[Gary Eickmeier]

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
A lot more work needs to be done, but it looks like the British measurement
company, Acuity Products (http://www.acuityproducts.co.uk/) has developed
a
waveform analysis test for the effects of cables on sound(!).

Listen fellers - this stuff is really incredibly simple.

The only way to tell if a SOUND is AUDIBLE is with a LISTENING test. All the
king's meters and all the king's scopes do not mean anything unless
correlated with LISTENING tests.

All together now: How can you tell if two cables sound different from each
other?

______________ ___________

Gary Eickmeier

[Audio Empire]

On Sun, 1 May 2011 16:00:25 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
A lot more work needs to be done, but it looks like the British measurement
company, Acuity Products (http://www.acuityproducts.co.uk/) has developed
a
waveform analysis test for the effects of cables on sound(!).

Listen fellers - this stuff is really incredibly simple.

The only way to tell if a SOUND is AUDIBLE is with a LISTENING test. All the
king's meters and all the king's scopes do not mean anything unless
correlated with LISTENING tests.

All together now: How can you tell if two cables sound different from each
other?

______________ ___________

Gary Eickmeier

Easy. They don't because they can't. speaking of effects that are below the
threshold of hearing!

[Gary Eickmeier]

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 1 May 2011 16:00:25 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
A lot more work needs to be done, but it looks like the British
measurement
company, Acuity Products (http://www.acuityproducts.co.uk/) has
developed
a
waveform analysis test for the effects of cables on sound(!).

Listen fellers - this stuff is really incredibly simple.

The only way to tell if a SOUND is AUDIBLE is with a LISTENING test. All
the
king's meters and all the king's scopes do not mean anything unless
correlated with LISTENING tests.

All together now: How can you tell if two cables sound different from
each
other?

______________ ___________

Gary Eickmeier

Easy. They don't because they can't. speaking of effects that are below
the
threshold of hearing!


Probably correct! But they are going on and on about all of these technical
details without correlating anything to a listening test. And a lot of
responders are getting sucked in by it.

I'm just sayin'.

Gary Eickmeier

[Edmund[_2_]]

On Mon, 02 May 2011 11:09:19 +0000, Gary Eickmeier wrote:

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 1 May 2011 16:00:25 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote (in article
):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
A lot more work needs to be done, but it looks like the British
measurement
company, Acuity Products (http://www.acuityproducts.co.uk/) has
developed
a
waveform analysis test for the effects of cables on sound(!).

Listen fellers - this stuff is really incredibly simple.

The only way to tell if a SOUND is AUDIBLE is with a LISTENING test.
All the
king's meters and all the king's scopes do not mean anything unless
correlated with LISTENING tests.

All together now: How can you tell if two cables sound different from
each
other?

______________ ___________

Gary Eickmeier

Easy. They don't because they can't. speaking of effects that are belo=
w
the
threshold of hearing!


Probably correct! But they are going on and on about all of these
technical details without correlating anything to a listening test. And
a lot of responders are getting sucked in by it.

Probably wrong! They claim to have heard differences in the first place a=
nd
they claim to have found a way to measure it in such way that it shows=20
these differences in hard data.
What is true of these claims I cannot judge from here but it seems like a=
=20
valid point of view. And since we not have a perfect sound system yet, cl=
aims
like " we cannot hear that..." are less valid because that depends mostly=
of the
sound system used but as said even the best sound system isn't perfect...=
.. yet.
AS long we don't have a perfect sound system, it is OK to improve every l=
ink
in the audio chain. Having said this, I have a hard time believing a spea=
ker
cable or a interlink could ever improve reproduced sound.

Edmund

=20
I'm just sayin'.
=20
Gary Eickmeier

[Gary Eickmeier]

Edmund wrote:

What is true of these claims I cannot judge from here but it seems
like a
valid point of view. And since we not have a perfect sound system
yet, claims like " we cannot hear that..." are less valid because
that depends mostly of the sound system used but as said even the
best sound system isn't perfect.... yet. AS long we don't have a
perfect sound system, it is OK to improve every link
in the audio chain. Having said this, I have a hard time believing a
speaker cable or a interlink could ever improve reproduced sound.

Edmund

This last statement is much more interesting than the topic under
discussion. What do you mean, Edmund, that we don't have a perfect audio
system yet? What part are we missing? What can't we do with sound
reproduction?

