophiles," have been tricked by your brain into believing in a false reality.
I hope you, (or anyone else), doesn't worry about this. I'll never take it that way, as I hope no one takes offence at my comments either. I do find your second sentence here, puzzling though. I don't understand why you think its ". . . more than likely. . ." that my brain tricked me into hearing something I didn't. Perhaps I'm grossly over-simplifying the debate here, but it seems to me that this all boils down to one simple contention: That its impossible that speaker wire, regardless of its construction, could have an audible effect on the music being reproduced. (Obviously, gauge considerations aside.) Is that, actually what folks are saying here? If thats
not the contention here, if there
could be a difference, isn't it not only likely, but obvious, that someone, somewhere would hear those differences? And why, might I not be one of those people?
And, as a slight aside, if you described my listening habits and stereo system to a thousand "audiophiles", I doubt that
any of them would consider me a member of the "club". Most of my listening, these days, is of mp3's or Ogg's played through a Turtle Beach sound card, into a late 70's vintage Sony amp, into equaly as old Yamaha speakers. Goodies, but oldies. I'm hardly a "tweak" and believe that anyone who runs a green marker around the edge of their CD to "improve" its sound, is truly an idiot.
Dex
Our memory, touch, hearing, taste, smell and even vision are all so easily confounded by what our brain expects or suspects that I simply can't trust them outside of any blind statistical tests. Test after test, as well as real world experience, bears out that what we think we sense is not necessarily there.
That's how our brain works, so
any abudio quality test without double-blinding is useless...
Do you want setup that sounds good only in comparisons and even that only in some conditions?
Placebo is a Strong Thingy
C'mon Bedeox, you couldn't have meant that how it sounds! I can't compare the sound of an
$80,000 Mark Levinson system with a clock radio without "double-blind" testing?
Surely, thats not what you meant, yet it convey's the idea that we're on two different paths here.
Dex
In HA, MP3 vs original, with measurable time smearing and lowpass, has been ABXed. Vinyl vs CD with measurable frequency loss has been ABXed too.
In hifi, very few ABX tests has been done. I don't think it would be difficult to ABX two different speakers, but well, I've not heard of ABX tests done between speakers, so I won't speak of it.
On the other hand, differences between cables, or between original CDs and copies, that are not measurable, have not been ABXed.
The amount of ABX tests done in hifi in general is too little to sort out a correlation between what has been abxed and what should be audible.
But my opinion is that as long as no one ABXes any line cable, digital cable, biwiring, or CD copying, the hypothesis that states that what is not measurable is not audible is a good hypothesis.
I recall that an ABX test with positive results is a proof that a difference was heard, and is not difficult to run. So why doesn't anybody who can hear a difference decide himself and perform a properly designed ABX test to end the debate once for all ?
For me, the most probable answer is that its because there is not any audible effect, and that's why all blind tests fail.
I've not heard of any blind tests done in hifi, because I'm not in hifi mailing lists, but if people tell me that most people in audiophile ML say that blind tests doesn't work, what other reason could there be for this than that they tried and failed ?
Why do they fail ? ABXing MP3 is possible, ABXing CD vs vinyl is possible, ABXing analog copies of CD vs digital copies is possible, therefore ABX blind tests do work.
What's the reason why audiophile say ABX is crap ?
In fact I can see two of them : a logical one, and a pragmatic one.
The logical reason is that in theory there should be no difference audible between different cables of same gauge, or between an original CD and a CDR with the same data, so I don't see anything abnormal in the fact that an ABX test between them would fail.
The pragmatic reason is that setting an ABX test between hardwares like cables, or even CDs, requires two people at least, and more time than for ABXing two files in a computer with headphones.
And if placebo doesn't exists, how do you explain that yesterday when a tried to ABX the track Camouflage - That Smiling Face, that I found to be smeared in MP3 APS vs the original WAV, I was sure to have at least 10/12, because I could perfectly hear the difference, while I had in fact 5/12 only ?
And if placebo doesn't exists, how do you explain that yesterday when a tried to ABX the track Camouflage - That Smiling Face, that I found to be smeared in MP3 APS vs the original WAV, I was sure to have at least 10/12, because I could perfectly hear the difference, while I had in fact 5/12 only ?
That is EXACTLY what placebo is! You were positive, convinced that you could hear a difference... but in reality you could not. Similar to when someone buys a new expensive set of cables, and they are positive they can hear a difference, but really they cannot.
At the same time, I just wanna make clear that my opinion of the whole audio quality is that you should not trouble yourself over it too much. If something sounds good to you, great! But at the same time, don't try to convince everyone that your way of doing things is the best way. Just keep it to yourself, and be happy.
But if you really want to get into a discussion with someone about audio quality, then you really need hard data, not subjective. That is because since everyone's perception is different, you have to find a common ground between everyone, and that would be the test equipment and methodologies.