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.'"
Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, here's [youtube.com] a video of him in action.
Randi and his cohorts (Score:5, Informative)
Re:From what I understand... (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:From what I understand... (Score:5, Informative)
MMMm... Placebo (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:From what I understand... (Score:3, Informative)
No, he/she wouldn't. Nada. That's what this whole article is about.
Re:I can prove it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who? (Score:1, Informative)
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].
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:From what I understand... (Score:3, Informative)
So that's 4 requirements:
- the right length
- the right composition
- the right amount of shielding
- the right gauge
And all of these requirements, except for length, are various degrees. There's a lot of room for optimization there.
Some high-end audio stuff makes sense and a lot is just emotional. The really expensive speakers sound better. Cables, on the other hand, probably only get better up to a certain point -- possibly in the 3-figure range.
All but the lowest of low end OEM cables meet these needs. Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding. Any perceived difference is in the listeners head.
This statement is probably provably false, though it's true enough for consumer-level equipment. For expensive setups, a sound quality improvement is probably available using higher gauge, better shielding, and better composition than you get with cheap cables.
None of that justifies $7k.
Randi might lose this one, depending on how he defines "prove". The signal at the other end of the cable won't be identical between the 2 cables. They are analog cables. It's nearly impossible for them to be identical. "Better" would be a question of whether the difference is audible and a group of people decide it's better in a double-blind trial by a significant margin. I'm not sure what makes him thinks that's an impossible outcome.
Re:He'd be safer with HDMI (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.ee.ucr.edu/~rlake/EE135/Class_D_amp_notes_AL.pdf [ucr.edu]
Re:copper is copper (Score:1, Informative)
as a side note, monster instrument cables like the bass and rock ones have connectors that are slightly larger than normal ones. this is a cheap way of getting a better connection with the output jack on your instrument, but it will eventually result in the output jack getting deformed from constant plugging/unplugging. beware of monster cables, they are a gimmick. my whole studio is wired with mogami, and i've tried almost every other brand out there.
Re:copper is copper (Score:4, 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: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
Those 1 inch cables (Score:1, Informative)
A speaker cable carries an analog signal from the amp to the speaker (where a magnet resonates to create compression waves in the air, which in turn impact upon the ear, which in turn generate a signal to the brain). There is a lot that can go wrong in that chain, from crappy cable, turbulance or accoustic imbalances in the ear, through to ear wax.
Have a look at those 1 inch cables again - and notice the big prongs of pure copper coming out the ends. Those cables carry an analog signal from the amplifier, and those prongs can connect directly to the human brain. Bypassing the whole messy speaker magnet / air wave compression / ear drum vibration problem.
The idiot reviewer, Dave Clarke, inserted those thick prongs (one up each nostril mind you), and thrust them deeply into the ever-so-soft tissues of the cerebral cortex, in order to experience the ultimate 'danceable rendition' of his fav tunes.
For $7000 odd, its one of the best ways to increase your musical appreciation without resorting to recreational drugs. For the rest of us, dropping a $20 pill remains the best way to make several hours of music sound soooo much more 'danceable'.
EVEN - VS - ODD (Score:3, Informative)
Re:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I dare them to go further. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Informative)
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
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.
Do you remember tube data? (Score:2, Informative)
Data today is just too harsh.
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)
I used to work in a stereo store (Score:3, Informative)
First, the three most profitable items we sold were:
1: Extended service contracts
2: Cables
3: Speakers
At the yearly Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Monster would put onthe best parties - open bar, great food and top entertainment.
Someone made the claim that HDMI "just either works or doesn't". I've had bad ones. But a broken one shows up as missing bit planes in the digital signal. Not a subtle difference.
99% of the power conditioning market is indeed bullshit. But 1% is not. In pro audio we use balanced power for some applications. 2 60 volt sources, 180 degrees different in phase to the normal "hot" and "neutral". The same system is used in submarines to reduce the electromagnetic signnature. This can reduce the noise floor of the connected equipment as much as 20 db. Measurable, not snake oil.
