The Great Cable and Interconnect Swindle: An Etiology

[gmgraves]

10 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

Hmmm. I wonder why ? Could it be age related perhaps ? 😉

 

I can still hear tape hiss, but it never bothered me even as a kid (but the 15,750 Hz TV “fly back” frequency produced by the horizontal oscillator in an NTSC television, used to drive me crazy!). Since it was constant and unchanging, I can/could ignore it.

[sandyk]

34 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I can still hear tape hiss, but it never bothered me even as a kid (but the 15,750 Hz TV “fly back” frequency produced by the horizontal oscillator in an NTSC television, used to drive me crazy!). Since it was constant and unchanging, I can/could ignore it.

 

 I had the same problem with our PAL System 15,625HZ when a younger adult.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Frank, that’s total nonsense and I’m sure that you MUST know it too. Either you’re putting us on, or, you tend to greatly exaggerate the results of your little experiments. There is no real third choice. Surely you must realize that if dressing cables made the sort of difference that you are reporting, others would have found it too. But instead of just ridiculing you, I tried to replicate your results. I have a pair of TUK brand powered speakers in my office similar in concept to yours. I.E. one speaker has the electronics and the other doesn’t. The main speaker (right channel)  connects to the left channel with just a cable. I moved that cable every way it was possible; draped it over the back of the desk, even laid the cable on inverted ceramic demitasse cups, to get it up off the desk. Nothing made the slightest perceivable difference in the sound. Even if it had, it would have only affected the left channel, the channel connected with the cable, because the right channel doesn’t have a cable!

 

There can be a variety of reasons for why this happened in mine, and you're not noticing anything varying in yours, George.

 

First of all, I've done a fair bit of tweaking of the external environment, isolating the electronics from mains noise - this has lifted the standard very nicely, and allowed 'rough' recordings to come up much, much better. Adele 21 needs everything working exactly right to come good, so is an excellent test specimen.

 

Next, everything has to be in order, for a single thing not in order to be obvious. A good analogy is a piano - if the instrument is generally out of tune, then getting an expert piano tuner to make a couple of strings perfect will be almost completely unnoticeable; it will still sound awful! But have the piano in excellent tune, and then deliberately get a single string to go sour - that will sound awful! That's the principle at work - the one thing that's out of alignment "makes all the difference".

 

Another consideration, your cable may be a better quality specimen, or the internal circuitry may be better set up to isolate its working from noise being generated by the cable ... every rig will be unique ... what works for one setup may have zero impact in another.

 

The other thing is to understand better what I did - in exaggerated form, imagine the cable being extremely sensitive, physically, to vibration, say from heavy bass in the music - makes it rattle against anything it happens to touch in its path; the harder the thing it touches, the more the rattle ... what one has to do is damp that vibration, the same thing as a shock absorber in a suspension does. I happen to use Blu Tack, because it's cheap, readily available, and does the job, in an experiment. In that sense, the inverted ceramic cups are not a good method.

 

So, I would give it another go, George, just in case.

 

Interestingly, this morning, completely unprompted, Bev was just shaking her head about how much of a difference getting this cable right made yesterday - I just say, "Welcome to the mad world of optimising audio systems - get one thing wrong, and it falls apart!" ... you get sorta used to it, after doing for decades ... 😉.

[fas42]

50 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Even if it had, it would have only affected the left channel, the channel connected with the cable, because the right channel doesn’t have a cable!

 

Actually, this demonstrates more clearly that it most likely is disturbing the digital to analogue conversion area of the circuit - would be one circuit board with everything, one chip would do both channels; the noise gets in there, disrupts its working - Bingo! Both channels go off ...

[gmgraves]

3 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

 I had the same problem with our PAL System 15,625HZ when a younger adult.

Pretty standard stuff. We had a RCA Victor B&W TV in the early ‘50’s, and I never heard/noticed the fly-back on that, but when we got our first color set (also RCA circa 1956), that was the first time I heard it. After that just about every NTSC TV I had to put up with it until I was 35 or so, after which I couldn’t hear it so easily any more (of course If I stuck my head inside the TV I could still hear it until very recently. I can’t hear 15,750 Hz any more But I can still hear 15 KHz (sorta)!

 

[Allan F]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Pretty standard stuff. We had a RCA Victor B&W TV in the early ‘50’s, and I never heard/noticed the fly-back on that, but when we got our first color set (also RCA circa 1956), that was the first time I heard it. After that just about every NTSC TV I had to put up with it until I was 35 or so, after which I couldn’t hear it so easily any more (of course If I stuck my head inside the TV I could still hear it until very recently. I can’t hear 15,750 Hz any more But I can still hear 15 KHz (sorta)!

