$10,000/ft Cable burn-in ! Wasted $500 a watt on an amp! Why the war?

[gmgraves]

 

 

Don't know if you've ever heard of an audio engineer/designer named Bruno Putzeys? Quite a fanatic about engineering and measurement. Here's what he has to say on the subject:

You can see the rest at SoundStage! Ultra | SoundStageUltra.com (UltraAudio.com) | Searching for the Extreme: Bruno Putzeys of Mola-Mola, Hypex, and Grimm Audio -- Part One

 

He's right, up to a point. But wire is so simple and has been studied so thoroughly for so long, that the notion that there may be things about wire that engineers and physicists do not know, is, frankly, ludicrous. Nobody has any idea why wire would change the sound of a signal representing music and the cable manufacturers' attempts to"explain" why their ccables sound better than their competitors are embarrassingly stupid to anyone with even a soupscon of electronics knowledge.

[STC]

I wouldn't say that is stupid. We are wired to anticipate and interpret sound before it actually gets processed by the brain.

 

Take away the prior knowledge of the product under test and the difference disappears.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[vmartell22]

Take away the prior knowledge of the product under test and the difference disappears.

 

OP here - trying to pull back the thread from "just another cable thread" (btw - amplifiers were also mentioned!)

 

A great point about knowledge of the item - if a wealthy subjectivist audiophile knows what the item cost he will: (using he, well, because... you know.. mostly "he", right?)

 

a) Feel happy about himself and his accomplishments - specially economic - if he can afford such costly item

b) If believes cost == quality, I think human nature will make him hear that quality

c) any doubt cast on the item will be interpreted as casting doubts on those accomplishments - Deep down, he doesn't want to be seen as just a rich fool, his accomplishments (and money!) the byproduct of luck rather than ability, intelligence or insight...

 

of course the objectivist audiophile side will have different hangups - my reasoning tells me that one of them will be the money vs. wisdom thing... (could insert something about Whole Foods here, but will abstain...)

 

getting very close to class warfare being the gist of it, isn't it? Am I off the mark? a bit worried about that... politics is not my thing and don't want the thread to go there...

 

Someone mentioned watches - that is a great analogy... I like it better than cars... after all if even if you see a car as only a means of getting from A to B, a hyper expensive super car will objectively be faster at it... but watches! time is time!

 

But you if you can afford it, that beautiful Patek will be reflection of you, your status and station in life - if you cannot and you are a smart person, or even a scientist or engineer, well, many arguments to be made against the wisdom of spending $25,000 on a watch that might not be as accurate as your cell phone!

 

Seems close to an intractable problem isn't it? May be the best option is to learn to live with each other - or have separate forums!

 

Then again, I would need to learn to bite my tongue (or fingers!) when reading some of the stuff in forums!

 

v

[STC]

OP here - trying to pull back the thread ....

 

But you if you can afford it, that beautiful Patek will be reflection of you, your status and station in life - if you cannot and you are a smart person, or even a scientist or engineer, well, many arguments to be made against the wisdom of spending $25,000 on a watch that might not be as accurate as your cell phone!

 

 

 

 

What would you do if the person with Patek insists that his time is accurate compared to your Casio?

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[witchdoctor]

He's right, up to a point. But wire is so simple and has been studied so thoroughly for so long, that the notion that there may be things about wire that engineers and physicists do not know, is, frankly, ludicrous. Nobody has any idea why wire would change the sound of a signal representing music and the cable manufacturers' attempts to"explain" why their ccables sound better than their competitors are embarrassingly stupid to anyone with even a soupscon of electronics knowledge.

 

You do realize that all you are doing is embarrassing yourself. By this point we all "get" that cables are a subject that make your blood boil, no need to keep repeating yourself.

[witchdoctor]

The topic of this thread is $10,000 cable burn in. The thing I like about this hobby is not spending money, its saving money. Every time I get better SQ with a cheaper component it puts a smile on my face. If you can take your $2000 CDP or processor or whatever and make it sound like the more expensive $4000 model by using vibration control, a power filter, a cable or some other device that costs less than $1000 why wouldn't you do it? This board is to share your experience and let others try. Just because it doesn't work in your system no reason to foam at the mouth about it. State your experience and move on, don't have a stroke because something didn't work out for you.

