The ultimate cables can/can't - only $80,000

[sdolezalek]

When I saw this product (the Music Interface Technologies ACC 268 Articulation Control Console -- one gushing review here: http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/music-interface-technologies-acc-268-articulation-control-console-and-ma-x-shd-interconnects/), I couldn't help but think it was the perfect product for a discussion here.  As OP,  I'd like to limit this discussion to points of view about why what MIT is doing might legitimately produce "positive" audio quality effects and how that might broaden our overall views on whether cables do or don't make a difference.  

 

So please no comments like: the ultimate snake oil, no device like this could ever make a difference, etc. (I'll ask Chris to remove those if they flood this thread).

 

But I would appreciate comments like: Yes, it can affect sound, but only in the same way as an equalizer because...., or "Yes, it can, but what it is really doing is ... or No, it can't and here is why...

 

In others words, no plain opinions, only views based upon some level of expertise that include an explantion of "why"

 

[sdolezalek]

Because I'm trying to learn something, not conduct an opinion poll

[sdolezalek]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

That's an equaliser, not a cable. Nobody has ever doubted that equalisers work.

I suspected that might be the case, but if so, it appears to be an extraordinarily expensive one and my sense is those here willing to use their computers as a front end can do better (at a tiny fraction of the cost) with products like REW, DIRAC, combined with Roon, HQPlayer, JRiver etc. that apply equalization but based upon measurements rather than "fine-tuning to taste."  Am I missing anything else here?

 

Ralf11: Thanks, the altering of complex impedance is an interesting thought, but do you have anything further than an educated guess?

 

By the way, thanks everyone for respecting my wish re "not opinions," so far this has been a far more useful discussion, even if it generates 10% of the hits/responses that including opinions might.

[sdolezalek]

2 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

A hank of wire doesn't have a complex impedance characteristic (not at audio frequencies, anyway). It has a certain DC resistance that increases with length (and which can change the sound of SOME - but not all, highly reactive speakers) and it has a certain (tiny amount) of inductive and capacitive reactance that also increases with length. But these latter two characteristics are so small that your speaker cable length would have to be more than 50 ft (with 14 gauge wire) in order for these characteristics to attenuate a 20 KHz sine wave by even ONE dB! So, any complex impedance in the cable/box system would have to be self induced by the box itself! IOW, without the box in the cable, there would be no complex impedance for the controls to alter!

Thanks George!

[sdolezalek]

10 minutes ago, GUTB said:

 

Obviously it’s not "just" an equalizer.

Ok, that falls into the "opinion" category.  Substantiation, reasonig, basis for that opinion?

[sdolezalek]

One of the reasons I wasn't so quick to just dismiss Brisson's claims is that we are increasing learning that out of audible bandwidth effects can have in-bandwidth artifacts.  His quote below goes to that:

Quote

It’s generally assumed that the electrical bandwidth of an audio system should be ten times greater than the audio bandwidth. That is, the electronic components should operate out to at least 200kHz. So, what are the first issues that cause distortion when a cable doesn’t work well within that band of frequencies? Cables suffer from a parasitic series resonance at frequencies below about 1.5kHz and from parallel resonances at higher frequencies, determined by the values of the inductance and capacitance. The cable doesn’t function as an ideal inductor. All audio products act as low-pass filters. Cables without networked terminations function as a lossy low-pass filter because of this parasitic capacitance as well as shunt capacitance. The vector seen at the input terminals of an audio signal-carrying cable should be an inductive vector at all frequencies and at all power levels.

We can correct for the parasitic and shunt capacitance by adding reactive components in the network that will offset these effects.

I don't like the way he starts by saying it is assumed that "the electrical bandwidth of an audio system should be ten times greater than the audio bandwidth."  I would guess a number of folks here might dispute that assumption.  But the rest of his statement at least explains what he thinks is going on.  You might say, "yeah" but there is no way these effects are audible, but I hear a lot of folks saying the same thing about upsampling to DSD512 and benefitting from the use of further out of bandwidth and gentler sloped filters.  

 

If the net result is just a tiny bit of re-equalization of the signal, then we have other cheaper ways of fixing that.  So I'm more curious about his claims with regard to this introducing jitter and noise that he somehow filters out.

 

Further thoughts?

[sdolezalek]

6 minutes ago, esldude said:

As for patents, here is a picture of one of the MIT lower priced digital interconnects.  It is part of the patented networking design (the patent number is right there on it).  You can't quite read it in my picture.  It consists of a conventional nicely shielded 75 ohm coax cable, their nice RCA ends, and the part that makes it one of their patented network designs.  That part is a 1 ohm metal film resistor in series with the center lead.  

 

Thanks Dennis! Love it!  I guess far too many of us are way too eager/willing to believe stuff we just don't understand.  The digital age was supposed to make us all smarter, but while it may have increased the volume of answers by 10X, I think it also increased the volume of questions by 100X, making us feel dummer, not smarter...