 

 

Other than a repairman, why on earth would anyone stick their head inside the TV for any reason, let alone to hear a 15,750 Hz tone? Must be an old TV because I don't see how you could stick your head inside a flat screen?

[gmgraves]

11 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

Other than a repairman, why on earth would anyone stick their head inside the TV for any reason, let alone to hear a 15,750 Hz tone? Must be an old TV because I don't see how you could stick your head inside a flat screen?

You’re being too literal. If I got to close to the back of a CRT-based NTSC TV I could still hear it. Of course, we, here in the USA don’t use NTSC any more, nor do we use CRT TVs any more. Today’s LCD/OLED screens don’t have a high-voltage raster, so there is no audible high frequency sound.

[sandyk]

5 hours ago, gmgraves said:

You’re being too literal. If I got to close to the back of a CRT-based NTSC TV I could still hear it. Of course, we, here in the USA don’t use NTSC any more, nor do we use CRT TVs any more. Today’s LCD/OLED screens don’t have a high-voltage raster, so there is no audible high frequency sound.

 I agree

 You didn't need to stick your head into the TV to hear it. Quite a few of the earlier colour TVs (Rank Arena, Sharp etc. ) had quite a little annoying Horizontal timebase related noise . I could still notice it  in the background to well past my teens.

[Allan F]

9 hours ago, gmgraves said:

You’re being too literal. If I got to close to the back of a CRT-based NTSC TV I could still hear it. Of course, we, here in the USA don’t use NTSC any more, nor do we use CRT TVs any more. Today’s LCD/OLED screens don’t have a high-voltage raster, so there is no audible high frequency sound.

 

3 hours ago, sandyk said:

 I agree

 You didn't need to stick your head into the TV to hear it. Quite a few of the earlier colour TVs (Rank Arena, Sharp etc. ) had quite a little annoying Horizontal timebase related noise . I could still notice it  in the background to well past my teens.

 

You guys take things far too seriously. It was a joke. I guess my humour is just too subtle for both of you.

[gmgraves]

4 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

 

You guys take things far too seriously. It was a joke. I guess my humour is just too subtle for both of you.

Subtlety doesn’t really play very well on Internet forums, it seems. My comment on sticking one’s head in the TV was meant facetiously as well, I meant that the older one gets, the closer one needs to get to the source of the raster sound to still hear it, hence the joking reference to having to stick ones head IN the TV.

[PYP]

On 5/23/2020 at 5:39 PM, gmgraves said:

Electronics don’t “burn-in per se, but all can benefit from thermally stabilizing by leaving it on all the time (if practical) or warmed up for an hour before a listening session since leaving a power amp all the time is not practical.

 

I had asked whether this warm up was measurable.  No one responded, but I did notice this post that has comparable measurements.  

 

 

[gmgraves]

On 5/24/2020 at 4:53 PM, fas42 said:

 

There can be a variety of reasons for why this happened in mine, and you're not noticing anything varying in yours, George.

Frank. I’m not noticing anything varying because nothing is! Dressing a (The?)

speaker cable on a powered speaker based system does nothing, and can’t do anything. 
What I have come to believe, when reading your posts about the “miracles” that your ”method” hath wrought, is several things. First, your sense of scale is vastly different from that of the rest of us. What you consider a night and day difference, for instance, to the rest of us would equate to “barely perceptible”. Secondly, you enhance your results with a huge amount of imagination. Again, I’ve been a serious audiophile since the mid 1950’s when I was just a pre-teen kid. I have experience with every type of equipment and probably every tweak that has come down the pike. None of them, either alone or in concert with others has ever created anywhere even close to the sweeping changes in SQ that you so routinely report. The sciences of electronics and acoustics are simply not that magical. Neither are alchemy or sorcery nor are they religious experiences. There are logical reasons for everything, and none of those reasons will yield the results you report on almost a daily basis. I think it is fine for you when you do something that to your mind seems like an audio epiphany. But you shouldn’t get so defensive when others don’t see it as one. 
You should also keep in mind (some others here too), that not all changes in the sound of a system are positive. Just because a tweak yields a difference doesn’t necessarily mean that said difference is better than what the system sounded like before!

 

[gmgraves]

18 minutes ago, PYP said:

 

I had asked whether this warm up was measurable.  No one responded, but I did notice this post that has comparable measurements.  