[Speedskater]

Bruno Putzeys on cables:

 

'A Few Overlooked Cable Metrics'

A few overlooked cable metrics

 

Cable Distortion and Dielectric Biasing Debunked

Cable Distortion and Dielectric Biasing Debunked | Audioholics

 

'Some Serious Cable Measurements with Interesting Results'

Some serious cable measurements with interesting results. – Mombu

 

 

 

[h=1]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[/h]

[NOMBEDES]

Amplifiers, Preamplifiers, CD Players, Turntables, Streamers, Speakers, the dreaded Cable.

 

If 75% (+/-) of the music recorded in the last 20 years suffers from the loudness war syndrome or was just not recorded, for various reasons, very well then all your equipment is a method for transmitting poorly recorded dreck.

 

Let us go to the math:

 

$1000 Cable = 10% increase in musical enjoyment. Apx 75% of music is not recorded to audiophile standards. Therefore $1000 only provides a

fraction of the musical enjoyment factor.

 

We can only conclude that the thrifty audiophile will go with a cost effective solution.

[witchdoctor]

Amplifiers, Preamplifiers, CD Players, Turntables, Streamers, Speakers, the dreaded Cable.

 

If 75% (+/-) of the music recorded in the last 20 years suffers from the loudness war syndrome or was just not recorded, for various reasons, very well then all your equipment is a method for transmitting poorly recorded dreck.

 

Let us go to the math:

 

$1000 Cable = 10% increase in musical enjoyment. Apx 75% of music is not recorded to audiophile standards. Therefore $1000 only provides a

fraction of the musical enjoyment factor.

 

We can only conclude that the thrifty audiophile will go with a cost effective solution.

 

NOMBEDES, that post was a bulls eye. This is why the tail is wagging the dog. Audiophiles are chasing solutions like hirez, $$$ dacs, $$$$ speakers in pursuit of what is sometimes a mirage. In my personal experience the closest I can get to LIVE performance is a LIVE recording. Stuff cut in a studio may sound excellent as a well engineered replication of the live event but for me it just doesn't get it.

80% of my music listening is streamed from:

 

Concert Vault - Live Concert Recordings Streamed Online - It can't get any better than listening to your favorite bands, recorded at the peak of their careers in legendary performance spaces. Most of these recordings were captured through the sound engineers mixing board and what it was is what you get.

 

www.qello.com- All types of genre concert videos.

 

www.broadwayhd.com- broadway shows

[Ralf11]

it might be helpful to distinguish different types of cables - interconnects, speaker cables, phono cartridge cables...

 

 

if you need a reflection of you, your status and station in life then I suggest a psychiatrist

[mansr]

if you need a reflection of you, your status and station in life then I suggest a psychiatrist

 

Or get a mirror. Though you may not like what you see.

[witchdoctor]

Bruno Putzeys on cables:

 

'A Few Overlooked Cable Metrics'

A few overlooked cable metrics

 

Cable Distortion and Dielectric Biasing Debunked

Cable Distortion and Dielectric Biasing Debunked | Audioholics

 

'Some Serious Cable Measurements with Interesting Results'

Some serious cable measurements with interesting results. – Mombu

 

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/42483/#0

 

Thanks for posting this Speedskater, great resource. A nice summary-

I hope this short outlook shows that in proper science, the notion that cables don't make a difference is a huge oversimplification.

What can be said is that cables shouldn't make a difference but that is an entirely different ball game. Very, very little equipment is that well designed.

[witchdoctor]

A few overlooked cable metrics

 

Thanks for posting this Speedskater

[arcman]

To me it's all a mindset that each of us adopt.

 

For one, there are a many audiophile that have ultra expensive equpment that's technically better than the equipment than the recordings they listen to are made with. However, if they find that the expensive stuff brings them the joy of listening to music, then that is what matters. Plus, some of that technology trickles down to people like me.

 

I use to always think about the next piece of gear, not appreciating what I have. I now view each listening session as a singular performance in of itself. My listening area is the venue that I have acces to at the moment in time. Much like going to a concert. One generally does not think "why doesn't the band use Yamaha PA , etc". You generally engulf yourself in the performance as is.

[gmgraves]

I wouldn't say that is stupid. We are wired to anticipate and interpret sound before it actually gets processed by the brain.

 

Take away the prior knowledge of the product under test and the difference disappears.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. What is stupid is the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that the wire manufacturers use to try to explain why their product sounds better than their competitor's products. They throw around terms like "skin-effect", dielectric absorption, signal differentiation and integration hoping that their audience does;t understand that while these parameters are very real, audio cable would not experience any of them until the signal they were carrying exceeded 50 MegaHerz and that none of these characteristics even exist at 20-30 KHz and below. One company (I forget which one) showed, in an ad that ran in both Stereophile and TAS, two oscilloscope pictures of square waves. One for their brand of interconnects and one for a competitor's brand which showed clearly that their cable was better because the square wave was much "squarer" than their competitor's square wave. This showed that their cable was indeed better than the competition. Until one looked closely at the two pictures. It turns out that the oscilloscope used for the pictures also displayed the frequency of the signal being displayed on the screen! The pictures were showing the square wave performance of the two cables at 100 MegaHertz (That's VHF radio, not audio - not even close).