Gary Eickmeier

[Scott[_6_]]

On May 3, 5:54=A0am, "Gary Eickmeier" wrote:
Edmund wrote:
What is true of these claims I cannot judge from here but it seems
like a
valid point of view. And since we not have a perfect sound system
yet, claims like " we cannot hear that..." are less valid because
that depends mostly of the sound system used but as said even the
best sound system isn't perfect.... yet. AS long we don't have a
perfect sound system, it is OK to improve every link
in the audio chain. Having said this, I have a hard time believing a
speaker cable or a interlink could ever improve reproduced sound.

Edmund

This last statement is much more interesting than the topic under
discussion. What do you mean, Edmund, that we don't have a perfect audio
system yet?


I don't know what Edmund meant but if you are using original acoustic
events as your reference then we do not have any perfect audio systems
of recording and playback. The most common system used, two channel
stereo, clearly is anything but perfect in this regard. Muyltichannel
just fixes certain inherent problems while piling onto other inherent
problems.


What part are we missing? What can't we do with sound
reproduction?

We certainly can't recreate the original three dimensional wave form
of an original acoustic event. No one even tries.

[Audio Empire]

On Tue, 3 May 2011 05:54:34 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

Edmund wrote:

What is true of these claims I cannot judge from here but it seems
like a
valid point of view. And since we not have a perfect sound system
yet, claims like " we cannot hear that..." are less valid because
that depends mostly of the sound system used but as said even the
best sound system isn't perfect.... yet. AS long we don't have a
perfect sound system, it is OK to improve every link
in the audio chain. Having said this, I have a hard time believing a
speaker cable or a interlink could ever improve reproduced sound.

Edmund

This last statement is much more interesting than the topic under
discussion. What do you mean, Edmund, that we don't have a perfect audio
system yet? What part are we missing? What can't we do with sound
reproduction?

Gary Eickmeier




What can't we do with sound reproduction? The two avowed goals of
High-Fidelity ever since the concept was first described in the 1930's -
bring the real sound of live, unamplified music into the listening room,
and/or conversely, virtually transport the listener to the venue where a
performance of unamplified music is taking place. Neither of these has been
realized - nor is it likely to be for a myriad of reasons. Firstly, room
acoustics are always going to overlay the acoustics of the recording, and
while sound treatment and DSP can overcome SOME of that, it cannot eliminate
all of the room sound. One would need an anechoic chamber, or sort of an
audio "holodeck", to do that. Secondly, no speaker can move enough air to
simulate a full symphony orchestra, even in a smallish room. The closest I
ever heard was the Wilson Audio "Grand SLAMM" speaker system of the mid
1980's and while the amount of sound it produced and the visceral impact it
had on all present in the room was impressive, it had other problems which
kept it from completing the illusion. One problem that speakers have that
real instruments don't is that to move a great deal of air, they need to have
a great deal of surface area. That surface area has high mass because for a
true piston-like action, the moving mass must be stiff. But antithetically,
for proper and realistic propagation, the sound source must be infinitely
small, and should be designed like a totally modal and phase coherent
pulsating sphere. That's a tall order - an impossibly tall order. While some
of these characteristics can be imparted over certain parts of the audio
spectrum, what is needed is a solution that covers the entire audio gamut,
and that doesn't exist.

As far as amplification is concerned, I think we can do that, today. It is
apparently fairly trivial (according to some of the audio design specialists
who contribute to this forum) to design amplifiers that have aggregate noise
and distortion figures below the threshold of hearing. The expense would come
at building a transparent amp large enough to move enough air (in our
theoretical perfect speaker) to realistically load an anechoic chamber.
Certainly, high-resolution digital with 24 or 32-bits should be transparent
enough to hold a virtually perfect copy of a performance, so from that
standpoint a source shouldn't be a big technical problem - except for one
thing. On the other end of the chain is another transducer, the microphone.
They are at least as flawed as the speaker system and for many of the same
reasons, only in reverse. No microphone comes even close to perfection and
even if it were sonically perfect, microphones simply simply don't hear the
way humans hear and although we use them as surrogate ears, they really
aren't.

I record using DSD, and while I cannot speak to the accuracy of the
microphones except in the broadest sense; that is to say, they aren't
anywhere near as perfect as they need be to fulfill the goal of
high-fidelity, I can tell you that the recordings made with the DSD recorder
are EXACTLY like the microphone feed. There is NO difference. That tells me
that the recordings are perfect copies of what comes out of the mixer.
Whether what comes out of the mixer is a perfect copy of what the ensemble
being recorded sounds like is a different story.

So, as you can see, while we can do some of it right, there are many
obstacles to perfect reproduction, most of which are physically improbable to
be able to ever overcome.

