James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables 1239
elrond amandil writes "James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'"
All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
fappable? (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell does that mean?
on second thought...
I don't even want to know what the hell that means.
Re:fappable? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:fappable? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:fappable? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a 6-foot USB cable costing $31 (!!!): from circuit city [circuitcity.com]. It features:
I keep around a few spare USB AB cables, which I give to friends and family when they tell me they're going to buy a new printer. I tell them to insist to the sales-person that they already have the proper cable. They save $25-30 and I get the smug feeling of sticking it to a dishonest industry... woohoo
PS- The ironic part is that the USB connectors and cables are actually *specified* with extremely loose tolerances, so that cheap processes and materials can be used to manufacture them reliably. And since the USB protocol is *digital* and includes error-correction, cables have to be almost ludicrously bad for their quality to affect signaling. Case in point: I have a functioning home-made USB cable which I produced by splicing the wires from two cables together and wrapping them with electrical tape. This completely violates the USB spec, which requires that the data wires form a twisted pair [wikipedia.org] with something like 5mm per twist. However, my ugly home-made cable transmits data from a USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure at the same speed as a proper cable.
Interestingly... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interestingly... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:5, Interesting)
Transistors do sound more harsh. That's why a lot of heavy metal guys prefer transistor amps (Dimebag Darrell really was the first guy I can think of who was vocal in his preference of tranny amps because of the harsh sound). I'd bet that most people could tell the difference between a transistor amp and a tube amp. It's subtle, but it's there. It's like the dynamic range compression that you find on newer recordings. You may not actively *notice* it, but the sound tends to fatigue your ear. There was a nice article on that here on
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:5, Informative)
Both tubes and transistors cause harmonic distortion when saturated. Its the nature of the distortion that causes the harshness.
When a solid state amp is saturated the result is a hard clipped waveform where there is a sharp edge at the point of clipping. This produces a lot of odd harmonics in the frequency spectrum. Odd harmonics over the fundamental tend to sound very harsh to the human ear.
When a tube amp saturates it tends to soft clip the waveform. This means that at the point where clipping occurs the waveform becomes slightly compressed giving a rounder edged waveform. This tends to produces more even harmonic distortion, which to the human ear is not perceived to be nearly as harsh.
dude
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:5, Funny)
My primary reason for selecting larger cables is to reduce power loss, not safety... but larger cables have other benefits, however marginal they may be.
This is why I use sections of railroad track for speaker wires. A little heavy though. :-)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Your ears need new drivers. When I go outside, and listen to birds, I'm hearing the latest lossless codecs. The presence is amazing-- you feel as if the birds are actually alive, and not just hologramatic replicas.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm...it seems the error in this article was that the reviewer forgot to FREEZE the cables, prior to listening. This of course helps the molecules to align correctly, for better electron movement, directionally speaking.
If this had been done and written into the review, of course, we'd not be having this /. discussion.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
A friend of mine claims to have found the ideal ingredients to prepare his cables for playing a Find Young Cannibals album. A couple of other friends have gone over to listen, but for some reason I haven't heard back from them.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
"New! Featuring four beams, nearly twice the rotation speed and improved timing processing, the Quadri-Beam is an ultra cool disc treatment. This patented process reduces the noise floor allowing far more information to be retrieved from the disc. It also works great on DVDs, giving you a picture that is brighter, sharper, crisper and cleaner. For those of you who have never experienced the sonic benefits of the Bedini Clarifier, it significantly reduces high frequency glare and increases retrieval of information, enhancing dynamic range. Detail and resolution are improved dramatically."
I won't comment. This is Slashdot, so I guess you have some entry level knowledge to know why this is the most ridiculous thing you've read in months.
Sorry, for "Rediculous" this one has you beat (Score:5, Funny)
To Quote:
The Teleportation Tweak is the phenomenal new product from Machina Dynamica. The Teleportation Tweak is an advanced communications technique discovered and developed by Machina Dynamica for upgrading audio systems remotely -- even over very long distances. The Teleportation Tweak has a profound effect on the sound and is performed during a phone call to Machina Dynamica; the phone call can be made via landline or cell phone from any room in the house. The tweak itself takes about 30 seconds.
The effects of the Teleportation Tweak are instantaneous and the improvement to sound quality will be audible immediately. The Teleportation Tweak excels in 3-dimensionality, lushness, inner detail and air. Bonus: The picture quality of any video system in the house will also be improved - better color and contrast! Customer should pay via Paypal or check/MO (payable to Geoff Kait) prior to calling Machina Dynamica via landline or cell phone. Machina Dynamica's Teleportation Tweak $60.
