Great blog – i actually worked for one of the major uk cable makers – we all knew what we were selling was no different from using 4mm or 6mm standard copper audio cable – in fact some of what we re sold was just that from rs components – basically everyone in the industry knows its all bullshit but the customers want to believe – so…..

basically u believe what u want to believe – lol

http://www.altmann.haan.de/tubeolator/default.htm

Wrap your head around that one!

Unfortunately it seems it’s no longer available, what a shame

Off to see if the reviews compare with the “Ethernet Cable from God” over on Amazon.

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=186-188

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=110-439&vReviewShow=1&vReviewRand=2818820

Read those glowing reviews, hilarious.

http://www.wattgate.com/

Wattgate 381 Audio Grade Duplex Socket

List Price: $148.00
Price: $147.72
You Save: $0.28

For those people who want to brag that they have cubic dollars to burn!

power cables change the way music is presented in a audio system.

inportant to consider that not all systems will show a diffrence some have more resolution then others.

A/V reproduction can be influenced by countless design aspects, but these outrageous claims on individual products like cables and the like will always fail to deliver compared to a similar specified product without the BS marketing. When you do real world direct apples-to-apples comparisons the audiophool products never come out ahead, ever. This is why Monster Cable have been busted cheating on shop demos (e.g. comparing their HDMI cable with a composite video cable, or 20m of their 12 gauge speaker cable with 20 meters of 20 gauge normal cable), because that’s the only way their products will make a difference.

Sure, if you want you can compare a shielded mains cable to a non shielded one and show it can make a difference on some poorly designed product in some particular obscure application example, but that ain’t what the audiophools promote. They will take your $1000, put their hand on their heart and guarantee you it will make a difference in your system. The reality of course is that it’s 99.99% certain it won’t make a rats arse difference over a standard $1 cable.

Sure, if you want to “distort” the sound you can use all sorts of component effects to do that. And yes, distortion can sound “better” to many, but that’s usually not the aim of HiFi gear.

BTW, if you think you can beat the measuring equipment, then you are really talking psycho-acoustics. And like I said, this effect is real, if you pay $1000 for a 1m RCA cable, you WILL hear the difference!

Over-zealous about audiophool products? – I’ve barely even started!

In your blog on caps you talked about dielectric absorption and microphonics. Cables also have this and some of the more interesting ones try to either enhance or mitigate this property without an understanding of what they are doing. The problem is that microphonics in cables becomes highly system dependent. I have personally heard the sound of cables I have rattled when played back through an amp with 10K input impedance.

Some of the microphonics in capacitors can be used to advantage. Say you had a recording which sounded dry and wished to add a little reverb, would the recording not sound “better”? If a high gain input stage has a microphonic capacitor in it which picks up the delayed vibrations from the speaker and feeds it back into the audio signal path would this not be a type of reverb? The microphonics you talk about in ceramic capacitors can be used to add intentional or unintentional reverb which can change our perception of sound quality. I don’t think many people consider this when designing audio equipment though. It is exactly the reason why valve equipment sounds different to solid state. Resonant chambers = valve. High gain valves are almost always microphonic. But I guess that I am talking to a “solid state man”.

Some cables are directional because they are wired up in a pseudo-balanced configuration with a bleed wire attached to the source earth. The concept of crystal orientation is as you say, bollocks.

Power cables are mostly a total crank but I know that any cable is a channel with a characteristic impedance and shielded power cables are actually a passive RF filter which sometimes helps to reject a part of the RF spectrum before it even has a chance to enter the chassis. This helps poorly designed PLL circuits in digital receiver sections of AV units and can reduce the effect of AM demodulation by nonlinear components which is easily heard when a mobile phone is close to an amp or preamp. This radiation is present nowdays almost all of the time at lower levels.

There is no argument about stupidly high prices or some of the outlandish claims cable and capacitor manufacturers make but sometimes there is more to audio than meets the measuring equipment and some perceived effects can be explained using well established electrical engineering theory!

http://www.geekologie.com/2009/09/crimes_against_humanity_altern.php

I just discovered your blog today, great work, keep it up!

Cheers,

Andy

You know it’s got to be bad when humanity somehow manages to automatically organize itself into that level of sarcasm.

This is the best:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2MBG53YJEKQCI/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R2MBG53YJEKQCI

Good to see you bring up a favourite pet hate of mine as well. I just shake my head & walk away when I hear the HiFi salesmen start bull shitting about all these products that will make your sound better.

/Cheers, PK.