[Audio Empire]

On Mon, 2 May 2011 04:09:19 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 1 May 2011 16:00:25 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...
A lot more work needs to be done, but it looks like the British
measurement
company, Acuity Products (http://www.acuityproducts.co.uk/) has
developed
a
waveform analysis test for the effects of cables on sound(!).

Listen fellers - this stuff is really incredibly simple.

The only way to tell if a SOUND is AUDIBLE is with a LISTENING test. All
the
king's meters and all the king's scopes do not mean anything unless
correlated with LISTENING tests.

All together now: How can you tell if two cables sound different from
each
other?

______________ ___________

Gary Eickmeier

Easy. They don't because they can't. speaking of effects that are below
the
threshold of hearing!


Probably correct! But they are going on and on about all of these technical
details without correlating anything to a listening test. And a lot of
responders are getting sucked in by it.

I'm just sayin'.

Gary Eickmeier



That's why I brought it up. OK, they have developed software based on sonar
correlation algorithms. Sounds reasonable that some navy has developed
sophisticated programs that can "listen" through the background clutter of
undersea spunds and find intelligence such as prop noise, engine signatures,
and can even tell hull reflections from temperature inversion layers or
whales. It is also reasonable that these programs can be modified to look for
other things within an audio signal. Things such as minute differences in the
way that two different cables conduct an audio signal, or how two different
amplifiers do their job.

I might even buy that such software could tell the difference between a
component powered through a mains conditioner, and one that wasn't (although
that's really stretching my willing suspension of disbelief),

But, given all that, there remain two points about this test that I cannot
get around.

1) If such military auto-correlation software were designed to pick up sounds
in the water that trained human sonar operators cannot hear, and thus miss
when doing strategic listening, what does that say about the audibility of
the differences picked-up by the modified software? Nobody has ever said, for
instance, that cables and interconnects have NO effect on the signals they
pass. We all realize that any conductor will have resistance, capacitance,
and inductance. What is important is that over the audio spectrum (and quite
a bit beyond) and in the lengths commonly used for a home audio system (a
couple of meters maximum for interconnects, and probably ten meters maximum
for speaker cable) that the effects of these three parameters are so far
below the threshold of human hearing as to be inconsequential. The fact that
a computer algorithm can detect these minute differences between these
characteristics in different cables (if indeed it can), is completely
irrelevant to music reproduction except in, perhaps, the most academic
manner.

2) If the people who developed this test methodology are technically
competent enough to conduct these tests and to compile the data shown in the
paper, then why is it that they don't seem to understand that results with as
many variables as these tests seem to exhibit don't MEAN ANYTHING?

Instead of saying that their tests reveal that the Vertex mains cables BY
ITSELF showed a significant difference in the cleanliness of the component's
sound, for instance, or that the Nordost mains conditioner BY ITSELF effected
a marked improvement in noise, these people lumped them both together. This
is ludicrous! Was the "improvement" in noise a result of the mains cable or
the mains conditioner, or the sum of both? And is the difference with and
without these two components in the tests setup something that one is likely
to hear? Nowhere in the entire paper are we told the scale of the shown
oscillographs except to say that the noise difference scale was 10X that of
the actual mains noise seen on the raw AC. The entire paper is riddled with
fundamental testing "errors" of this sort.

Frankly, I have looked at the raw AC feeding lots of amplifiers, pre-amps and
CD players on a dual-trace oscilloscope and then looked, simultaneously, at
the DC on the other side of that same power supply, and even at as much as
100X the gain of the AC trace, I have NEVER seen the AC line noise, even
severely attenuated, show up on a component's power supply DC. It just isn't
there. The reason? Power transformers designed for 50-60 Hz simply haven't
the bandwidth to pass the high-frequency grunge that can be riding on our
house current. Add to that the time constant of the filters on the output of
the rectifiers (and the frequency response of the rectifier diodes
themselves) and again, they act as low-pass filters. High-frequency noise and
transient spikes haven't a chance of getting through. So, while using power
line conditioners sounds, on the surface, like a good idea, the reality is
that they are totally redundant. That's why I say that if your components
NEED such power conditioning, then you bought very poorly designed
components. Expensive IEC line cords? Don't be ridiculous! That the last 2
meters of WIRE from the wall plate to your component could do ANYTHING to
improve the quality of an AC current that has probably travelled hundreds of
miles over all types of terrain and through countless transformers and
switching yards, is at the very least, the height of electrical naivete.