For the Engineers Among Us

[Priaptor]

This post is NOT meant to be condescending, but asking for those of you who have looked at the claims of manufacturer to please look at the claims by Louis Motek of LessLoss regarding his Tunnel Bridge interconnects and give your comments. This is not to start an internet fight, just exchange of ideas and claims.

 

I have never heard or seen them. I am just curious as to the claims on the LessLoss page. I have never read a review or seen these cables in real life but have talked to one person who owns them and who claims they were transformative.

 

Tunnelbridge Distortionless Interconnect System : High end audio interconnect cables | Interconnect systems | Speaker cables by LessLoss

[ringenesherre]

Hi

 

Nice to see you haven't let previous experiences get in your way of enjoying this forum :-)

 

I haven't had time to look at it in detail yet, but this link describes how the mechanism is supposed to work:

 

The Audio Beat - LessLoss Audio - Tunnelbridge Interconnect System and Anchorwave Speaker Cables

 

A quick glance shows a more solid use of electrodynamical concepts than most. Personally, I do not believe that the (real) effects of the skin effect and interaction with the dielectric have to be considered for typical audio transmission settings.

 

Just my 2 cents. YMMV.

 

Cheers,

Peter

[Priaptor]

Hi

 

Nice to see you haven't let previous experiences get in your way of enjoying this forum :-)

 

I haven't had time to look at it in detail yet, but this link describes how the mechanism is supposed to work:

 

The Audio Beat - LessLoss Audio - Tunnelbridge Interconnect System and Anchorwave Speaker Cables

 

A quick glance shows a more solid use of electrodynamical concepts than most. Personally, I do not believe that the (real) effects of the skin effect and interaction with the dielectric have to be considered for typical audio transmission settings.

 

Just my 2 cents. YMMV.

 

Cheers,

Peter

 

Thanks for the link. These cables have always interested me. I will read the link you provided.

[Speedskater]

Without getting into the engineering pluses & minuses of the LessLoss page, The Audio Beat page is from some fantasy world.

[Priaptor]

Without getting into the engineering pluses & minuses of the LessLoss page, The Audio Beat page is from some fantasy world.

 

In what way?

[mayhem13]

The engineering and science doesn't matter.....what matters is if the end user hears an improvement. I think we've already covered this. The audiophile mantra is that science or measurements can't fully explain the essence of human hearing, and therefore the listening experience is the higher priority.

 

Hopefully the OP will invest in a set and tell us what he thinks.

[mav52]

The engineering and science doesn't matter.....what matters is if the end user hears an improvement. I think we've already covered this. The audiophile mantra is that science or measurements can't fully explain the essence of human hearing, and therefore the listening experience is the higher priority.

 

Hopefully the OP will invest in a set and tell us what he thinks.

 

I agree with mayhem.

 

I feel you have to hear it to draw your own conclusion as something written is a person's personal opinion based on what they can hear or what they want to sell.

[One and a half]

Yet another cable thread? It's about time CA had a separate classification for cables so those who don't care can ignore the section.

[jshawn]

Yet another cable thread? It's about time CA had a separate classification for cables so those who don't care can ignore the section.

 

 

+1

 

And lets put it in the "Members Only" area.

[spdif-usb]

Yet another cable thread? It's about time CA had a separate classification for cables so those who don't care can ignore the section.

High frequency noise is what this is technically about. An audio engineer worth his or her salt will know that when high frequency noise enters the rectifier of an amp, it will partially become noise in the audible band. Similarly, someone who knows something about psychoacoustics will tell you that the human hearing system is incredibly sensitive to variations in noise characteristics. Not all variations can be measured using conventional measurement techniques.

One has to understand the fact that differences, even if they are differences that cannot be heard, the brain can still respond to them in such way that it affects the listening experience. I am not just talking about inaudible differences causing listening fatigue similar to the way the invisible flicker of a TV screen can cause eyestrain, etcetera. I am also talking about the fact the hairs of the haircells that vibrate actually don't just vibrate to the soundwaves, but also physically move as a direct result from a muscular effect in the haircells as they receive neural stimulae that originate from the brain. The human hearing system can discern tonal differences that are as little as 1 Hz. Humans are capable of detecting the direction sounds are coming from with much more accuracy than was first assumed by scientists. The threshold of human hearing, in dB, is -135.