I have something to add to that list–found it during my research, and it relates directly to loudspeaker cables:
http://sound.westhost.com/cables.htm
In short, if you’ve got longer cable runs, they can make a difference, but there’s no reason why they cost that much. In fact, most audiophool cables probably were designed with snake oil and not physics in mind, and they don’t necessarily perform better. All that matters in the end are the Rs, Cs, and Ls. . .

All I can say in the end is that I’m thankful that all my audiophoolery led me to my current EE career path and not an even larger dent in my wallet =)

http://www.edn.com/blog/980000298/post/830048683.html?nid=3403

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM/

A riot.

Also note the price for a used cable

I think the link below is a classic with respect to audiophools. I bet the two-headed arrrow dramatically improves the transfer rate …..

http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp

I’m sure we all know denon’s $499 network cable.

this subject has always been in my way since I started with Electronics 25 years ago. Even back then, there were audiophools claiming this and that. Tube amplifiers were supposed to sound better than transistor amplifiers and final stages with FETs were not as good as the ones with transistors. Go figure… Of course there was never safe ground reasoning and as soon as someone with technical background was producing graphs to prove the profound, brows were raised and claims such as “it’s more than figures and graphs, you know” were brought up. Anyway, my main objection to all this crap, is that people that spend thousands of dollars for cables (not to mention extraordinary equipment with dubious designs) do not spend a dime to go to their doctors and get their ears examined for their frequency response. It’s highly unlikely that anyone more than 25 years old (and thus capable to spend enormous amounts of money…) can hear anything better than 15kHz at maximum. With this characteristic in the chain of sound, they can use even the cheapest mains power cables to connect the amplifier to the speakers and still get the same result.

Optical will solve groundloop issues since home audio is for some reason still stuck with unbalanced signals unless you spend megabucks on your gear…

Shielded power cables also help quite a bit when its stuffed behind the gear with poorly shielded RCA cables.

And those powerboards that take the coax cable thru them and grounds it there, will help with groundloops via the cable/sat dish feed.

its just that peoples ignorances means that they will buy the audiophool solution rather then an engeneered one which is normally a lot cheaper – Mine was to screw the coax splitter to the side of the grounded metal powerstrip to remove groundloop noice via the antenna – total cost about 20 mins and 2 screws…

Thanks for taking on this subject. You are so spot on! As for the requests to verify the claims with test equipment, forget it. The audiophools will tell you that your equipment doesn’t measure the right stuff. That there’s something more than frequency response, phase response, noise, attenuation, etc. to be measured. That we don’t really understand the way the human ear hears. When CDs first came out, many audiophiles said that LPs had better acoustics. You know what? They were right, but not for the reason they assumed. Many of the early CDs were direct transfers from the LPs and the masters were equalized for the very imperfect reproduction abilities of the LPs. The CDs delivered far flatter sound so LP EQ sounded harsh. But think of all the CD tricks that have surfaced to improve CD sound. The green magic marker around the edge of the CD to improve sound. The balancing weight to smooth out the rotational variation in the CD’s RPM (despite there being a clocked D/A in the sound-reproduction chain), etc. As you say, NUTS!

About the expensive power leads. At uni one of my colleagues in my Electronic Eng classes was very clever, especially in the related maths. He was an audiophile and I dubiously respected his rantings about equipment (he bought a 1000GBP CD player!), right up to the point he claimed a power lead costing him a couple hundred made made a significant difference to the sound quality.

the thing is that when i went to visiting him (he is 1200km far, so once a year) he was listening the movies with those small speakers from the plasma!! and HE DIDN’T KNOW!! so i configured everything correctly, the 5.1, dts, etc,etc,etc…and..he didn’t like it!! so i let it as it was before i came and i went. but that was depressing.

Dave

I’m learning a TON of things, and it entertaining to see someone else get kinda bent out of shape about the same stuff my friends and I do too.

Although I agree with you about most of the cable things, i’d like to see some proof of it. That would be cooler than just a monologue.

I think especially speaker cable can be tested very well since the impedance of the speaker is in the same order of magnitude as the cable.
One could do a simple comparison between a thin cable, a thick cheap cable and a monster cable by measuring the waveform over the speaker with different input tones and do an FFT on the output signal to get some idea about the significance of the resistance, inductance and capacitance of the cable. Of course there are a lot more tests that could be performed to show that the actual signal is the same with cheap and expensive cables, but any test would be cooler than a monologue i think.

Thanks for the cool blog anyway,

Tom