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(Nousaine) wrote in message . net...
(See remainder of the discussion below

So YOU hear speaker cables? Why not take a cable with 'sound' and compare it to
zip cord in a bias controlled listening test and tell us what you find?

Why not? Because why should one bother with a $ 600:00 switch
and trained assistants if the result is predictable? You'll hear "no
difference" just like the 80% or more of the listeners in ALL the
reported "bias controlled" listening tests, whatever is being tested:
cables, preamps, amps, cd players, dacs, distortion under
2%-everything. And if you score within the "yes" 20% group you'll be
told that the goal is now moved and the criteria for the likes of YOU
are now set higher.
For the record- it was not I , who inroduced the topic of "bias
controlled" tests. Unless you meant something else -not ABX. Did you?
Ludovic Mirabel

Lou Anschuetz wrote:

...snips to specific content .....

chung wrote in
. net:

Can you provide a little more detail on what research you are
talking about?
Actually no. It would be unwise for me to comment on unpublished
research.

I wonder why you mentioned it then?

What new informatin has come out about audio cables in the last 30
years? (We're not talking about fiber-optical cables here.)
I've already stated that little (if any) research is being done
at sites other than cable companies on _audio_ cables. That doesn't
mean that other things learned have no effect. This is a falsifiability
issue.

There is no audibility 'research' being done at any high-end company. But
experiments that I've personally performed indicate that none is seemingly
necessary.

While nature is wonderful, it is also pretty consistent. To believe
that the range 20-20,000 is somehow protected or asymptoted out of
all effects is, IMHO, pretty bold.

No, it's just a range that is easily handled by cables, and it has
been handled successfully for decades. We're not talking about
delivering kilowatts of power or nano-amps of current here. Let's get
practical.

For those same decades people have heard differences.

No they have only 'claimed' such. No interested party has ever produced a
bias-control listening test that nominally competent audio interconnects and
speaker cables have any sound of their own.

You argue it
is bias (which it *may* be), but there may be other explanations
as well.

Such as?

Most every cable user I know of (and I know a lot in both research
and manufacturing) check every spool of wire that comes in. A lot of
it doesn't pass master.

In what ways. I once had a job as a sheey metal expediter and we tested every
coil that came in. Some were rejected but mostly because it was the wrong size
or the spool wouldn't fit on the decoiler (one time because it was stamped in
ink "ford reject" although there was nothing else wrong with the steel.)

Remember that I too hear no differences between competently designed
interconnects and toslink cables. I do, however, contend that some
speaker cables, for whatever reasons, do sound different.

Ehh, perception biases?
It is one of the possibilities, yes. I just don't happen to think it
is the only one. Hence my relating the story below.

There has been no experimental listening test results that indicate otherwise.
I suppose that on occasion that the interface 'boxes' might produce an effect
but IME I've not found this to be the case.

I also know
that testing such cables via human hearing is frought with
difficulty. Some early, unpublished (and potentially invalid)
research I did many decades ago as an undergraduate suggested that
people couldn't even identify their own voice vs. someone else's
(even of a different gender!) in some studies. That has the potential
to be quite damming in certain areas of research, so might be quite
hard to get funding for But it has always made me aware that
testing by listening alone is not to be trusted - thus gives me pause
when suggesting any kind of "audio" test of cables will be
conclusive.

So if you can't 'hear' the effect, why bother? No one argues that measurements
made at the microscopic level can always find variations that are not visible
with the naked eye (or audible with the naked ear) so why would we care?

But, I also know that cables do sometimes act in funny ways. Until
someone can adequately model every potential agent acting in random
ways concurrently in a cable, there is room for some healthy
scepticism about whether or not they make a difference.

Even if they do operate in funny ways unless it affects the sound quality the
effects are nearly always noise or loss of transmission, which means a system
error of some type. Those circumstances, which you describe below, need fixing
but have nobearing on the innate sound quality of the transmission media.

Here's mu 'funny wire' story. When making soem speaker measurements my computer
based test gear kept giving me an error message indicting that I might have had
a wire failure. Sure enough substituting a different cable seemed to fix the
problem although that cable tested good for conductivity.

Next time around I got the same message; and hunted the problem down to
re-seating the ISA card in the computer.

Another time, long ago, I had an intermittent channel drop-out problem that
would fix itself whenever I touched any piece of equipment in the rack. Turned
out to be a tone arm lead wire that was broken behind the rca plug and would
operate only intermittently.

Neither of those conditions had any bearing on the sound quality of the wires.
The lesson I learned from the latter is not to expect high-end wire to be
reliable.

Please list those funny ways, and see if we can sort them out. I think
that makes for a much more productive discussion.
Not sure how that helps unless you follow me around

Example: take two new snake (bundle cables) out on stage. Check each
one for all normal effects. Thirty minutes into the show one connector
starts picking up a flourescent light. The rest of the individual
coax's don't. Declare this one bad. Accidentally use the same coax in
the same bundle the next night - works fine.

Example, hook up my television camera to a snake bundle with multiple
analog coax feeds. An hour into shooting the remote monitors show
ghosting (known as cable reflections). Change to other coax. After shoot
put back the first one - no problem. Jump up and down on cable, twist
it, scream at it, etc. It never fails again. Cosmic particles? Pixie
dust? don't know - flaw is never found again. Happened to me last month.
Cable tests perfectly (as do the electronics).

But you're not talking about home audio grade wires or conditions here. And
even if so; what does operating faults like this have to do with the 'sound' of
tranmission media?

I *never* assume that cables will act as theory says. 1/20 or so times
they stop acting normally. Many times we find a flaw, many times we
don't. All the video/audio guys I know
bring lots of extra cabling. Sure, many of the failures
are going to be mechanical. Sometimes they aren't.

I'm pretty sure that the failures I've just documented aren't
perceptual bias Since we also can't establish mechanical
issues, there is clearly something else going on. Either it is
just magic, or the cables are being affected by *something* in the
environment.

I'm thinking the examples you used were probably all mechanically related.

If those cables, made for professional use, can exhibit
non-easily explained behaviors, I find it hard to believe that
speaker cables don't as well. I'm not attempting to *prove*
anything - just provide a rationale for why I remain sceptical
about cables all sounding the same. I wish they did to me too

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