We're audiophiles. We're interested in the improvement of audio and our listening experience. It's about time those who do not care had a separate classification on a different forum website than CA.

[mayhem13]

.

We're audiophiles. We're interested in the improvement of audio and our listening experience. It's about time those who do not care had a separate classification on a different forum website than CA.

 

Great summation. I'll forward your request for segregation and eliminating all those that don't agree with your viewpoint from the forum.

[Jud]

This post is NOT meant to be condescending, but asking for those of you who have looked at the claims of manufacturer to please look at the claims by Louis Motek of LessLoss regarding his Tunnel Bridge interconnects and give your comments. This is not to start an internet fight, just exchange of ideas and claims.

 

I have never heard or seen them. I am just curious as to the claims on the LessLoss page. I have never read a review or seen these cables in real life but have talked to one person who owns them and who claims they were transformative.

 

Tunnelbridge Distortionless Interconnect System : High end audio interconnect cables | Interconnect systems | Speaker cables by LessLoss

 

My interest was piqued as well, because as Peter mentions, there isn't anything in the phenomena mentioned by LessLoss that immediately sets BS detectors ringing. Also, the folks who build the cables I use throughout most of my system discuss skin effect and dielectric interactions in their engineering justifications. (I am not as smart as Peter, so I am unable to say whether skin effect and dielectric interactions ought to be considered in typical audio cable usage scenarios. :-)

[Priaptor]

My interest was piqued as well, because as Peter mentions, there isn't anything in the phenomena mentioned by LessLoss that immediately sets BS detectors ringing. Also, the folks who build the cables I use throughout most of my system discuss skin effect and dielectric interactions in their engineering justifications. (I am not as smart as Peter, so I am unable to say whether skin effect and dielectric interactions ought to be considered in typical audio cable usage scenarios. :-)

 

Jud,

 

Hence my interest. My experience with the cables I previously mentioned also piqued my interest as did Ted's post. I have long been interested in much of what LessLoss does, particularly the TunnelBridge, just not sure of the physics he describes and its effect on one's system. I too sensed no BS factor, but obviously have not heard them to determine the effect in my system.

 

I thought Motek's discussion was interesting enough for discussion and not "just another cable thread". If his explanations have a legitimate effect, reducing colorations, etc, the implications of his approach could theoretically be applied to more than interconnects and speaker cables.

[spdif-usb]

Great summation. I'll forward your request for segregation and eliminating all those that don't agree with your viewpoint from the forum.

Please do.

[Fokus]

It is just active shielding, or guarding. A technique that has been in use, where it matters, for many decades. Nothing new, probably irrelevant for audio. All the words are just marketing dress-up.

[spdif-usb]

Another company that has been focusing on the application of active shielding in audio interconnects is Synergistic Research. The History of Active Shielding | Synergistic Research

[ringenesherre]

It is just active shielding, or guarding. A technique that has been in use, where it matters, for many decades. Nothing new, probably irrelevant for audio. All the words are just marketing dress-up.

 

Yep, the tech seems to be real. Gave it another read. The question about audibility we can leave for those interested in trying. Personally, I'm not holding my breath, but some first-hand review I would definitely read.

 

Cheers,

Peter

[Jud]

Yep, the tech seems to be real. Gave it another read. The question about audibility we can leave for those interested in trying. Personally, I'm not holding my breath, but some first-hand review I would definitely read.

 

Cheers,

Peter

 

After looking at Fokus's post, I followed the link in the original post and saw it regards interconnects and talks about different tech than what I was remembering, which was the Firewall power conditioner. The power conditioner reputedly uses skin effect, and is intriguing to me.

 

Regarding the interconnects, I simply can't take in everything they're claiming at a quick glance, other than the active shielding Fokus mentioned. Duplication of the signal and supposedly feeding all the distortion into one version while keeping the other clean strikes me as a fairly extraordinary claim worthy of close reading.

