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.'"
Upgrade (Score:2, Insightful)
So, the JREF Challenge [randi.org] has been upgraded to not jut paranormal psychic claims to ridiculous marketing claims? Well, he hasn't lost his money yet, so he's a pretty good gambler.
I love the concept, I just pray that it will change the marketing practices (Monster cables are HOW MUCH?... there isn't enough loss over 6' for me to not just buy some radio shack [also now overpriced, but not as much] cables instead)
Sadly, like the Music companies, I think ad-makers are set in their ways, and we won't see any change soon. I just hope it wakes people up to how much their ignorance can hurt their wallet.
copper is copper (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Psychology (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Couldn't it be proven (or disproven)... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Psychology (Score:1, Insightful)
"A fool and his money are easily parted" and "More money than sense" are two of my favourites
It's all about social status (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (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."
reminds me of "BALANCED HEADPHONE AMP" (Score:3, Insightful)
We were thinking if there are really people paying $4k for this stuff, we're in the wrong business (Analog Integrated Circuits)
Audiophiles are idiots. The issue is they have more pretension than technical acumen... so they are easily taken.
Carl
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.
Gotta give it to Randi (Score:4, Insightful)
How about power cables? (Score:3, 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!).
Re:From what I understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:He'd be safer with HDMI - (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:3, 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.
True enough.. but that reliability tops out at around 100-200 bucks and then it becomes better to just replace your cables often. $7000 cables are a bit of overkill. nothing they can add for $6800 will make it worth it unless throw in a Russian nude model of your choice in the bargain (even then you're over paying).
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Kinda make me root for the vendors.
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's what they have to say. Do you honestly expect a statement like "Yeah, yeah, I just blew a few k bucks on rubbish, ok, you happy now?"
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the quality of your ABX switch? (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, if you believe that a $7000 cable improves the sound quality, what sort of requirements are you going to put on the construction of that ABX switch, and what do you think the odds are that you'll be satisfied by it?
Someone arguing, "The ABX switch won't harm the audio signal." will probably be using the same reasoning he uses to conclude, "A $5 cable won't harm the audio signal more than a $7,000 cable." In a way, the ABX argument is circular.
Skeptics and audiophiles haven't sorted anything out between them through ABX tests yet, and I doubt they ever will.
On the upside, I bet you could sell a fancied-up ABX switch for upwards of $50,000.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Computer Science is an art
Programming is a craft
Software Engineering is a science
and Systems Architecture is a way.
just lets not discuss what project management is.
Re:onfession time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mod-up please (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not make much sense to pay several dollars a foot for "future proofing" your cables. That's money spent on something that depreciates anyway, it's better to save the difference spend that money 5 years from now if you need it and not get cables now that might be replaced by different connector standard anyway. I'm very skeptical of the future for 1440p, when even the ProjectorCentral people swear that they can't tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p.
Re:Pear's headquaters (Score:3, Insightful)
Directional Cables (Score:4, Insightful)
However, when I showed him the patchbay with, on the order of 250 cables, the reason sunk in. When you are dealing with something like this,
and when a single lost signal can represent thousands of dollars of financial loss, it makes sense to really test every cable and to make them with care and consistency.
Ideas like this that make sense in a production environment are often taken straight out of context and put into the "audiophile" world. And then you get things like directional cables where someone tries to claim that the electrical signal itself is directional. Or you get extreme amounts of quality control. Or you get people who *claim* they apply extreme amounts of quality control when all they are really doing is rebranding some industrial product.
Know what works really well for speaker wire in permanent installations? Romex 12 gauge copper house wiring. Incredibly durable, solid wire, lays flat, tends to be very pure copper (costs more to make alloys), easy to fish, and it's hard to pay more than $.50 a meter.
Line signal cables have different issues from speaker cables of course, but the $7500 wires in the article are speaker wires.
In the blind test, one control I'd want to do is to have the subject hook up the system with the really expensive wires (play up the whole packaging angle, use really fancy connectors, etc.) but the signal they actually listen to is going through $0.29/meter lamp cord.
If these were signal routing lines for a mastering studio, the cost per foot would still be extreme, but the idea that quality matters this much would be a little more reasonable. You typical studio probably has a kilometer of cables, mostly on the hard to reach side of patch panels. You want to get these right the first time. This can be expensive. For an IT analogy think "fiber interconnects where a downtime incident costs millions and you get fired." There are plenty of situations like that in audio production and broadcast. Other examples of really high cost items, lamps for stage lighting where it would be a real nightmare if one lamp failed without warning.
Anyway I rant. I realize there are thousands of audio and broadcast engineers on slashdot, pro musicians, people with home studios, people who work in pro studios, lighting and camera folks, etc. I think they know where I'm coming from on this. I just hate seeing these things, because if one thing is insanely overpriced and has ridiculous claims, the response tends to be applied to all kinds of other things. (You *can* have a preference among $3000 microphones; minute individual variations in signal impedance or shielding *can* mean a ruined production; tube circuits and solid state circuits *do* have different coloration effects on a signal, etc.)
But will there be a double blind test on the speaker wires in the article? Don't hold your breath.
Doubtful (Score:1, Insightful)
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:2, Insightful)
But I thought CCR was *supposed* to sound like a busker in a subway station!!