Re:Don't forget the cable towers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who? (Score:2, Informative)
It was beautiful - Gellar getting more and more frustrated and making lame excuses, and Carson being his regular, genteel self, with nary a smirk, knowing full well he was destroying Uri Gellar in front of millions.
Re:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:4, Informative)
I disagree. I'm not an audiophile; my conventional amp and speakers are some 20 year old hunk of junk. Guitar cable quality is important however. It boils mainly down to capacitance, the more of which a cable has, the more it has the effect of making the cable act like a low pass filter. If you put a guitar on the neck pickup with all the controls turned up, and feed it through a bright amp, there is a noticeable and obvious difference between a short cable (low capacitance) and a long cable (higher capacitance) of the same type.
$100 speaker cables?... yeah.. right. Guitar cables? Worth spending a little bit extra. Obviously build quality is also of importance as you point out, but it's worth paying attention to electrical properties too.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:3, Informative)
This is speaker cable we're talking about here. Speaker cable is unshielded. In fact, shielded speaker cable would result in much higher capacitance, which interacts very badly with many power amplifier designs. There is never a good reason to use shielded speaker cable from the perspective of avoiding noise in your speaker signal. The only valid reason to use shielded speaker cable is to keep the speaker cable's signal from causing inductive noise in some other signal cable nearby, and even that is dubious since such a thin layer of foil won't really have much impact on low frequency EMI anyway at the power levels involved.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Informative)
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:He'd be safer with HDMI (Score:3, Informative)
No it doesn't. Error correction works by including redundant data, verifying that it's consistent with the data transmitted, and detecting, if possible, where the error is.
For example a trivial error correction algorithm is to transmit data in blocks of say, 8x8, plus a parity bit per column, plus a parity bit per row. Then you check the parity for the rows and columns, and from that determine where the error is. Then you flip the bit at that location, and voila, the original data.
Sane implementations can detect when there are too many errors to correct the information. For example, it may detect and correct 1 bit in 16, and detect but not correct 2 bits in 16. In the later case it drops it, asks for a retransmit, etc.
But digital data generally includes more than the raw audio/video, so yes, if the cable is so incredibly horrible that the error correction can't deal with it, then that'll result in a very obvious malfunction, and not silent and almost unnoticeable data corruption.
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:4, Informative)
And now: The Physics! Most modern hi-fi systems are designed for 8 ohm speakers. Loudspeakers are inductive, so at higher frequencies they have a higher impedance. At UHF, a loudspeaker is practically an open-circuit -- so the cable makes quite a good antenna. Most amplifiers employ negative feedback, so there is a connection from the output to the input. The idea is that as long as the feedback circuit behaves linearly, which it ought to do since it consists of only passive components, then the system consisting of the amplifier and its feedback circuit will behave more linearly than the amplifier -- at the expense of gain. Since we can build amplifiers with gain to spare nowadays, this isn't even a trade-off.
Unfortunately, while the feedback circuit may be linear at audio frequencies, it's not linear at UHF. Everything looks like an inductor, solder joints look like leaky diodes and P-N junctions can't change from conducting to not-conducting quickly enough to rectify. So you get some grossly-distorted and partially rectified (mostly by parasitic junctions in the soldering) version of the RF signal coupled back from the speaker cables to the amplifier input. And mobile telephony is digital, so the signals have lots of sharp edges.
For a cure, stick the biggest ceramic capacitor you can find (it'll probably be 100nF) across the amplifier's output terminals -- and add more like it on the power lines of the output amplifier ICs (or between the collector and emitter of the output transistors).
warranty... (Score:3, Informative)
Monster instrument cables are definitely dripping with hype mojo but they're still pretty affordable and have the great warranty. Mogami cables are even more ridiculous but I'm pretty sure they exchange too...