Transation: They will call you, for the bargain price of $60, and not only make your entire audio system sound better, but it will improve the picture quality on your televisions!
ALL THROUGH A SINGLE 30-SECOND PHONE CALL
Science just jumped out the window, and took Logic and Reason with her.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.philorch.org/styles/poa02e/www/index2.html [philorch.org]
http://www.cso.org/ [cso.org]
http://nyphil.org/ [nyphil.org]
http://www.lpo.co.uk/ [lpo.co.uk]
http://www.bostonpops.org/ [bostonpops.org]
etc.
With the money spent on your audiophile addiction, you could get a life's worth of concerts with 100% clarity and still save a lot of money.
Support real music, not processed music.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, a few decades back, YES...this would have meant just what you said. Way back when, the US did manufacture a great number of products, and back then, workers and manufacturers DID care about build and quality. Things were attempted to be manufactured to last before this recent age of disposable culture.
A funny reverence to this can be seen in the first Back to the Future movie...where the Doc of the 50's ridicule's something of Marty's that says "Made in Japan"...he can't believe quality could come from Japan.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
May I remind you that you are living on a planet where countless hordes torture, maim and murder each other to prove that their omnipotent invisible man in the sky has a longer dick then the other guys', where vast masses prostate themselves before some random idiot because he has pretended to be someone else in a series of moving pictures, where the supposed leaders of various tribes promise the sun and the moon while consistently delivering manure instead, only for themselves or their ideological twins be re-elected, over and over and over, etc and so on.
Oh and it is also a place where one can "buy", "sell" and "steal" large integer numbers.
The unfortunate truth is that most of humanity does not really qualify for the "sapiens" label in "homo sapiens".
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Make people feel good while saying the name of your product and they will buy it, whether or not they need it.
Are you sure you aren't talking about religion?
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:5, Informative)
True, but up to a point.
There IS a difference in the quality of cable. Really, it is just the "quality of construction" type stuff. Cheap connectors will eventually start to corrode, and maybe even corrode itself to the device so that you break something when you unplug it (been there, done that). Getting a good quality of construction is important: nice strong strain relief, quality crimping/soldering, gold plating is sure nice to have to prevent corrosion. Also, for speaker wire, bigger is always better. This helps reduce I^2/R losses. Monster does seem to provide pretty good quality. However, with that being said, unless you find an absolute steal of a bargain, Monster is overpriced for what you get.
I am not an audiophile, but I am an engineer. Here is my shopping list:
Line-level cables (RCA cables): Nice thick jacket. You want your cables strong. Sometimes you get a rat's nest of wires and you need to pull on a cable. Get one strong enough to survive a good tugging. Gold-plated connectors are very nice to have. Make sure that the connectors look like quality stuff.
Super-video (mini-DIN) cables: This, to me, is harder to tell because they all look the same. Gold plating is nice to have.
Speaker Cable: This may be raw cable with cut-n-soldered ends, or it may have a special pin on the end. The main thing for speaker cable is that it is thick (more important for high power levels & huge amps). This cuts resistive losses. As always, if it has a pin on the end, get gold-plated. For raw cable, if you get corrosion, you can just chop an inch and re-solder.
Anybody who tells you to worry about impedance matching or termination on a stereo system is full of bull. When I design digital systems, I have to worry about this sort of stuff when the lengh of the transmission line get to be about 1/4 the wavelength of the highest frequency that I care about. In digital systems, this number is typically about an inch or two. For audio, I would not worry as long as my cables are shorter than 1/4 mile or so.
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all, if you RTFA you will find that he was pretty skeptical about the monster cable as well.
But a bake off between a $80 pair of speaker cables and a pair at $10 would simply be another product test. The difference in price could easily be justified by factors that are not audible. Gold plated connectors will not sound any better in a one week lab test. They will however be much less likely to corrode which could lead to a scratching connection, overheating etc over several years.
A bake off between a $80 cable and a $8000 cable on the other hand is far more amusing. The person who buys monster cables is at worst out the price of a meal out for two. The person who buys the Anjou cables on the other hand could buy a two week vacation in Hawaii for two with the same money.
Audiophiles are an obnoxious bunch. They whine on about how CD is not as good as vinyl but what they really despise is not the quality of CD vs scratchy vinyl rubbish, its the deomocratization of quality sound that CD brought. There is no perceptible difference in the sound produced by a $50 player or a $500 player, none, zilch, nada. That really gets up audiophile people's noses because the resonse they get whey they show off their gear is not 'woot want one' but 'can't tell the difference'.
