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(Stewart Pinkerton) writes:

On Wed, 07 Jan 2004 19:06:38 GMT, "=?iso-8859-1?q?J=F3n?= Fairbairn"
wrote:
Just out of interest, how low quality does cable have to be
before you can detect it? I'd expect that if you connect the
speakers with something crazy like thin coax it would be
noticable, but it would be an interesting datapoint to try
DBTs with a few things to see what can be heard.

Aside from silliness like 'bell wire' with several ohms resistance, I
have *never* heard any difference under blind conditions, even with
unobtainium conductors of Golden Section dimensions insulated with
rarest Chinese silk hand-rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins.....

Um, Stewart, I think you need to read my post without
engaging your seek-and-destroy anti-DBT-ites mechanisms! I
don't for a minute believe that there is an audible
difference between any of the commericially available cables
(with the possible exception of snake oil with added
detrimental bogosity).

I wouldn't expect the results to be different from DBTs with
various series resistors,

... I should probably have included thermistors and other
nonlinear devices here ...

inductors and parallel capacitors,
(what values of those are detectable?) but it still might
be worth doing from a didactic point of view.

With levels matched to +/- 0.1 dB at 100Hz, 1kHz and
10kHz, experience suggests that 'wire is wire'.

Yes, but the question was about what isn't wire. Your first
paragraph implies that bell wire can be heard, which goes
some short way towards answering my question, but where is
the limit of detectability for that sort of sillyiness? How
little resistance -- in particular current dependent
resistance -- can be detected? How much
inductance/capacitance?

If you can prove different, there's a $4k pot waiting to
be collected.

Attractive though $4k may be, I'm not given to
circle-squaring exercises.

--
JÃ³n Fairbairn