headphones
gjsmo writes:
(snips)
I know about the various other effects (though not their exact
meanings), but it seems like those would be negligible, ESPECIALLY on
wires like speaker interconnects - big, thick wires carrying a good
You're going in the right general direction. My suggestion is to be
alert to oversimplification.
In audio, not only are the subtle aspects prone to complexity (devil
in the details, as it were), the perceptive aspects are complex with
humans, and with any one of us in our particular listening
environments.
There are all sorts of wild and wonderful perceptive issues that make
humans exquisitely sensitive in some regards, but near stone deaf in
others. The nature of music itself can mask or expose different
problems in uneven ways.
So, are the effects of tiny parasitics audible or not?
Depends on what they are and what they affect. But I want mine way
down, at least 90 dB down, preferably 100+ down, at or below the
noise floor.
If you're talking volts into a reasonably efficient speaker, 100 dB
down will put you in the microvolt range and *hopefully* be
inaudible. Hopefully.
But if the problem is merely 50-60 dB down, we're talking millivolts
against volts and that's likely audible.
Just because from a *linear* frame of reference we'd be inclined to
say that a 1/2 millivolt signal should be lost against the swamping
tide of a 10 volt signal, that's not necessarily true.
There are perceptive tests you can cobble together for your own
edification, and as a challenge to the "common sense" notion of huge
signals swamping little ones.
Here's something fun to try:
I assume your DAW has an oscillator plugin and it can generate
various waveforms, and hopefully even white noise.
Take a white noise source. Hi and low pass it with steep cut-offs to
give you a band of noise from 100 Hz to 500 Hz. Take a sine
oscillator set to 2Khz, with the output 50 dB lower than your white
noise. Mix them together. While moderately faint, you should hear
that 2K signal, no problem.
Crank down that little signal still mo -60, -70. I bet you can
still hear it.
This is something of a rigged test, in that the ear is most sensitive
in the 2k region. And, with the band pass on the noise signal, we've
left things wide open for that tiny signal.
This is still a useful test because circuit aberrations in that
frequency range with real music might be that much more evident,
along with how real music itself does not occupy all frequencies at
any given instant. Something small that doesn't belong *can* be exposed.
This is especially true with acoustic music.
The theme of this test is that you can hear the small among the large.
==
I would never spend kilobucks for speaker wire, but I am going to be
careful about what I use and how it's maintained.
Part of the issue in my room is that the monitor chain and room
itself is good enough so that many things ambiguously perceived on a
typical system are not fleeting on this system. If there's something
there, you will hear it.
Likewise, if something is NOT there (yet you thought otherwise due to
suggestion or self-deception inspired by non-linearities in a lesser
system/room) you'll be disappointed -- because you won't hear it.
And along those same lines, you won't hear a faux brightness due to
distortion, or a fake creaminess due to slight dips in HF response,
etc.
Sigh. There's so much more to all this, but this post would get way
too long.
The general point is that if an improbable observation comes your
way, eliminate what you can as the cause. If it persists, you might
indeed have found something that initially seemed unlikely.
AC circuits can be odd at first glance, but it sounds like you
understand the broad fundamentals, and that's a good portion of what
you need unless you plan on designing gear from scratch.
But back (finally!) to your statement:
I'm still not buying any cable that costs much more than the
copper and rubber that's in it.
Theoretically, yes, absolutely. I'm right there with you.
But in the real world, things might not be quite so simple. We need
to specify:
- how much impurity we'll allow in the copper, and the affiliated
parasitic dioding, if a particular impurity leads to that (mere
resistance or reactance we can likely tolerate -- up to a point). Our
answer depends on the application. And it's more granular than
"audio". A tracking studio might tolerate "little" failings in their
monitoring more than a mastering studio.
- what price for the chosen level of purity?
- what level of diminishing returns for that price?
- what return on investment?
(There's yet another discussion about the geometry of the wire,
starting with solid or stranded, and branching out from there. Again,
not as simple as we might like.)
Anyway, way more than $0.02 worth; sorry for the length. Hope it helps.
Frank
Mobile Audio
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