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:He'd be safer with HDMI - (Score:4, Insightful)
To relate this to the topic, consider that HDMI cables need bandwidth of over 3 GHZ (cat 2), while audio signals only go to 20 kHz. Even if we generously extend the audio bandwidth to 100KHz, there's over 4 orders of magnitude difference. So it's not surprising that a cable for gigabit speeds needs tighter specs.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Randi missed his target (Score:3, Insightful)
Or did you at all read what I wrote, in the thing you so eloquently quoted?
psychology of evangelism (Score:3, Insightful)
People with superiority complexes are easy to deal with, in comparison to people with inferiority complexes who are compensating by attacking you and trying to drag you to their level.
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason is that a loud speaker is a reactive load, when the amp drives the speaker, the speaker drives it back or tries too. The amp combats this by having a low output impedance and negative feedback. The problem is that the speaker wire and the speaker are not part of the feedback loop.
An analogy might be to imagine that you have lost the remote control for your tv. Being lazy you get a long cane from the garden shed and tape a pencil eraser to the end and use this to sit in your chair and prod at the buttons on the telly with your cane. Dont knock this, I've seen it done. Clearly the longer, thiner and more springy the cane the more difficult this will be to do. You will keep overshooting and over correcting and the end will bounce up and down. not an exact analogy as you can see the end of the cane, but close.
Loud speakers often have an impedance of about 8 ohms so a 1 ohm resistance in the cable and connectors is getting on for significant.
As for twisted, twisting a cable improves its performance at higher frequencies. I don't know if this is significant in the audio spectrum.
According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen-free_copper oxygen free copper has a lower resistance than ordinary copper, a whole 1% lower. It is probably cheaper to add 1% more copper to the cable (to the thickness, not the length) than it is to use a more expensive material. If you are rich you could use gold or silver for the wires both are better conductors than copper.
If you look at the frequency plot for a loudspeaker eg www.jblpro.com/pages/components/maxout.htm you will see a very jagged line and wonder why they work as well as they do. I would think that imperfections in the mechanical bit of the system are going to overwhelm imperfections in the electronic/electrical part of the setup.
Anyway, after twenty odd years playing with loud PA systems I doubt if I could tell the difference between a $7000 set of speaker leads and a bit 1.5mm^2 mains wire. Just don't use woolworths bell wire and you should be ok.
Re:oxygen-free sharpie (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I think $100 for a 1 meter pair of speaker cables is insane. 16-14ga lamp cord is easy, i did my car sub amp with 8ga mains wiring (the kind you need pliars to bend) and it works perfectly fine.
I understand spending substantially more for a tiny improvement if you're talking about a hobby. Are the $3000 guitars $2900 better than the one i can buy in target? Doubful. But for a hobbiest RIO is skewed in the extreme.
That said, I'd put up my own fortune that there's no effective difference between those fancy cables and any decently made speaker wire. They're just playing to the same extreme case hobbiests where cost is far secondary to performance. My problem is I honestly don't think there's any performance difference.
How about the "burning in" they do to these cables? Copper shouldn't be changing as you send a current through it...unless you melt it at least.
If they were serious, show me a wave form analysis with the difference between this and another cable.
Re:Do you remember tube data? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:All the things true Audiophile needs.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Randi missed his target (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is that the speaker wire separates the speaker from the feedback loop.
That is why speakers sound better on cables with lower resistance.
Raw food bullshit: AC cause it's OT (Score:1, Insightful)
The methods might have been flawed, but they were pretty safe in asserting there is no scientific basis for raw (as in prohibiting all cooked food) diets being intrinsically superior.
[begin raw food rant]
Does a cooked apple or cooked carrot have less nutrients than a raw one? Probably yes.
Then again, there are some foods that release nutrients only when cooked, and cooking in general aids absorption greatly. 50% absorption of 60mg is better than 10% absorption of 200mg, even though the cooked food "destroyed" 70 percent of the nutrients. Heck, there are some foods that are poisonous before cooking, even fatal. It's a trade off: some things are best raw, some best cooked. Restricting to just one side is stupid.
To address some of the "science" underpinning raw food theory: The idea that the body needs to take in active enzymes through the digestive system (a theory I've often been told) is ludicrous. It's all a bunch of "Enzymes are AMAZING! pseudo-science mumbo jumbo.
Very, very few proteins survive digestion long enough to be absorbed whole. Add to this the fact that there is NO plausible evolutionary explanation for the "need" to have undigested, uncooked enzymes absorbed whole: First, human diet has varied to much (and indeed still varies too much), for any one plant enzyme to be adapted for use. Second, they are *PLANT* enzymes, unless you are eating raw meat... Plant enzymes are highly specialized to do plant things, not human things.
IF (BIG IF) a plan enzyme managed to be absorbed whole, and even had the correct pH, osmolarity, co-factors and ligands to be active, then biologically there is either: a human enzyme already present better suited for processing that ligand; or that there is no need for an enzyme processing said ligand. What that means is that an active plant enzyme would probably just muck things up in a human cell.
Enzymes do not just go into foreign cells and "do magic"
[end raw food rant]
Biochemisty and Molecular biology FTW