[sdolezalek]

A lot of equipment like this gets bought as part of a larger house building project where the new house might cost $20-40 million or more and the owner decides they want a sound room or home theater and specifies to their audio contractor that "I want the very best."  In most industries those buyers pay for a lot of the bleeding-edge innovation that later trickles down and become available to the rest of us at affordable prices.  To the degree that is what is going on, it is a healthy economic process from which we all benefit.

 

But, if customers are convinced to buy systems at bleeding edge costs that don't actually advance the state of the art, then this industry suffers, at least reputationally. 

 

That is why I was trying to understand what these cable boxes do -- are they advancing the art/science of audio, and if so, how?  

[sdolezalek]

53 minutes ago, CuteStudio said:

Hmm.

I suspect it's an adjustable zobel network so you can equalise the impedance a speaker presents to an amplifier. Assuming someone twists the knobs in the right way and it does flatten it then many amplifiers may sound better with it.

 

The poor mans solution would be to slap a big 4ohm resistor over the speaker terminals to achieve a similar aim, a smart man would do an impedance sweep and design the correct zobel, or simply buy an active speaker or more amps and a digital crossover.

 

http://diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Speaker-Zobel/

 

Either way I can see why it costs $80k: That's to stop people doing teardowns and works extremely well

 Thank you.  Useful input.  As someone with large Magnepan speakers that are notorious for having fairly complex impedance curves, I was wondering whether a network like this might present an amplifier with an easier load to drive.  Question is, what sonic benefits are derived from "easier to drive loads"?

[sdolezalek]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

The OP said nothing that should lead you to believe he is an anti-vaxer type. He asked for real information and said opinions really didn't matter. I don't know what more he could do.

Asking how a product could work and excluding opinions, is about as close as you can get to someone who should be in your camp.

 

Chris: Thanks and I hope that Ralph11 and I are on the same page.  I actually quite like his comment below:

Quote

how long can ignorant citizens maintain an advanced civilization  <---- that is the larger issue beyond cables

 

I have actually found that the more I learn, the more willing I become to admit how much I don't know.  There are those here who exhibit the opposite behavior, but the reason this remains such a great site is that you can get some highly technical and educated responses to questions that aren't that easy, and I appreciate the willingness of those folks to continuously take the time to be helpful.  The more we can admit to how little we each actually know and how much we can benefit from those who, on any specific topic, know so much more than we do, the more we can return to a safer and saner world generally.   

[sdolezalek]

17 minutes ago, Speed Racer said:

 

No one here knows enough about the product to provide an education. All they can do is guess......

 

If that is really what you think about the sophistication and expertise of the regulars on this site, it probably isn't worth your time to hang out here.  If all you are saying is that we don't know what's in the box, I'd still suggest that you re-read some of the posts more carefully.  On the other hand, if you can contribute additional data that would educate all of us to what these boxes do, please do so.  

[sdolezalek]

I didn't ask whether this box was worth $80k because our free market society allows us to spend whatever we want on anything we want and therefore it's not my place to critize someone else's choices on how they spend their money.  I think I did ask the "what could be inside this thing" question, but not relating to price, only relating to whether it was doing something the rest of us might be interested in (albeit not at that price). 

 

I too have Maggies as my favorites (I still have my original set of MG-IIIa's but also have a tri-center surround system based on the 20.1's).  Maybe in a separate thread I'll ask for expert speculation on why the world divides so neatly into those who love what Maggies do and those who will always prefer what a box can do.  I have wondered what a no-holds barred Magico approach of controlling vibration and using exotic materials might accomplish with a Magnepan starting point, but I don't think I'd like what the result would be priced at.  In addition, I kind of like the fact that each Maggie is utimately still a hand built wooden instrument that gets tweaked over and over again to make it just that tiny bit better.  Almost like the old handbuilt string instruments...

 

Thanks also to George and Dennis for correcting my bad memory about Maggies and impedance -- shows I'm getting old. 

[sdolezalek]

7 minutes ago, Speed Racer said:

 

The web site for the product is extremely vague as to what the product actually does and does not explain how it does whatever it does. I looked. I downloaded everything from the site on the products. All quite vague with no discussion of actual implementation. There certainly was no discussion of IP.

 

So, no, I can't contribute additional information because there is none. It's basically a black box that does something they claim improves the sound coming out of the speakers. Is it just an equalizer? Does it impedance match? What else might it do to improve the sound? There are not enough details out there to really answer any of those questions.

 

Finally, you don't get to tell what I can do......not anymore than I can tell you what to do.

Apologies - Completely fair response.  I tried to do the same and couldn't find anything either.  But I find that to be an odd characteristic of this hobby -- that we are willing to let manufacturers produce products at these price points without insisting on some basis for their differentiation.  I'm not asking for MIT to disclose trade secrets, but you could disclose measurements that show the difference contributed by these boxes without saying anything about how they do it.  I guess the feature that most piqued my interest was the rotating dials -- if this were really designed to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of a system, wouldn't there be a single optimal setting, rather than something the user can dial in to taste?

[sdolezalek]

And the topic we were discussing was???