There isn't very much difference in amplifiers either. 5.1 speakers vs two makes a huge difference when listening to a movie but the idea that one amplifier sounds 'better' than another is just silly. There is certainly still something of a difference in the quality of loudspeakers but even that is not that great.
The only feature I have found to have a real effect on sound is the feedback system some of the mid range systems now offer. I recently bought an Onkyo system for about $500 which came with a microphone that you plug in and can use to calibrate all the speakers for the seating position. I strongly suspect that the $500 system is essentially identical to the $900 THX certified system.
Calibrating the signal delays for the seating position and balancing the sound to the room acoustics definitely has a real effect. Its not an effect that I would pay more than a few bucks for but it did have an effect. Once you have feedback in the system it simply does not matter much what the quality of any of your hifi components is, the balance can be made up using CPU power.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part... (Score:5, Interesting)
Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, here's [youtube.com] a video of him in action.
Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
Randi and Nostradamus (Score:5, Interesting)
"People are hungry for this kind of thing," Randi said. "Knowledge of the future represents power, and people are looking for power, so they pay money to astrologers and 1-900 numbers, not realizing that if the astrologers and operators of the 1-900 service really had all this power, they'd use it for themselves and not have to do all this marketing to others."
Not sure what kind of speakers Nostradamus may have been using, tho.
Re:Who? (Score:4, Funny)
IT Paranormal (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
oxygen-free sharpie (Score:5, Interesting)
I find the audiophile phenomenon to be mighty amusing, even though I'm guilty of throwing away a few extra dollars for an "oxygen free" guitar cable or two. But holy crap, that's quite a price difference -- and for what? If anybody ever gives me crap about getting a Cinema Display instead of a Dell monitor, I'll just think of the Pear Anjou cables. Getting a monitor to match your workstation's case at least has "interior decorating" to justify the difference in cost, but who's ever going to see your speaker cables? Yikes!
P.S. Did you know that if you mark around the edges of your CDs with a sharpie that the music sounds better? ;-)
Re:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:5, Insightful)
There, the reason for buying expensive cables isn't usually much one of sound quality.
Since the cable of an electric guitar is constantly bent,flexed and stepped on, it is more one about reliability.
There are few things more irritating than crappy, stiff and badly soldered guitar cables that break after five sessions.
Re:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:4, Informative)
Re:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:5, Funny)
copper is copper (Score:5, Insightful)
Martians! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:copper is copper (Score:4, Informative)
Re:copper is copper (Score:4, Insightful)
What annoys me about Monster cable in particular is that they try to sell cables for freaking DIGITAL signals using the same marketing material. HDMI cables that promise shaper picture. Coax for SPDIF promising better sound. I've even seen "special" USB cables that are supposedly faster than standard cables.
Hello??? It's a digital protocol, it either makes it through or it doesn't. If they wanted to advertise less chance of the signal dropping out completely, or losing sync, or the connectors breaking or whatever I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it.
Psychology (Score:4, Funny)
Ofcourse - the whole industry is based on me thinking that there's some better product out there that I still haven't bought... Just around the corner is Eternal Bliss ®
Re:Psychology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Psychology (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you'd do the world a lot more good if you bought a set of radio shack speaker cables (which sound the same), and donated $7000 to some variety of charitable organization [gregmortenson.com] (which would help those of us without a lot of money out -- a lot!).
Randi and his cohorts (Score:5, Informative)
I dare them to go further. (Score:5, Informative)
I tried back when I worked in stereo showcase. double blind tests and even testing with high end equipment showed that the $100.00 a foot directional low-oxygen speaker cables were no different than the lamp cord.
Audiophiles typically are some of the stupidest people on the planet. they buy into the snake oil festering bull that any company comes along and pushes in any of the magazines.
Want an awesome example? Richard Gray power conditioners. They cost upwards of $5000.00 and do NOTHING a $49.00 one will. the sales people also make sure to tell you that you will not notice a change when you plug it in, it takes a few weeks for the capacitors and electronics in your equipment to re-learn how to run with clean power.
yes audiophiles fall for that kind of blatent crap!
Re:I dare them to go further. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I dare them to go further. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course your expensive cables didn't work (Score:5, Funny)
You see, by not properly conditioning your cables, you made a mockery of the entire double blind test. These are sensitive, precision pieces of equipment, and can't simply be handled the way zip cord can.
You'll have to excuse me now, it seems my tongue has seriously bruised my left cheek.
Re:Of course your expensive cables didn't work (Score:5, Informative)
FTFA:
I was sent a 4-foot single run pair and after a short break-in (Adam suggested that the break-in is minimal, but even so I gave them 48 hours on the Cable Cooker and good two-weeks 24/7 of music prior to the audition)
Re:I dare them to go further. (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget the cable towers (Score:5, Funny)
He'd be safer with HDMI (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that it's at all possible for any human to detect the difference, but I suppose it's theoretically possible that if they are simply audio cables, there might be some measurable difference in the sound, even if no one could tell.