[Priaptor]

Another company that has been focusing on the application of active shielding in audio interconnects is Synergistic Research. The History of Active Shielding | Synergistic Research

 

spdif-usb

 

Synergistic is fairly expensive. I spoke Louis about his products versus Synergistic and he felt their approach was wrong (I wouldn't expect anything different from his lips) and he then went into a complex discussion over my head why his was different and superior.

 

From my perch, the "perfect" cable would add or subtract nothing to the signal. Whether "active shielding" works or not, it would be nice if a reviewer like Chris who had the time, patience and access could compare them by classification of cable type

[RobbieC]

I tried explaining some of the simpler concepts raised by the LessLoss site before here on CA. I think it might help some if I included that post here...and then maybe not. But hopefully, at the very least, I further the discussion.

 

 

@wgscott Thank you.

 

It helps to have the qualifiers for the "wire is wire" argument. With these qualifiers it definitely becomes a comparison between essentially what are two instantiations of the same thing and I'd have to agree with wgscott in this kind of case.

 

However, keep in mind that in the real world, everything is a filter—even air. Thus, in general it's important not to underplay, especially in the context of audio, the fact that no two distinct physical objects can ever be truly identical in the real world.

 

What two objects can be, however, is sufficiently close enough to one another (say to some tolerance, ε) such that their differences become meaningless. Since the qualifiers wgscott mentioned cover just about everything that would play a role in the impedance of the "wire" (with the exception of capacitance, which I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he meant to include), his position on the argument makes sense.

 

Now, suppose his argument was that a bare coat hanger is equivalent to any wire without qualification, even 100% pure silver 20-gauge wire wrapped in "dielectric"...that I would take exception with. For one, pure silver has one of the highest conductivities known at room temperature. Since conductivity and resistivity/resistance are two different ways of describing the same thing, it is highly unlikely that the resistance across the plain coat hanger will be the same as that of the 20-gauge silver wire of equal length. Even if it happened to be the same due to differences in cross-sectional area between them, there is still a very real possibility that the filtering done by the two will still be different. Why? To answer that, I need to touch on two basic concepts and then on filters.

 

Capacitance: if anyone thinks that there is absolutely no capacitance to consider with fully coated paired wire, reconsider your understanding of “basic” physics. Speaker wires and analog interconnects are simply conductors in proximity of one another meant to carry an ac signal, a signal that is now confined (by the two-wire design of most cables whether twisted pair or coaxial or whatever) to a circuit that has legs running parallel to one another. Since in the real world there is no such thing as a perfect insulator, there is always some capacitance—that’s why I purposely chose to say in the paragraph above wrapped in dielectric and not "insulation" even though for most people PETE is an insulator and dielectric means a certain set of materials. To those that hold that meaning of dielectric, I would say I’m not talking theory—I’m talking real world where everything not a conductor (wherever that cutoff is) is a dielectric to some degree. And in the real world there is dielectric dispersion, dielectric relaxation, dielectric memory, etc. related uniquely with materials, each having an effect on capacitor frequency response because in the real world there is no such thing as a perfect capacitor. I’d like to add, however, that this capacitance, like the inductance that will be discussed next, is typically very small for audio cables.

 

Inductance. Next consider that most wire used is normally made of twisted strands for reasons mostly to do with the need for flexibility in the resultant physical cables at the gauges used. This twisting of conductors (or torsion in the Frenet frame for the math types) is exactly what is needed to construct an inductor since inductance stems from geometry. Inductance is directly proportional to the scalar torsion (or the number of turns and how closely spaced they are) of the wire (an assumption must be made that some small, but not negligible, resistance effectively separates the turns in some sense diverting a small proportion of the signal into the twisting geometry instead of simply across it). Then take any deviation from perfectly straight of the overall wire caused by its physical routing and that geometry itself produces some inductance. There is also no such thing as a perfect inductor so there are again a number of effects that affect an inductor’s frequency response like there were for capacitors. I’ll leave it at this: if anyone thinks that there is absolutely no inductance to consider with wire, again reconsider your understanding of “basic” physics.

