Why!? Please Tell Me Why!

[mansr]

6 hours ago, vmartell22 said:

How do we go from "conductors with large air dielectrics" ->  "Probably very nice sounding"?

The thing is the most of the time the explanation includes very detailed and very arcane knowledge of conducting materials, the physics of it etc - and well,  I am not one to knock anyone that knows lots more than I do - that said the crucial jump from  "this is how that constrictor-like cable works" to better sound is either never explained or goes straight to "therefore there is a  difference" or "therefore it sounds better"... and without true scientific testing of those conclusions, well, there will always be a controversy...

 

[mansr]

26 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I just wish somebody could explain why and how, because it shouldn't, you know. 

Try getting sound without a power cord.

[mansr]

50 minutes ago, beancounter said:

Grab the anode with one hand, the cathode with the other, and FEEL the music

So that's what power cords like this one are for.

[mansr]

14 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

is that a British Mains plug? Please answer me this. Why is there a male plug on both ends of that cable. I thought that was a no-no!

Those are British mains plugs. I had some spare parts, so I made it to confuse visitors. The wires aren't actually connected in either end.

[mansr]

13 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

Yes, I am SURE that ESP is causing the differences in power cables that people "hear" when they have a lot of expectation bias.

How else do you explain the teleportation tweak?

[mansr]

1 minute ago, GUTB said:

Sub-atomic particles are observed to act as a particle and a wave. This doesn’t mean they are magic, it just means we haven’t observed them sufficiently to properly determine thier nature.

Sure we have. They are both. It's a simple experiment, at least for photons.

[mansr]

14 minutes ago, GUTB said:

They can’t be both.

I guess you don't believe in the Fourier transform either.

[mansr]

7 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Directional cables are the result of a controversial build methodology. It has nothing to do with electron flow per se. Cables are generally marked with an arrow when only one end of the coaxial cable's shield is connected to the barrel on a non-balanced connector like an RCA.

An Audioquest cable I took apart has two insulated conductors surrounded by a shield. The shield is connected to the RCA plug barrel at the pointy end of the arrow. The two signal wires are obviously connected in both ends. The main result of this arrangement is some nasty reflections going back and forth along the cable, even causing a resonance at a few tens of MHz.

[mansr]

17 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

That's what my picture, above shows.

The arrow points the other direction on the AQ cable.

 

17 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I don't know why there should be reflections. The circuit is completed by the two internal signal wires and the shield acts as a Faraday "cage" for those two conductors and carries no current.

There are reflections for the same reason they occur in any unterminated cable.

[mansr]

Just now, phosphorein said:

Indeed, the Audioquest cable distorted the pulse (significant ringing) but the distortion was bi-directional.

Mine, to my surprise, behaved asymmetrically. That's why I took it apart.

[mansr]

1 hour ago, phosphorein said:

Strange! Unfortunately I no longer have access to that measuring system.

What sort of system was that?

[mansr]

1 hour ago, phosphorein said:

Pulse sequences used a SRS DG535 generator (and assorted other pulse generators: HP and Tektronix; I don't remember the model numbers) and I had a Lecroy 500 MHZ dual channel digital scope as well a Tektronix 7912AD digital scope (picosecond rise time) for the fast stuff. The testing of the Audioquest cable was on a whim. I was at the time verifying the time resolution of an optical detection system in which I had to have sub-nanosecond resolution in the time domain and S/N sufficient to observe a transient of 10^-5 optical density units. All this in the presence of a high power, high rep rate Nd-YAG laser which was a big-time rf generator.

I used a Tektronix MDO3054 and its built-in AFG. Not quite up to the same specs. Then again, it's not quite the same price either.

[mansr]

35 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

But in interconnects the source is a fairly low impedance, and the destination is a relatively high impedance. That should be fairly proper termination for a coaxial interconnect. 

The floating shield isn't terminated.

[mansr]

50 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

I would think that the cable manufacturers would at least get together on the arrow's direction. I wrote an article about star grounding technique about 20 years ago and made those drawings. I called Monster at the time and talked to one of their engineers. He told me that the convention was that the arrow pointed away from the end where the the shield was fixed tho show the direction that all connections went, AWAY from the common grounding point. I guess it could be either way pointing at the common termination or pointing away from it. I wonder why Audioquest decided to point away from it. It seems confusing especially since I've never noticed any mention on any cable's packaging referencing the arrow or what it's for!

The snake oil vendors sometimes say the arrow should point in the direction of the signal, that is from DAC to preamp or from preamp to amp, quite at odds with the star grounding idea.

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

The floating shield isn't carrying any current either. It's just a static Faraday shield.

Have you ever tried sending signals into a dangling coax and watched how they bounce back from the open end?

[mansr]

1 minute ago, marce said:

dialectics

Really?

[mansr]

19 minutes ago, jabbr said:

An "electrical signal" uses time varying voltages and currents to carry information. There is a difference: an electrical signal uses current flow, they aren't the same. Indeed in a balanced signal their is no net current flow because current in one direction is matched by the opposite current. Nonetheless the source expends energy and the signal is indeed directional.

It should be noted that it need not be the source that expends energy. Imagine a pair of wires with a voltage source at one end and a switch at the other. By opening and closing the switch, a sender of information can cause current to flow or not. A receiver at the voltage source can monitor the current flow and thus decode the information. Here the receiver is the one expending energy by sending current through the loop.

[mansr]

5 minutes ago, mav52 said:

You have a link

For what, the speed of electrical signals in metal wires? I don't have a link handy, but it's easy enough to measure it.

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, Summit said:

Why are you saying No no no no no no no no. An audio signal is flow of electricity.

Doesn't have to be. Are you saying the grooves on an LP aren't audio signals?

[mansr]

So smoke signals and semaphores aren't signals either then? You people have some weird definitions of words.

[mansr]

30 minutes ago, marce said:

We have to know how fast a signal is travelling down a trace for length matching of high speed traces such as DDR memory interfaces... And to make it more fun signals travel faster on the outer layers of a PCB (microstrip) than they do on inner layers (stripline) as half the signal travels through air on the outer layers. Of course if you mix the core materials of a PCB then it can get really fun...

And sometimes the weave orientation matters. I don't recall seeing any audiophool products make a big deal out of this. Could there be a market opportunity here?

[mansr]

1 hour ago, Summit said:

The audio signal needs to be transformed in to sound wave by a transducer (I.e. driver/woofer) for us to hear it.

A sound wave is a type of audio signal.

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

An audio signal is simply a voltage that varies at an alternating audio rate.

Or a current, light intensity, pressure, mechanical displacement, or just about any physical property. Or an analogue or digital modulation of a carrier signal of any of the above forms.

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Well, yes, but I was addressing vmartell22's specific statement about the nature of an audio signal!

As was I. A signal does not have to be in any way electrical.

[mansr]

5 minutes ago, Allan F said:

That would require a quantum leap in the tone of the discussion.

A quantum leap is the smallest possible leap, right?