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:2, Informative)
But unless you're pumping 500 Watts of power, 16 AWG "zip" cord is all that is necessary, IMHO. And don't solder the wire ends, just the tips so that they don't fray out, making sure that what goes under the speaker connector gets nice and smashed for the minimum resistance.
And I do think that we're all missing a business opportunity of two here...
Re:Of course your expensive cables didn't work (Score:3, Informative)
Re:fappable? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who? (Score:2, Informative)
What, do you seriously think that no one in the West was questioning religious orthodoxy before the twentieth century?
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:3, Informative)
In which case I'd consider the amp part of the instrument.
I don't think that anybody here is arguing that components can't make a difference in the sound, but there will generally be an order of magnitude more difference between a 10 cent/meter cable and a $1/meter cable than between a $1/meter cable and a $10/meter cable. Given that, even with analogue signals, there might be
Especially when you're talking about digital data. When it comes to digital sound, as long as you're getting enough of the bitstream for the error correction to work, you'll get the same sound. Even if there is no repair mechanism, you can't get any better than 100% - which any cable that meets specifications should allow rather easily.
If you live next to a radio station, shielded speaker cables might make sense. If you're working on classified data, go with STP. Otherwise, it doesn't make enough difference to matter.
Re:fappable? (Score:2, Informative)
The term fap does not originate on 4chan, and in fact predates it, nearly twice as old in fact. The term originated in a translation of the manga "Heartbreak Angels", and was popularized in the April 28, 1999 strip of the webcomic Sexy Losers.
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:I used to work in a stereo store (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit on your bullshit.
I'm talking about use in recording studios, where every effort has already been made to eliminate all ground loops and providing an excellent ground. Moving to a balanced power system provided an additional 20 db reduction in noise with older, analog equipment.
Don't take my word for it. Equitech, one of a handful of non-bullshit companies in this field, has reports from a number of reliable sources [equitech.com], including the legendary recording engineer Roger Nichols and a radio observatory at Cal Tech.
What do I know anyway? I've only been doing audio for 30 years and built recording studios and FM radio stations.
Re:fappable? (Score:3, Informative)
SL is impressive because more than 1/3 of the comics, I can't decide whether I'm more offended or amused.
Incorrect (Score:3, Informative)
However, the PRIMARY advantage of balanced audio cabling is this... There's a hot lead and a cold lead. The hot lead carries the audio signal. The cold lead carries a copy of the audio signal, but phase shifted 180 degrees. That is to say the two signals, if combined in this way, would cancel each other out.
RF/EMI disturbance introduces noise into the signal along the line. In an unbalanced cable this noise travels all the way to the other end. However, in a balanced cable system what happens is that the noise is picked up by both the hot and cold leads. At this point the noise is in phase while the original signal is out of phase. Then, at the other end the cold lead's signal is flipped back in phase with the hot lead. Now the signal is in phase and the noise is out of phase! Voila... efficient noise cancellation.
Also I should note that POTS is assisted by coils that act as signal repeaters to amplify transmissions over long distances, but these repeater coils must be removed on lines supporting DSL as they interfere with the much higher bandwidth DSL signal. Consequently, DSL signals become severely attenuated at distances approaching 18,000 feet. In the case of Rate Adaptive DSL, the most common DSL around today, this translates into reduced bandwidth because the number of frequency-spread channels across which downstream traffic is transmitted start dropping out. This has nothing to do with the cable being balanced or not... because technically it's not a balanced cable, and it can't be because balanced cabling involves a phase shift where the two separate leads should not succumb to RF crosstalk. In the case of UTP, crosstalk is beneficial because the twists in the unshielded pair actually serve to increase the signal power (measurable in decibel-milliwatts, or dBm) and consequently improve SNR over rated distances. The higher the category rating of the UTP, the more twists per meter, and the higher the bandwidth capacity.
