The End of Speaker Cables.?

[mansr]

I think Kal's comment there is seeing this correctly. This isn't about good sound, much less great.

 

OTOH, I am really surprised at this late date we don't have a wireless standard agreed to that allows transmission of lossless digital at either 44/16 or 48/24 material. I think active speakers are the way to go. And a wireless connection of quality would be a great way to do things. It goes against audiophile habits and it would eliminate all this constant flux of gear. I also think a good wireless connection (bluetooth aint it) would be a boon to those wanting a mch rig. I do note as much as I think active speakers are a plus, it actually is easier to run speaker wires all around places than to run balanced XLR's and have a power plug next to your speakers in many cases.

Synchronising multiple wireless speakers would be quite difficult.

[mansr]

Yesterday I watched the latest Werner Herzog documentary

 

 

There's an interesting part in which he shows people who have to live in a space with a minimal radiation otherwise they get quite sick. Some of them spend long years living in Faraday Cages! A small community of these radiation sensitive people lives in Green Bank, West Virginia area where the level of radiation of any kind is greatly reduced for scientifical reasons (telescopes picking up radio waves from space). The doc is worth checking out IMO!

 

There's no evidence that these symptoms are caused by electromagnetic radiation. Everything credible I've read about the phenomenon suggests it's all in their heads. For instance, a test subject has never, as far I know, passed a blind test where they have to identify whether a transmitter is on or off without seeing it.

[mansr]

C'mon.. feeling something instantly and experiencing its long term effects are two different things. Can anyone rezognize instantly x-rays.? Yet we know the long term exposure can cause very serious problems. I've heard about cases of health problems of people living near cell phones' networks antennae - I'don't know whether somebody examined for instance this subject in detail.

A lot of people claim to suffer various symptoms immediately in the presence of, say, a mobile phone. Somehow they still fail in a controlled test environment. It's like with audiophile cables, all in the head.

 

X-rays are, as has already been mentioned, ionising. That's completely different.

[mansr]

Only UV with wavelengths below 125 nM is considered ionizing radiation. This is at the very end of the UVC spectrum (100-280 nM) and is absorbed by the ozone in the atmosphere - it's not a significant contributor to development of malignancy. UVA is 315-400 nm and UVB is 280-315 nm by definition, and these are the UV bands of importance. UVA and UVB are non-ionizing radiation - the damage they cause is technically photochemical. Non-ionizing UV induces the formation of covalent linkages at C=C double bonds and causes uracil dimers to accumulate in RNA (among many other deleterious effects).

 

I'm a board certified facial plastic surgeon, a full professor at one of our major medical schools, on the editorial boards of all our major journals, the medical editor of my academy's monthly publication for 20+ years, and the author of about 80 peer reviewed publications, chapters, etc in my field. But if you can't accept this on my authority, start with this typical study by Placzek et al in the British Journal of Dermatology (156: 843-7, 2007). The intro begins with

 

"One important component of the cellular response to irradiation is the activation of cell cycle checkpoints. It is known that

both ultraviolet (UV) radiation and ionizing radiation (IR)

[emphasis added by me] can activate checkpoints at transitions from G(1) to S phase, from G(2) phase to mitosis and during DNA replication."

 

and the study ends with

 

"UVA and IR induce radical-mediated strand breaks and DNA lesions, and UVB essentially induces thymine dimers that lead to excision repair-related strand breaks. Different cell cycle effects may be a consequence of different types of DNA damage."

 

Thanks for the thorough explanation. Nevertheless, all UV radiation has much, much higher energy than radio frequencies used for communication (up to 10 GHz or so). RF radiation simply doesn't have the energy to cause that kind of damage. Putting your hand in a hot oven is probably more dangerous. Do bakers have abnormally high incidence of anything?

[mansr]

Maybe I wasn't clear enough - I do not hide from ambient energy. I don't think it's a direct and immediate hazard, and sunscreen is as far as I go toward mitigation. I'm not a doomsday dude and I'm happily living in the 21st century. But ambient RF has much more energy in toto than you seem to think.

 

It's unrealistic (at least, to me) to assume that the EMF in which we're now constantly bathed cannot possibly have any effect on the future of life on this planet. Although there's a huge difference in energy between ionizing radiation and simple EMF (e.g. gamma rays have about 10 to the 19th more energy than radio station signals), there's more energy in RF than you seem to believe. For example, a 100,000 watt AM radio station will induce 20 to 50 mW into your car's radio antenna. Researchers have generated 0.06µW at 1.2mV potential by converting a single WiFi signal using similar methods to those that convert RF input at the antenna into an audio signal at your tuner's output jacks.

 

For electromagnetic radiation to cause ionisation or changes to molecular bonds, the individual photons need to have sufficiently high energy. In normal radio signals they do not. All they can do is heat the sample to a lesser or greater degree. Standing near a powerful radio transmitter or radar antenna will cook you alive. A mile away it has less effect than raising the room temperature by a degree. If it's not making you physically hot, RF radiation is harmless.