 

 

I don’t know if “burn-in” with electronics is measurable or not. I can’t think of any measurement off-hand. But mechanical “runnng-in” can be measured sometimes. For instance a woofer might yield a flatter measuring frequency response, After a hundred hours or so of use. Or, perhaps exhibit a change in transient response or an impedance difference that would show up on an oscillograph of some type.

[PYP]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

I don’t know if “burn-in” with electronics is measurable or not. I can’t think of any measurement off-hand. 

 

This is interesting, at least to me.  Everyone hears the difference, yet no one (?) measures it?   Would anyone tell you to keep your toaster on so that you could get the best toast (or perfect toast forever)?  Of course, if audiophiles got hold of that toaster, they would demand the manufacturer lose the captive cord, would add a weight on top and put the thing on footers -- only then would it yield the best toast    I'm not sure what objectivists would do.  Perhaps you can tell me. 

[fas42]

1 hour ago, gmgraves said:

Frank. I’m not noticing anything varying because nothing is! Dressing a (The?)

speaker cable on a powered speaker based system does nothing, and can’t do anything. 
What I have come to believe, when reading your posts about the “miracles” that your ”method” hath wrought, is several things. First, your sense of scale is vastly different from that of the rest of us. What you consider a night and day difference, for instance, to the rest of us would equate to “barely perceptible”. Secondly, you enhance your results with a huge amount of imagination. Again, I’ve been a serious audiophile since the mid 1950’s when I was just a pre-teen kid. I have experience with every type of equipment and probably every tweak that has come down the pike. None of them, either alone or in concert with others has ever created anywhere even close to the sweeping changes in SQ that you so routinely report. The sciences of electronics and acoustics are simply not that magical. Neither are alchemy or sorcery nor are they religious experiences. There are logical reasons for everything, and none of those reasons will yield the results you report on almost a daily basis. I think it is fine for you when you do something that to your mind seems like an audio epiphany. But you shouldn’t get so defensive when others don’t see it as one. 
You should also keep in mind (some others here too), that not all changes in the sound of a system are positive. Just because a tweak yields a difference doesn’t necessarily mean that said difference is better than what the system sounded like before!

 

 

All wrong, George... Which is why you find so many recordings unpleasant to listen to... 

 

Until you can comprehend that niggly little things in a rig can subjectively damage the SQ, badly... little will be achieved by you doing any fiddling. - 

 

[jabbr]

35 minutes ago, PYP said:

 

This is interesting, at least to me.  Everyone hears the difference, yet no one (?) measures it?   Would anyone tell you to keep your toaster on so that you could get the best toast (or perfect toast forever)?  Of course, if audiophiles got hold of that toaster, they would demand the manufacturer lose the captive cord, would add a weight on top and put the thing on footers -- only then would it yield the best toast    I'm not sure what objectivists would do.  Perhaps you can tell me. 

“Everyone” doesn’t include me. I certainly hear and can measure “warm up”, but “burn in” not so much. That said I have no direct knowledge about what anyone else perceives. 
 

I do keep my equipment on, particularly in the winter, because warm-up and thermal stability is a real (and measurable) thing.

[PYP]

25 minutes ago, jabbr said:

“Everyone” doesn’t include me. I certainly hear and can measure “warm up”, but “burn in” not so much. That said I have no direct knowledge about what anyone else perceives. 
 

I do keep my equipment on, particularly in the winter, because warm-up and thermal stability is a real (and measurable) thing.

 

I cut too much of the quote so the context was missing.  The conversation was about warm up and thermal stability.  

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, PYP said:

 

This is interesting, at least to me.  Everyone hears the difference, yet no one (?) measures it?   Would anyone tell you to keep your toaster on so that you could get the best toast (or perfect toast forever)?  Of course, if audiophiles got hold of that toaster, they would demand the manufacturer lose the captive cord, would add a weight on top and put the thing on footers -- only then would it yield the best toast    I'm not sure what objectivists would do.  Perhaps you can tell me. 

It’s not that things can’t be measured, it’s more that what can be measured really can’t be correlated with the differences heard because nobody’s really made that kind of connection. IOW, we know that components age as they are used, but the aging is cumulative and they all work together to give an unpredictable result. Generally, as components heat up, they stabilize, and most think that they reach their “best“ under those circumstances. If they do, it’s a result of many hours of listening by those responsible for the component’s sound. They pick and choose components that will sound a certain way when optimally warmed up.

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

All wrong, George... Which is why you find so many recordings unpleasant to listen to... 