Also, it should be noted that structured cabling systems like SYSTIMAX are an implementation of UTP where not one pair but all four pairs are used simultaneously for transmit/receive, thus increasing the available bandwidth (e.g. CAT 5 UTP single pair would support up to 155Mbps whereas CAT 5 SYSTIMAX supported up to 655Mbps over rated distances).
Clipping is irrelavant (Score:4, Informative)
Tube amps are usually terrible underpowered so they are routinely overdriven, so the soft clipping matters more.
Tube amps aren't really usable as anything other than an effect box.
While we are at it any competent power amplifier will sound exactly the same as any other, given that they are both driven to the same level and not overdriven.
Bullshit (Score:3, Informative)
In sum, we are not making progress. A hundred years ago, they would laugh at an Oxford professor who went around attacking other academics for thinking that religion is better than science at revealing the truth about the world. But that's because the only people who thought this in 1907 were considered fringe loonies, not worth bothering with. Now, attacking the same loonie position is ... ooh, controversial. And Dawkins is what, brave for doing so? You call that progress?
Re:From what I understand... (Score:3, Informative)
Any noise the wire picks up gets amplified.
True. Instead of using unshielded speaker wire, the best thing to use is shielded twisted pair. Most home stereo stuff does not accept balanced inputs, so the next best thing is 100% shielded coax. The selection of dielectric is important. Look up cable rustle. Dielectric with an embeded charge can be microphonic and pick up mechanical noises of things bumping the cable. This is a problem mostly with amplifiers with high input impedance. (>20K Ohm) The current generated is often too low to be significant in low impedance circuits. (Doesn't the latter situation seem innately better, from a noise-fighting standpoint?
Yes. Long signal wire is a noise pick-up if unshielded.
When I lay out power-correction circuitry, I put all my effort into minimizing the loop area in front of the amplifiers, the high-impedance region, and downstream of the amp
Good plan
Or are you saying that the wire type does actually matter a lot, that shielded wire to powered amps is a much better solution than unshielded wire for either unpowered or powered speakers?
What I am saying is when laying out a system, you have to deal with real resistance of a speaker wire. Part of the distortion in an amplifier speaker setup is the ability for the amplifier to control the movement of the speaker cone. The figure often thrown out is call Damping Factor. For an example of this, take a speaker not connected to anything and drum the cone lightly with your fingers. Now repeat the test with a short length of wire shorting the speaker terminals. Notice anything different? Now repeat the test a third time with cheap 24 gauge speaker wire connected. 25 feet should do nicely, and short the far end of the wire. The resistance of the cheap wire reduced the ability of the amplifier to damp the unwanted speaker cone resonances.
Not only is there resistance in wire, there is capacitance and resistance. All these are factors in how power is delivered to the speakers and unwanted reflected power is returned back to the amplifier.
For the answer to your question.. It's a trade-off. Knowing how much noise you gain and how much reduction in fidelity loss should be what affect your decision. Trade noise pick-up for speaker damping and frequency response. Noise pick-up can be managed. Eliminating speaker cable resistance, inductance, and capacitance is as easy as removing gravity which is why there is $7000 speaker cable for the fools to buy. All the expensive speaker cable attempt to eliminate the problems created by using speaker cable. The proper solution is to eliminate the speaker cable or keep them as short as physically possible. Resistance, inductance and capacitance all add up over the length of the cable. Cut the cable length in half, the problem is also cut in half. It is easy to figure as well as measure the improvement going from a 20 foot cable to a 6 inch cable. Measuring the change in a 20 foot 12 AWG zip cord and a 20 foot 12 AWG monster oxygen free cable is much harder.
Re:fappable? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, it is sexylosers.com [sexylosers.com] (formerly "The Thin H Line").
While Clay (Hard) didn't come up with "Fap", he is responsible for its popularity.
As for being offended or amused, Sexy Losers is hands down the greatest web comic evar! Clay is a comic genius. The only comic that comes close to being as great is Ghastly's Ghastly Comic [ghastlycomic.com].