 

Okay, now we need an understanding of very basic analog low-pass filters of which there two simple types: the inductive low-pass filter and the capacitive low-pass filter. I’m going to make the assumption here in the interest of brevity that everyone is familiar with these and their circuit diagrams (let's restrict to first-order). If you compare against the circuit diagrams you’ll note that wire is indeed an inductive low-pass filter in the sense that it puts an inductor in series with the circuit. If you compare against the diagrams again you’ll also note that wire is a capacitive low-pass filter in the sense that it puts a resistor in series and a capacitor in parallel with the circuit (one of the reasons why the conductivity of the wire matters). In a sense, we have the proverbial double whammy.

 

Then there is shielding, reflections due to impedance changes, skin effect, resonance and other more complicated physics stuff to consider. All of these contributions together cause very real differences between “wires.” Skin effect in particular adds a "third" low-pass filter to the circuit (triple whammy). And then there is the contribution of the load having its own effect on the frequency response of the wire/low-pass filter complex and then phase shifts...and even the possibility of phase shifts without frequency attenuation! A lot to consider for the lay person...

 

Whether those differences caused by the combined effect of all I mentioned will be perceptible or not is another question entirely! If the differences are imperceptible then I guess it's okay to say "wire is wire" since we are implicitly talking about human hearing. But I hope this simple discussion of wire will help those who wish to negate arguments resting on "electrons are electrons" since it is inapplicable in this context: we are talking about properties of media and not properties of electrons. And yes the two are distinct.

[RobbieC]

Note: I tried to clean up the old post after pasting it here through editing but the ten minute limit caught me out. Apologies for any irregularities.

[RobbieC]

My point was mostly that there may indeed be coloration added by cables. Don't know if the coloration is discernible or not, but nonetheless, there are sound reasons as to where the coloration comes from and that is from the combined filtering effect of the physical cable as everything in the physical world is a filter.

[RobbieC]

Ok, my understanding of what LessLoss is claiming is that a buffered signal can be applied in between a conductor and its ground/shield (in a coaxial geometry) such that the buffered signal matches the intended signal peak for peak both spatially and temporally such that no potential difference is ever created between the two such that no electric field arises around the actual signal conductor and therefore no capacitance does either eliminating that source of filtering. The buffering circuit is presumably there to maintain the power of the cloned signal to unity as compared to the actual signal by compensating for the myriad of sources of corruption to the signal. A buffer incidentally acts to minimize or eliminate deviation from a setpoint by compensating for changes in a system. The outer shield also helps to keep sources of corruption from reaching the the buffered layer. However, a coaxial cable operates by containing both the electric field and magnetic field within the cable with the ground providing the reference potential, so we need to resolve that contradiction.

 

The signal in the central conductor relies on the outer shield to provide a reference potential (ground in this case). There should be both a magnetic and an electric field, each orthogonal to the signal as well as each other, contained within the cable. The insertion of a "tunnel" conductor into the classic coaxial geometry would certainly sandwich both fields in between the two coaxial cylinders of the tunnel and shield IF the signal were only conveyed by the tunnel with the shield providing reference potential. But we are interested in what happens when the central conductor also conveys the signal?

 

I'm a little rusty with the application of Maxwell equations (not my field) but I do recall the general math techniques used to solve these type questions. I believe Stoke's Theorem is probably best (due to the symmetry here) along with the Superposition Principle, i.e., solve each individually using Stoke's then superimpose since there is supposedly no potential difference between the central conductor (or Bridge) and the Tunnel. Anyway, the magnetic flux in a coaxial cable depends on where we choose to take our boundary (Stoke's simplifies integration of the derivative of a vector field over a surface by relating it to the line integration of the vector field along the surface boundary). If we choose to place our boundary just below the tunnel we will see that there is a non-zero flux there when current flows through our central conductor while there is no flux contribution there from any current flow through the tunnel circuit...

 

I have run out of time (have to go play soccer) and cannot complete this thought though would like to put it out there for others to complete. We need to either prove or disprove that both the electric field and magnetic field cancel between the central conductor and the tunnel.

[Priaptor]

Rob,

 

Appreciate the input.