 

Until you can comprehend that niggly little things in a rig can subjectively damage the SQ, badly... little will be achieved by you doing any fiddling. - 

 

I can never comprehend what’s all in your mind Frank. Nobody can. I find many  recordings unpleasant to listen to, because they ARE. They were recorded incompetently either because the recording engineers, themselves are incompetent, or they were following the wishes of producers and/or “artists“ that wouldn’t know a good sounding recording if they heard one. These recordings are distorted, improperly miked, have too much EQ, the wrong EQ, have been compressed, limited, poorly mixed, indifferently processed for production, or have had a hundred more indignities visited upon them. And here’s the thing. Once a recording has been ruined like that, there is NOTHiNG that a listener can do with or to their systems to correct it, or even make it listenable, in spite of your nonsense assertions to the contrary.

[jabbr]

7 hours ago, PYP said:

 

I cut too much of the quote so the context was missing.  The conversation was about warm up and thermal stability.  

Oh, well the bias, for one thing, is affected by temp, so that’s one thing you always want to adjust on an amp once the amp is warmed up ... almost all components are affected by temp to one degree of another in an electrically measurable way. But unless you’ve fried something, the curves remain the same over time.

[jabbr]

Here are a couple links which discuss the effects of temperature on both transistors and resistors:

 

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Electronic/transtemp.html

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chpt-12/temperature-coefficient-resistance/

[pkane2001]

10 hours ago, PYP said:

 

I cut too much of the quote so the context was missing.  The conversation was about warm up and thermal stability.  

 

Warm up and temperature sensitivity is something that's not that hard to measure. As Jon said, bias is one example. My class A-biased amps require about an hour of warm-up. This is by design, normal operating temperature is about 45°C. Until the amp components reach the target temperature, the distortion levels are higher.

 

There are cases where temperature relationship was not anticipated by the designer/manufacturer. Here's one such example (and here). The effect is measurable:

 

 

Here's another DAC showing no such obvious warm up effect:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[PYP]

9 hours ago, jabbr said:

Here are a couple links which discuss the effects of temperature on both transistors and resistors:

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chpt-12/temperature-coefficient-resistance/

 

"The “alpha” (α) constant is known as the temperature coefficient of resistance and symbolizes the resistance change factor per degree of temperature change. Just as all materials have a certain specific resistance (at 20° C), they also change resistance according to temperature by certain amounts. For pure metals, this coefficient is a positive number, meaning that resistance increases with increasing temperature. For the elements carbon, silicon, and germanium, this coefficient is a negative number, meaning that resistance decreases with increasing temperature.

 

Given how some of the exchanges proceed on the more controversial threads, this would lead me to believe that sapiens may be metal, all evidence to the contrary.  

[fas42]

16 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I can never comprehend what’s all in your mind Frank. Nobody can. I find many  recordings unpleasant to listen to, because they ARE. They were recorded incompetently either because the recording engineers, themselves are incompetent, or they were following the wishes of producers and/or “artists“ that wouldn’t know a good sounding recording if they heard one. These recordings are distorted, improperly miked, have too much EQ, the wrong EQ, have been compressed, limited, poorly mixed, indifferently processed for production, or have had a hundred more indignities visited upon them. And here’s the thing. Once a recording has been ruined like that, there is NOTHiNG that a listener can do with or to their systems to correct it, or even make it listenable, in spite of your nonsense assertions to the contrary.

 

As fairly common down here, my connection to fast Internet has been messed up by the NBN people - so have zero hard links working... Perhaps in a week! 

 

So, quick answer... When a system is working right, voices, on everything, connect; otherwise, they're forgettable. The Adele album made this obvious; if your expections in this area are low then you won't understand this... Bev and I have no interest in listening to systems that can't  "communicate"... QED. 

[sandyk]

9 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

Warm up and temperature sensitivity is something that's not that hard to measure. As Jon said, bias is one example. My class A-biased amps require about an hour of warm-up. This is by design, normal operating temperature is about 45°C. Until the amp components reach the target temperature, the distortion levels are higher.

 

 This doesn't need to be the case with a Class A amplifier, provided that the Bias is adequate initially and the Bias setting transistor is thermally coupled to the output devices to prevent Bias runaway.  The biggest change in this area is due to the front end differential pair and Current mirror area, and this can be compensated for in the Current Mirror area mainly, so that it normally only takes a matter of a few minutes to stabilise. You need something better though than the typical 2 transistor Current Mirror where Base and Collector of one of them is normally tied.