Saddly, Sexy Losers is "completed" and Ghastly's Ghastly Comic on hiatus.
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:4, Informative)
For years, Steve Vai has used a Boss DS-1 solid-state distortion pedal in front of his tube amps; I've done this as well with good results. Jimi Hendrix used a solid-state Fuzz Face in front of his Marshalls, as another example. Part of the "tube mystique" is hype. Use your ears, try every piece of gear you can get your hands on, and use what sounds good with your guitar. In some cases, that might even mean a modeling processor.
The main problem with modelers is the crap you'll get from purists about using a "digital-sounding" device, even if in a blind listening test, they couldn't tell a modeled Marshall from a real Marshall (and if you're going through a good power amp and a good speaker cabinet, that is quite possible.) Also, keep in mind that there is a lot of variation among tube amps. A modeled Marshall might not sound just like your Marshall, but then someone else's Marshall might not, either. I leave decisions on what to use to my ears, and I've done a lot of shows with a Boss GT-6 [rolandus.com] where my guitar sounded great (and my back thanked me for leaving the big, heavy tube head at home.) I am also sure that a GT-6 run through a crappy amp and crappy speakers would be unbearable, so it's important to make sure your entire signal chain is good enough. If used properly, I'm convinced that modern modeling gear can be up to the task.
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:3, Informative)
You are absolutely correct about resistance. Fatter cables = less resistive loss in copper. After a point, though, you reach dimishing returns. For a 20 watt power level, is it worth it to drop your losses from 0.1 to 0.05 watts? There are two approaches here:
1) Engineer way: determine desires power level, speaker resistance, cable length & cross section, and select based on calculations.
2) Common-sense way: buy the thickest thing that is reasonable priced and call it good enough (easiest, and good enough)
What you are talking about is most likely the skin effect [wikipedia.org] and, unless you are running 100 W and using gigantic cables, the "skin" still extends to the center of the cable for audio frequencies. Forget about it.
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:3, Informative)
While this may not pose a safety issue, it is a signal quality and loss-of-power one: having to turn the volume further up to compensate wire loss to achieve the same listening level means more unnecessary and easily avoidable THD+N from the amplifier. There are other parameters like skin effect and inductance that come into play as wire runs get longer and frequencies go up but these should be generally negligible compared to line-induced power loss and its indirect effect on the amplifier.
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.
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:3, Informative)
Parent is right on thing or two.
Thicker cables sound better because most speaker crossovers are crap, and adding small resistance in series with crossover does weird things to the phase of sound.
Just about anything high-class audiophile stuff is controversial.
You are wrong on one thing. Music is, or at least had been made on superb studio-class equipment. It's a shame to listen it on low quality equipment including the bad cables.
Speaker cables need to have low resistance. This is needed to keep sound quality. A good cables have resistance less than 1/30 of the speakers they power. The connectors add some resistance, so the common way to compensate is to use the overkill cables. #12 is quite common and usable up to 5 meters for 8 ohm speakers, for 4 ohm thicker wire is needed.
There is the other way to compensate for the cable resistance and other problems. Negative feedback point can be moved away from the power amplifier output terminals to the speaker terminals. This however makes more problems, this time much worse from an audiophile view on subject.
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:3, Informative)
I think you, and at least four other people in this thread, are getting confused and talking about amplifiers like you'd use in your home stereo system, as opposed to the kind that you'd plug a guitar into.
Overdriving the signal from a guitar to one degree or another is how nearly every player with an electric guitar gets the sound they want. They aren't overdriving at the power amplification stage, it's all in the pre-amp, but those are both in "the amplifier" that they connect their guitar to.
This tube discussion is also mostly unrelated to audiophiles. No one is seriously debating that a tube amp sounds the same as a solid state amp. Audiophiles are the people who claim that things like $7000 speaker wire and magic "Shakti stones" placed around their stereo improve the sound, but refuse to test that theory in a scientific way.