HDMI is where it's truly insane -- yeah, let's gold-plate a cable that transmit a digital signal. Digital is different -- either it worked or it didn't. HDMI even moreso -- if it didn't work, your entire audio/video is likely to cut out all at once, probably for a second or two, until it can be reestablished. If the video works at all, you have a good enough HDMI cable.
Re:He'd be safer with HDMI - (Score:4, Insightful)
I can prove it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you sell an idiot $7,000 cable, you get $7000 from him.
This proves that $7,000 cables are superior to $5 cables.
Where is my million?
Need to do ABX testing (Score:5, Insightful)
While we're at it... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all about social status (Score:5, Insightful)
Aw Jeez, Not This Shit Again! (Score:5, Insightful)
It all comes down to faith and the feeling that "I'm better than you."
Pear's headquaters (Score:5, Informative)
So I looked up their address listed, and it's residential. From the appearance, this appears to be a virtual company, in a nice Tony neighborhood, and all the owners have to do is sell a hundred cables and the house is paid for.
Oh, and the first and final word on speaker cable is from McIntosh's Rodger Russell [roger-russell.com].
PRAT (Score:5, Funny)
But I have one question for Dave Clark. I was told by my audiophilic colleagues in the late 1990's that as a true audiophile it is important to:
1. Check which way your amplifier is plugged in. Having the main power plug in the wrong way wreaks havoc on the sound,
2. Switch on your amplifier at least half an hour before even thinking about playing music, even if you have an amplifier that is devoid of any tubes whatsoever,
3. Put a second CD on top of the CD you want to play,
4. Keep your CD's in the freezer at all times.
This is all very very important for getting the best sound quality. Did you do all those things Dave? If not, I can't take your review seriously, sorry.
A fool and his money (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly, the drug dealers were our best customers - they just wanted something loud and they didn't f**k you around by insisting you order the latest greatest cable as reviewed by their favourite HiFi magazine. Paid in cash too.
Re:A fool and his money (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A fool and his money (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, but that is easily solved! Instead of sitting in that room yourself, you should put a microphone in there, and transmit that sound to your the headphones you wear in a different room. That way you can truly enjoy the perfect, undistorted sound of your listening room.
Gotta give it to Randi (Score:4, Insightful)
The cable thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always been amused by the cable thing. Even "high end" gear tends to use RCA phono jacks, which they gold plate, rather than BNC connectors, which are known to be flat to 50MHz and don't come loose.
Even Monster Cable for speaker cable is silly. All you need is heavy-gauge copper. Nothing else matters.
I was amused some years ago to find that Monster Cable didn't make VGA cables, where signal degradation is a real issue for long cables. That's a high bandwidth analog signal, and they'd have to actually work to make a good one. Eventually, they did get into VGA cables, which they overprice as usual. A high quality 5 meter VGA cable can be obtained for about $8, but Monster will charge you many times that.
The "tubes vs. transistors" amplifier thing is amusing. Back in 1990, Bob Carver, who designs amplifiers, challenged two high-end audio magazines to give him any audio amplifier at any price, and he'd duplicate its sound in one of his lower cost transistor amps. Two magazines took him up on the challenge. [wikipedia.org] He won. Then, almost as a joke, he built the Carver Silver 7 amplifier, which is all tube and sold for $17,000/pair. Each amp has two chassis, one for the power supply, and the thing is chrome-plated. Audiophiles bought the things. Then he came out with a transistor amplifier with the same transfer function at 1/40th the price.
There are things that do matter, like read error counts on CDs, but they're usually hidden from consumers. Early CD players had error counters, but the industry agreed to hide that information when people started complaining. Now, most CD players reread and buffer, so it's less of an issue.
The sordid life of the audiophile (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, there's the science. Cables can be engineered to push all of their flaws several orders of magnitude beyond the limits of human hearing, fairly trivially. Both speaker cables and interconnects have their own challenges, but can be overcome. With decent cables, any audible degradation is the result of bad equipment design. It is, for instance, possible to design gear so badly that cables make a difference--this is not a desirable goal, unless you're in the snake oil business.
How can you prove the audibility (or not) of cables? There are essentially four ways:
1) Rigorous double-blind ABX testing.
2) Measuring signal loss/distortion across the cable.
3) Subtract the post-cable signal from pre-cable signal and study the residual signal.