 

I think one of the reasons they frequently close down threads over on the Roon Community Forum is that most active threads at some point have put out 90% of the useful content, what comes after that is 80% noise and <20% useful content.  Maybe that is where we have arrived on this topic...

[sdolezalek]

6 hours ago, esldude said:

These images will illustrate what he is calling a pole of articulation.  It is like a combined low and high pass filter function of a resonance.  Good luck measuring such results with speaker wire.  

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a quote from the sidebar statement by Mr. Brisson in the link of the OP.  Even though he tells us he is dealing with this resonance caused by parasitic reactances by using reactive components in a network, Speedracer will inform us we are only guessing.  I am only guessing Mr. Brisson is adding what he says rather than lying to us about what his $80k gizmo does.  About the resonances of poles in the above graphs, I don't need Mr. Brisson's input. 

 

As with any passive network, cables contain both resistive and reactive components. This creates resonances and anti-resonances in the cable. A series resonance is when the reactive components cancel each other. At the resonant frequency the complex impedance will be quite low. This series resonance doesn’t impede the signal flow in a cable. An anti-resonance, however, is formed when the reactive components add together to form a highly complex impedance. This “parallel resonance” does impede signal flow in the cable. 

It’s generally assumed that the electrical bandwidth of an audio system should be ten times greater than the audio bandwidth. That is, the electronic components should operate out to at least 200kHz. So, what are the first issues that cause distortion when a cable doesn’t work well within that band of frequencies? Cables suffer from a parasitic series resonance at frequencies below about 1.5kHz and from parallel resonances at higher frequencies, determined by the values of the inductance and capacitance. The cable doesn’t function as an ideal inductor. All audio products act as low-pass filters. Cables without networked terminations function as a lossy low-pass filter because of this parasitic capacitance as well as shunt capacitance. The vector seen at the input terminals of an audio signal-carrying cable should be an inductive vector at all frequencies and at all power levels.

 

We can correct for the parasitic and shunt capacitance by adding reactive components in the network that will offset these effects.

Thanks Dennis, I can always count on you to dig deeper, just when others give up because it seems too hard in today's "feed it to me by the spoonful" world... 

 

Unfortunately, because Mr. Brisson appears good at inventing his own dictionary, he may in fact have identified a physical characteristic that varies and can be varied within the audible range, but the variance of which might be worth big numbers on his "articulation scale" but count as a less than 1dB variance on any scale of human audibility.  Also, if through a multiple pole approach, as his graphs imply, you could create a flat "articulation curve" and that had audible benefits, then why not just fix the problem rather than turn it into a weak form of equalizer? 

[sdolezalek]

6 minutes ago, esldude said:

No one pays $80 k for non-mysterious software. 

 

Interesting and valid comment.  Why are we willing to pay so much more for an unknown in a physical box than we are for the same thing in software?  Has the Internet and all the Apps we use every day demystified but also taken the "value" out of software, or are we somehow much more willing to challenge claims of value in a piece of software than we are from a piece of hardware?  

[sdolezalek]

Why hasn't this group ever taken on the value of the materials used in phono cartridges?  Say like the Koetsu Coralstone Platinum?  Maybe compared to $80k spending $15k on a little platinum seems downright reasonable...

[sdolezalek]

2 minutes ago, Don Hills said:

"... Discreet articulation control is now possible over three sections of the bandwidth, ..."

 

... "Discreet" as in you wouldn't notice it unless you knew it was there?

 

"Discrete" would make more sense, in context.

Don:  I think they are just trying to be truthful...discreet here could be read to mean minimal. 

[sdolezalek]

17 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

 

Good question. I always associated the high-price of some phono cartridges with the fact that cartridges such as Koetsus are hand-made by famous elves, working alone in small shops in Japan. It's certainly fine work attaching tiny diamonds to thin, fragile cantilevers made of exotic materials such as boron, carbon fiber and titanium or ruby and even diamond itself!

 Yes, it took me a while to realize that about 1/3rd of the price of the high-priced Koetsu cartridges is that "exotic material" the cantilever is attached to.  Some of them are visually quite attractive such as the Blue Lace Onyx, the Coralstone, the Rhodonite, or the ultimate, the Tiger Eye.  But maybe that puts these into the category of collectors watches -- no one pretends they tell better time -- and into simple art. That's no different than exotic woods or lacquers on speaker boxes.  At least there is no one suggesting the Tiger Eye frequency response is twice as linear as that of the Onyx... 

 

So I really can't complain if people choose to spend their money on those "artistic" qualities.

 

George: Note the "edit" box which allows you to modify even after you post.  i suppose you could go as far as edit what you previously wrote down to a single word: Oops! Not that I see anything wrong with your comments. 

[sdolezalek]

50 minutes ago, mansr said:

Deleting a post after posting it is indeed impossible, and that's a bit silly.

 

Why not just use the "Edit" feature just to the right of the plus sign and above your signature (which you can only see on your own posts and only for so long, but it allows you to edit away anything you said in haste.  I frequently find typos in my posts that I go in and fix 10-15 minutes later.