 

To me this shows that these charlatans will do and say anything to sell their snake oil to the unwary, the easily fooled and the naive.

[gmgraves]

Bruno Putzeys on cables:

 

'A Few Overlooked Cable Metrics'

 

All of these things are true, but they have no effect on frequencies as low as an audio signal. These are things that start being troublesome in coaxial cable at VHF RF frequencies and are negligible at audio frequencies. But don't take my word for it, or Putzeys' word for it. Do the math yourself! Look up the capacitance and inductance and resistance for common coax. Belden gives complete specs on their web site. Then look up the formulas for capacitive and inductive reactance at 20 KHz (it's simple algebra. Anybody can do it). Armed with those two figures X_L and X_c it is easy to plug those figures and the resistance figure into the impedance formula and come up with attenuation per foot at 20 KHz. Then go back and plot those figures for several other frequencies, and you'll see that at 20 KHz the signal will be attenuated at only a few tiny fractions of a dB, way too small to hear, and that at lower frequencies, say 5KHz and 1 KHz and 100 Hz, the attenuation is not only too small to hear, it's too small to measure.

 

So, ask yourself this: if all coaxial cables have flat frequency response from DC to at least 20 KHz, and since cable is 100% passive and therefore can not distort the signal, then what are you hearing as different between two different brands/models of interconnects? I can think of only two things that could possibly change the sound: Cables designed to to be filters with the addition of external components and cables with high DC resistance so that the music will be less loud through that cable than with another low resistance cable (and consequently the louder presentation will sound better). But in both instances, the cables in question are no longer conductors they are filters. I am skeptical of interconnects with bulges made of wood or aluminum or plastic in the cable. These can house external capacitors and inductors and resistors large enough to act as filters to attenuate certain frequency ranges in relation to the overall audio range - in other words, it's cables as "tone controls". And I really can't see any cable company getting away with a ploy like that for very long!

[Nelson_de_Leon]

Has anybody also considered the cables used in recording the music?

 

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[Jud]

All of these things are true, but they have no effect on frequencies as low as an audio signal. These are things that start being troublesome in coaxial cable at VHF RF frequencies and are negligible at audio frequencies. But don't take my word for it, or Putzeys' word for it. Do the math yourself! Look up the capacitance and inductance and resistance for common coax. Belden gives complete specs on their web site. Then look up the formulas for capacitive and inductive reactance at 20 KHz (it's simple algebra. Anybody can do it). Armed with those two figures

 

Hi George - Perhaps this quote from Putzeys is relevant to what you are discussing:

 

The impedance of the shield consists of its inductance (not to be confused with the inductance of the transmission line which is much smaller) and its resistance. Thus part of the voltage across the cable is in the inductance and another part is in the resistance. The voltage across the inductive portion is coupled to the signal conductor and thus eliminated from the output voltage. The voltage dropped across the resistance, however, is not coupled. This voltage is found at the output of the cable in addition to the wanted audio signal.Many audio cables are built with two wires and a shield, with only the wires connecting to the receiving end. The same argument holds for these cables, where the ground conductor is substituted for the shield.At low frequencies, the resistive component dominates. Over the entire audio band and under realistic conditions (leakage current is sourced by a high impedance), the coax (or twisted-pair in an unbalanced setting) cables are quite unable to carry an audio signal unscathed. For RF applications, coax is fine because the shield inductance produces an impedance which is very high compared to that of the earth current source.

 

 

So Putzeys is not considering the wire alone, but its interactions under realistic scenarios within a system. I also wonder whether his mention of inductance of the shield vs. inductance of the transmission line bears on this.

 

Please note also from his last sentence in the quote that he is certainly aware of the difference between audio and higher frequencies.