4) Listen to a system and make arbitrary comments about the cables.
One of these is not a valid proof, but is the one that gets promoted aggressively over the other three. Can you guess what it is?
In my mind, there are essentially two schools of audiophile: There are the 'absolute signal purity' geeks who want a perfect reproduction of the signal from source to speaker, and are willing to buy overengineered equipment to do it. These are the folks who buy Rotel, Bryston, Krell, and the like. Then there are the 'absolute musical purity' folks, who don't care about the signal per se, so much as the music in it. They're the ones who buy 3-watt triode amps (like the insane but gorgeous Moth S2A3) and the (new) Magnum-Dynalab tube tuners, and shun CDs. This group tends to fall into the audiophile 'tweaker' mentality more readily, but both groups have their extremes. The one thing about the extremists from either school is an absolute refusal to consider things rationally. It is the love of the irrational that keeps them happily tweaking, and keeps the snake oil salesmen in business.
The problem that leads to the endless search for audio nirvana is partly that audio is a perception issue, and one that is chronologically linear. You can't listen to two sounds simultaneously and decide which is better, or whether they're the same. (ABX testing is the closest you can get, but most hardcore audiophiles won't participate.) Worse, you can get into endless discussions about what constitutes hearing. If you put something in the chain that makes no change to the signal, but you believe that it sounds different, are you hearing something different or not?
As a final note, I highly recommend finding a copy of two articles in Audio Ideas Guide (an audiophile tweak-happy publication) by James Hayward, a retired engineer from Canada's National Research Council. In them, he discusses the actual physics behind audio cables, and points out what actually CAN lead to audible degradation by cables. (Hint: It isn't easy, but there are some on the market which qualify.)
1. Making The Connection: A Closer Look At The Role Of Interconnect Cables, J.H. Hayward, Audio Ideas Guide, Summer/Fall 1994
2. Making The Connection, Part Deux: A Closer Look At The Role Of Loudspeaker Cables, J.H. Hayward, Audio Ideas Guide, Winter/Spring 1995
You can read a short summary [bryston.ca] of the articles on Bryston's website.
Nigerian Audiophile needs help (Score:5, Funny)
Audiophiles are rich idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Audiophiles are in the same class of idiot as people who believe in homeopathy and copper bracelets. The only difference is that the audiophile isn't harming anything but his own obsessive-compulsiveness, and creates an efficient money transfer conduit from the stupid to the clever, namely the people who market this overpriced junk.
Audiophiles are also the ultimate disproof of the idea that "wealth equals intelligence", so when your dad asks why you why you aren't rich if you're so smart, you can tell him that at least you didn't spend $7,000 on speaker cable and the two of you can laugh about it over a beer. Just don't let him bring up the neon tubes and Arctic Silver conductive paste and water-cooled RAM in your own bedroom.
There's blame to be had on all sides (Score:5, Informative)
Of all audio gear, speaker cables and power cables are probably the ones that have the least effect, if any, on sound quality. I'll grant right off the bat that any difference probably won't be audible. But before everyone gets all comfy in their religous prejudices, consider the history of absolutism - it usually fails in the long run.
We saw it with CD players. 25 years ago it was easy to find hordes and hordes of scientifically-minded folks who proclaimed that CD players were all identical and perfect. They reproduced as high a frequency as the ear could hear. They did so with perfect digital repeatability. They were perfect and identical. That was an unassailable scientific fact. It was even a marketing slogan for Phillips; "Perfect Sound Forever" was their first ad campaign for CDs.
Audiophiles said different. They said they heard differences. When challenged to do double blind, ABX testing, they often failed. They offered up only feeble excuses about how such tests are never structured properly, always being too short and normally using switchboxes that degraded sound. The skeptics and scientists had a field day exposing audiophiles as frauds and hucksters, as (at best) deluded simpletons.
Eventually, though, a funny thing happened. Research got done by audiophiles who were also engineers. They discovered various CD player problems (like jitter) that could be measured and fixed. When those problems were fixed, the audiophiles said the players sounded better. The audiophiles still failed ABX tests and still held to the same excuses, but changes were made, anyway.
Nowadays, anyone who knows what music sounds like (and, yes, that eliminates 98% of the populace right there) can easily tell the difference between a first-gen Sony CDP-101 and a current high-end CD player. There really are differences. Those people who absolutely knew that it was scientifically impossible for any difference to exist turned out to be painfully, embarrassingly wrong. (Nowadays, they tend to fall back on revisionist history: "Oh, we never really said you guys were wrong, just that testing didn't bear you out...etc., etc.")
My point is not to construct an elaborate straw man. My point is that keeping an open mind is a good thing. We have previously seen lots of folks loudly and authoritatively proclaim that a given phenomena does not exist and cannot possibly exist. They cite scientific reasoning (as they spout it) as unquestionable. But that is nothing more than a religous devotion to a position and I reject it.
Sure, the burden of proof is on the people who make claims that cable A sounds better than cable B. I doubt they'll ever succeed. But the vituperative, out-of-hand rejection of alternate views is more than just unseemly; it argues against (indeed, belittles) an inquisitive spirit.
Perhaps some Carl Sagan would be in order. His essay The Dragon in My Garage [godlessgeeks.com] is right on point. When considering unverifiable and seemingly insane assertions, his advice is that: "...the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the ... hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion."
We've seen the mocking, "scientific" approach to audiophile claims turn out to be wrong in the past. We might do well to be a little less sure of ourselves when considering audiophile issues in the future.
Side note: Just to show that there's blame to go all around, note that the offer of the James Randi Educational Foundation folks is, as I have stated elsewhere, disingenuous as all hell. (See Rule 12, [randi.org]a proviso that makes it clear that the offer is only open to whoever they want to make it open to and gives the JREF multiple, too-easy excuses to reject any attempt to claim the reward.) The rules are set up so that the test will never happen. This is little more than a minor publicity stunt that's gotten picked up by too many 'net outlets and given far too much virtual ink, already.
We did a study on this at MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
At the time, CD players were just out, and many audiophiles derided them, so we used 33RPM LP recordings, purchased new and played on a high-end turntable, and used expensive electrostatic speakers and a typical audiophile listening room, not an anechoic chamber, as audiophiles again had in the past not accepted such tests.
Rather than testing speaker cables, we decided to test the tonearm-to-preamp connection, where the signal as the weakest, reasoning that any effects would show up more profoundly there.
We tested a 1-meter long cable from Straight Wire (provided to us free, but costing about $100) and 24-feet of zip cord from Radio Shack (which we purchased).
To avoid any interference from switches or relays, I went into a closet with the equipment and the door closed, and Philip waited with the test subjects in the listening room. (This formally made our test single-blind, though it answered previous concerns from previous tests about signal depredation from switches. Still, we made sure that there was no way for subjects to find out during the test.)
Each run consisted of either AAAA or ABAB, with A or B being a one-minute passage played with cable A or cable B. AAAA or ABAB was etermined by coin toss. Before each minute passage, I unplugged the cables and plugged the cable back in, so there was no way for the subjects to tell which cable was used. We asked for each 4-minute run if the subjects thought it was A or B, and we asked after each 1-minute, if they preferred it.
We ran several groups of 5 subjects each, and did 6 runs with each. Our tests included audiophiles, musicians, and other random test subjects. We found no statistically significant ability for subjects either in preference or in ability to distinguish 1 meter long audiophile cable from 24 feet of Radio Shack zip cord.
If we discarded the first run for each group of subjects as a training run, we found an 80% confidence for ability to distinguish, which was still not significant. However, we did find a 95% confidence on preference, for the Radio Shack 24' zip cord!
Just to clarify, cables can make a difference (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, I have a rather sad story about that exact same bias. My father was generally very conservative in his spending, but around 1963, he decided to splurge and buy a receiver and two stereo speakers from Acoustic Research. (yes, their well-known AR-3's.) Anyone buying Acoustic Research back in '63 was someone who'd done their homework and cared about sound, these were very well-regarded and expensive speakers.
My Dad was in vision research and taught introductory classes in sensory perception for experimental psychology majors, so he knew a thing or two about acoustics and what matters, and he designed and soldered up his own circuits for his experimental apparatus, so he knew a thing or two about electronics, too.
When he went to the store to buy the AR system, they tried to sell him very expensive cables, and he laughed and said it was a huge waste of money, and proceeded to go home and hook the system up with 24 AWG telephone cable, because the wires "don't make any difference." So he just used whatever was cheap that he already had around.
Anyone who knows much about stereos and electronics is probably already groaning at reading that. Good stereos push a high amperage current, and a 24 AWG wire is going to create a high resistance to that current, which is going to change the impedance the receiver is going to see trying to drive the speakers it was built specifically to be matched with. I don't know how to describe the specifics of the nasty effects on the signal that the speakers receive versus what was intended, but the effect on sound quality was tremendous. The system never sounded very good at all.
By the 90's that system was sitting in the basement, and my brother ended up taking the speakers and hooking them up to an inexpensive Sony receiver, and I ended up taking the receiver and hooking it up to some Linaum speakers. My dad ended up hearing the speakers and commenting on how amazing the improvement in receivers has been that those old speakers could sound so good when they never sounded anywhere near that good before. Then separately he heard my speakers being driven off the old receiver, and commented how amazing advances in speakers were, that they could sound so good being driven off that old tube receiver that never sounded any good...