[gmgraves]

Hi George - Perhaps this quote from Putzeys is relevant to what you are discussing:

 

The only problem I see is that when these cable's transmission properties are measured, such parameters as shield inductance/resistance are not in evidence. Transfer a any square wave signal in the audio passband through several different cables and view the results with an oscilloscope and you will see NO difference between the waveforms until you crank the frequency up into the 50 MHz or higher region, then different coaxial cables will start to perform differently. I have tested every kind of cable and wire you can think of with every kind of test there is with square waves, sine waves, triangular waves, impulse tests, Hy-pot tests (to see how well dielectrics stand up to high-voltage surges) everything you could think of in the Lockheed cable department, 8-hours a day for three years. I know cable very well and I've seen everything these boutique cable companies are doing to justify their high prices and I can tell you absolutely, that nothing they do will have the slightest effect on audio frequencies. They just don't. They can be pretty, and if one is buying them for bling factor, then none of this has any meaning, and more power to them.

So Putzeys is not considering the wire alone, but its interactions under realistic scenarios within a system. I also wonder whether his mention of inductance of the shield vs. inductance of the transmission line bears on this.

 

I don't see how it could. Any interaction of these parameters would show-up in an oscillograph of the output waveform. And it doesn't.

Please note also from his last sentence in the quote that he is certainly aware of the difference between audio and higher frequencies.

 

Yes, thanks for mentioning that. He certainly does. I think everything he states is true, but in my experience, none of these things has any effect at all on cable performance at audio frequencies.

[witchdoctor]

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. What is stupid is the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that the wire manufacturers use to try to explain why their product sounds better than their competitor's products. They throw around terms like "skin-effect", dielectric absorption, signal differentiation and integration hoping that their audience does;t understand that while these parameters are very real, audio cable would not experience any of them until the signal they were carrying exceeded 50 MegaHerz and that none of these characteristics even exist at 20-30 KHz and below. One company (I forget which one) showed, in an ad that ran in both Stereophile and TAS, two oscilloscope pictures of square waves. One for their brand of interconnects and one for a competitor's brand which showed clearly that their cable was better because the square wave was much "squarer" than their competitor's square wave. This showed that their cable was indeed better than the competition. Until one looked closely at the two pictures. It turns out that the oscilloscope used for the pictures also displayed the frequency of the signal being displayed on the screen! The pictures were showing the square wave performance of the two cables at 100 MegaHertz (That's VHF radio, not audio - not even close).

 

To me this shows that these charlatans will do and say anything to sell their snake oil to the unwary, the easily fooled and the naive.

 

You are just bashing an entire industry and again embarrassing your self with statements like "the wire manufacturers try to explain, yada, yada, yada". Be specific, name a person or a company and then link to a specific statement if you want to refute something.

gmgraves, you lack fundamental posting skills and are not very accurate in your claims. I am going to have to put you on my ignore list.

[mansr]

You are just bashing an entire industry and again embarrassing your self with statements like "the wire manufacturers try to explain, yada, yada, yada". Be specific, name a person or a company and then link to a specific statement if you want to refute something.

gmgraves, you lack fundamental posting skills and are not very accurate in your claims. I am going to have to put you on my ignore list.

Ignorance is bliss.

[semente]

To me it's all a mindset that each of us adopt.

 

For one, there are a many audiophile that have ultra expensive equipment that's technically better than the equipment than the recordings they listen to are made with. However, if they find that the expensive stuff brings them the joy of listening to music, then that is what matters.

 

I don't think that even the hardest, most combative Objectivist will disagree that the ultimate goal of a system is to satisfy it's owner.

 

But what we are discussing here is high-fidelity, or the accurate reproduction of the recorded signal (the music).

And from that perspective some products are a rip-off, others don't perform as the manufacturers and critics claim they do, and that there's a lot of misleading and some hanky parky between the two.

 

It's not a question of "taste".

We cannot realistically discuss audio from that angle.

It's about performance or suitability to the task.

 

Yes, there are grey areas but they are few and of comparatively little significance.

 

R

[gmgraves]

You are just bashing an entire industry and again embarrassing your self with statements like "the wire manufacturers try to explain, yada, yada, yada". Be specific, name a person or a company and then link to a specific statement if you want to refute something.

gmgraves, you lack fundamental posting skills and are not very accurate in your claims. I am going to have to put you on my ignore list.

 

Oh, THANK YOU! One less ignoramous trying desperately to support an unsupportable position.

 

Go in peace!

[kilroy]

Oh, THANK YOU! One less ignoramous trying desperately to support an unsupportable position.

 

Go in peace!

 

+1

[witchdoctor]

Has anybody also considered the cables used in recording the music?

 

Sent from my ASUS_Z012D using Tapatalk

 

Mogami is very popular and Crystal Cable is used among elite recording studios known for SQ. The fact is that I wouldn't hold today's typical recordings to a "gold standard".