Of course, really the whole thing came down to the fact that my Dad spent more than he has ever spent on a car on that stereo system, the reduced the sound quality to about that of a $20 clock radio by refusing to spend an extra $10 on cables. No, he didn't need gold Monster cables (not that they existed back then anyway), and it's quite possibly true that it would have been impossible to tell the difference between the expensive cables the guy at the store was selling and NM 14-2 household electrical cable from the local hardware store. But running telephone wire for speaker cables destroyed the sound quality. There is a difference in cables, if you don't know what you're doing, don't assume any old wire will be as good as any other. The basic point that I think loony millionaire audiophiles and conservative skeptical engineers can all agree on is that having a large enough gauge cable to easily handle the current is the most important aspect of the system's cables.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Informative)
before the marketing dollars took over, most folks recommended standard Radio Shack lamp cord as speaker cable. It a heavy gauge, has polarity markings, and is generally dirt cheap because its marketed to cheapskates fixing broken lamps instead of people who don't understand electricity who want a new sound system
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
For speaker cable, that is not the problem. The signal induced into an unshielded speaker wire is in the micro or picowatt range in the audible frequency range. It is not enough amplitude to be heard over the background noise present in a room with a breathing person in it, or more often it is much less than the thermal noise(hiss) of the amplifier. At inaudible frequencies such as RF, the wire makes a fine radio antenna. Add in a little non-linear detection in the output stages of a cheap stereo and you can plainly hear "Breaker 19" as the guy goes by outside.
For the rest of us, the problem is not related to unshielded verses shielded. It has to do with dielectric loss. The cable was designed for 60 HZ power, not high frequencies. Some cable had quite a bit of loss at higher frequencies (I swept a lot of RF cable and power cord). Most people wouldn't notice as the cable length was too short to have much effect (small room, speakers only 6 feet or less from the receiver) and the cheap speakers provided much more response flaws to the fidelity by several orders of magnitude. Did you know the loss was great enough in the clear lamp cord that it could be used as a very inefficient EL wire? A high voltage high frequency signal made these babies glow violet. (Discovered from my Tesla coil days)
These very real high frequency losses is why the wire dielectric is such a big deal in the manufacture of cable for high frequency use. The twist and dielectric is the big differences in Cat 3 Cat 5 and Cat5e cable. The copper in all three is the same gauge and quality.
When an engineer designs cable and knows what he is doing, they design the audio cable just like they would an RF cable. Low loss, and match the load impedance. At one time we needed to run a long signal wire over 500 feet. We used RF coax. We terminated it and added a small inductance to compensate for the end equipment's input capacitance of 47 pF. Then we sweep tested it. (audiophiles rarely do this with test equipment). We managed to get flat response to 500 Kilocycles with only a half db loss at the high end. Loss and distortion in 20HZ to 20KHZ wasn't measurable unlike it was in our unterminated cable.
This is why network cable has a design impedance and it is required to terminate the cable with it's impedance. T connections is not permitted. (Unlike stereo where a Y cable is often used either external to the equipment or internally. Coax network cable required external terminations (Network old timers will remember the 50 ohm terminations) while utp cable forbids T connectors and the end equipment provides the termination.
More HF engineering goes into most network cable than goes into most audiophile cable. Audiophile speaker cable is almost never engineered to match the load impedance. Due to the complex impedance of a speaker, the best cable is either none or as short as possible. This is the reason for powered speakers and sub woofers. The signal wire can then be a better match to the load impedance of the speaker amplifier. Now if they would just stop using cheap amplifiers and speakers for powered speakers..
Other than just having all the heat in one spot in the dash, this is the reason premium car stereos have amplified speakers. No speaker wire while driving a complex impedance. You can't make a speaker wire to match the impedance of a speaker. An amplified speaker or amplifier at the speaker with very short wires is a better solution than any $7000 long speaker cable. Anyone who does RF engineering understands this.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't do that.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you ever wonder why virtually no one makes double-blind tests of this kind of gear? Because if enough unbiased reviews are posted, no one will buy the most expensive stuff. It's the same reason why winemakers attack double-blind tests so fiercely.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:4, Informative)
"The thing is, even the cheap drilled wire of your phone-line is good enough to transmit multi-mhz signals for DSL over a few km."
That's because the telephone system uses low-impedance balanced lines; without this technology, POTS would be largely impractical, and long-distance nearly impossible (at least in the days before satellite).
Low-Z balanced lines are also used in many hi-end audio systems, for the same reasons; they offer a material advantage. In fact, an inexpensive low-z balanced line cable can easily better very high-priced single-ended cables. It's the primary reason that all of the equipment I build and work with uses balanced line technology.. better performance without fancy cables = value for the customer.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Tubes Vs. Solid State (Score:4, Informative)
> those black ebony (teak?) hockey puck things
Usually done with neoprene rubber and an acoustically inert material (marble, ceramic) - it works. Not sure about teak and for most listening environments the audible improvement will be negligible.
The real fun is with cables, try proving OFHC copper makes any significant electrical difference. Then look at cable capacitance; it's only relevant for passive guitar and Microphone cable (for long runs). Once you have an suitably amplified signal, cable capacitance audibly effects the signal by the same amount as the alignment of the planets or something.
The cable kooks are where it's at, if anyone deserves your scorn it's these guys.
Re:Couldn't it be proven (or disproven)... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason I'm asking is the "psychology" of an experience isn't just the consciously reportable part. Philosopher Ned Block [nyu.edu] has done some great work consolidating the research into experience and reportability, and concludes that what we're aware of phenomenologically is of far wider scope than what we're able to access in reportable form. A number of my friends are professional jazz critics. Even for the best of them, what they're able to report from a concert is far less than what they're able to consciously (and unconsciously) experience of it. This isn't just the subtle effects, but some of the most overt aspects of the experience - to the listener. But these aspects don't map into our spoken vocabulary - although another musician will often be able to describe them with more music. (A lot of music is musicians describing other music.)
So the blind test you'd need to do is of more than whether listeners can tell you about the difference. The test needs to be about whether the experience has been phenomenologically different for the listeners, perhaps - especially because it's music - in ways where words fail them. To do that you're going to have to do some sort of longer-term tracking and evaluations of outcomes. For instance, if it's music that fills the particular listener with joy, is there more joy at the end of an hour's listening? That would be the measure of a true psychological effect. It's not psycho-acoustics we need to measure, but different outcomes in the inward experience of mood and consciousness.
Re:I'd like your input on this (Score:5, Informative)
First off, I wasn't implying that high-quality headphones aren't valuable. I have $80 Sony headphones that have good frequency response. As to your question about balanced headphones...
Most high-performance analog signal processing these days is balanced. For example, the analog data path in a communications transceiver is almost certainly balanced, as are the data converters. There are a couple of key benefits of balanced (called differential in the industry) signal processing. The key one is rejection of interference that appears the same on both wires (since the signal is the difference of current or voltage on the wires). Also important lately is an increase of 3dB in SNR by using a differential signal path. This is simply because the signal on the two wires is perfectly correlated, while the noise on the two wires is uncorrelated. That said, differential signal processing sounds like a good idea for headphones, right? Well... it COULD be.
The problem is for a signal to accrue the benefits of balance it has to balanced everywhere there could be interference. Remember the point here is to have the absolutely cleanest signal possible (this is for audiophiles after all). The problem is that the signal IS NOT REALLY BALANCED. Look at the FAQ I posted the link to, refer to Art. III (Balanced Sources). If you look at the handsome diagrams you will see some problems. Now, to be a differential or balanced signal you need to have a signal that is equal and opposite. In the case of a vinyl source they get a single-ended source from the Phono and put it through two op-amp circuits, one inverting and one non-inverting, and they are depending on the outputs of the two circuits to have exactly the same phase relationship. True, they will be close because the audio is much lower in frequency that the bandwidths of the amplifiers, but it isn't truly balanced here. And the mismatch between the two halves is most likely MORE than the distortion/interference you would expect from a good quality single-ended headphone. Ouch!
For the digital source, it is a train wreck! That is NOT the way DACs are supposed to be used! I have designed quite a few data converters and they in no-way-shape-or-form match each other well. (In digital audio we are talking about supreme precision, so the matching isn't even close) If they could match that well, it would be possible to put a bunch in parallel and create SUPER FAST data converters. You can't do that easily in practice due to all kinds of DISTORTION due to mismatches between channels. There is no way that the overall signal path would be limited in performance by anything here than the mismatch of the DACs themselves. I would guess if you looked at the spectrum of the "balanced" signal it would be full of tones due to the DACs. OUCH!
That said, it is quite possible that subjectively this sounds good, because the ear finds certain kinds of distortion pleasing. For example, overdriven vacuum tubes sound good to a lot of people. However, from a technical standpoint, this is a supreme waste of money, and probably sounds worse than a good quality $100 - $200 set of single-ended headphones.
Carl