http://www.lessloss.com/

Thanks for your great blog!

One of my favorites though is people who tell me they bought a “Surge Protector” for their new whizbang home electronics gizmo so its safe from lightning! Now, for some surges, something like an APC backup is great and genuinely does protect your equipment. Especially something like a projector where the bulb is hot and needs the fans to never stop. But these 6 outlet pieces of crap, are you kidding? Furthermore I tell them, if the lightning doesn’t mind jumping 3 miles and has enough power to boil sap and debark a tree outside in 1ms, do you really think it cares about jumping over the passives in your $5 “Surge protector”? Get a clue!

About the only place where tubes still have a real place in audio is in guitar amps, which routinely do things that would be unforgivable in a system intended to *reproduce* music, though I think the guitar amp of the future will be a big, transparent solid-state power amp driven by a digital signal processor.

Regarding Audio-Phoolery, I agree the snake oil sales is pretty disgusting.

However, regarding Panasonic capacitors, I have personally measured Panasonic FC series electrolytic capacitors that *get better sounding* (measured THD in RightMark audio analyzer software running external loopback from hot-rodded M-audio USB soundcard) after a few hours of run time vs freshly soldered in parts. This goes for power supplies and for caps in the audio path.

I suspect that because Panasonic FC series capacitors are wet parts (as are most electrolytics) perhaps they act sort of like rechargeable batteries in that they need some “running in” before they act their best (Lowest impedance / ESR etc / who knows ?? )

To tell you the truth, I can only speculate as to the reasons, but the effect is real, unlike directional audio cables.

Cheers,
Mike Durller

You seem to have picked on Monster and Panasonic What about Linn, Naim, Nordost, Audioquest and the many others WHAT ABOUT THEM or what about the reviews in Stereophile, Hi Fi Choice, Hi Fi news and many others are you suggesting that there is not a thread of truth in any of their claims? I am just curious as to why you have only mentioned Panasonic and Monster

I used to make my own interconnects, particularly in the days when I had old equipment for which ready-made ones were hard to get. However, I found it fiddly and not always reliable.

If it was a survivable environment, you can bet they’d be advocating oxygen-free listening rooms.

I even compared short lengths of super cables (including some Monster brand stuff) against very long lengths of cheap stuff, and sometimes included upscale amps with the upscale cables and cheaper amps with the cheaper cables and guess what: still no audible differences. (It can be assumed that facing off high-power amps against lower-power amps that were forced into clipping would show differences, obviously.)

Some here might claim that I was probably using sub-par speakers (or that I am functionally deaf, even though I had a number of other, younger people do the comparisons, too), but I used Dunlavy Cantatas and SC-IIs, Allison IC-20s, NHT M6 satellites, and assorted other models by Snell, Eminent Technology, Waveform, Atlantic Technology, and Triad during the time I had the ABX box on hand, and NONE of those systems could show up differences between premium cables (shielded or speaker wire) and the cheap stuff.

Cables of any kind are just one product category where esoteric insanity seems to be running the show. Power conditioners, vibration isolators, disc coating, cryogenics, clamp racks, cable suspension devices, and various magnetizing tricks also abound, and I will assume that as time goes on the con artists (some of whom may also become deluded enough to actually believe some of their own hype) will come up with additional ways to fleece the clientele.

In many ways, so-called “serious” audio has devolved into a hobby for suckers with too much money to spend and too little common sense to spend it wisely.

Howard Ferstler

‘It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of “culture.”‘ – John Cage

Almost the worst cable that can be used for loudspeakers is figure 8 (zip) cable. Ironically, this is exactly the configuration used by most speaker cables. Some companies do manufacture speaker cables that do offer a technical performance which ranges from somewhat better to dramatically better than figure 8 cable. Does that translate to better sound? Yes it can, under certain circumstances.

Here are a couple of impedance plots of some speaker I ran some time ago:

http://www.rageaudio.com.au/index.php?p=1_12

Now I am not going to suggest that all loudspeakers exhibit such impedance curves, but there are a small number that do. In those cases and/or when speaker cable runs become quite long (>5 Metres) then fancy speaker cables may make an audible difference.

That said, I have been suggesting the use of RG213/U for many years, as an effective speaker cable for difficult situations. It’s cheap and very high performance.

As for the rest of the hokum, I can say much. It’s pretty much bullshit. That said, cables, surge arrestor power boards and the like is the only decent profit-making centre for many sales outlets nowadays. It’s the only way many companies can remain in business, since margins on AV equipment is now so low. Not that I am defending the practice. I’m just explaining it.

It would appear that a small faction of the membership on SNA would like to control the comments I make on other sites (IOW this site), about the nature of these audiophile cables. One of the management team who disagrees with your views has issued me with an infraction point for simply defending myself on SNA from another member who made (IMO a threatening remark towards me) in a direct reply to one of my posts clearly stating that he worked in a legal capacity for the Queensland Police Solicitors’ Office. The relevance of how he derives his income is IMHO irrelevant to the discussion of audiophile cables. The fact he felt it nessecary to include that information in the opening of his reply is IMO a feeble attempt to intimidate me. IMO it just illustrates the lengths some people will go to in attempting to stifle opinion based on well known scientific fact.

Sure I believe in cables. I find it singularly impractical to use anything but a power cable to get the power from the GPO on the wall to my amplifier or CD player. Whether I need or want a $500 one to do what a $10 one could do is a matter of opinion.

Cheers,
Alan

I completely agree with your observations but some of the membership at StereoNet Australia have opposing opinions. Read this for a polarised view – http://www.stereo.net.au/forums/showthread.php/26525-Dave-dispells-audiophoolery?p=391534&posted=1#post391534

One poster said you lost him at the 2;45 minute mark. He promotes and sells all manner of snake oil cables, so anyone who attempts to dispell the myths is in his eyes is committing hearesy – LOL.

Frankly I also can’t see how 1 metre of “special” power cable between the GPO on the floor and the IEC socket on the back of the amplifier can impart such a dramatic difference as to be likened to night and day. Let the truth be known that in many cases most of this snake oil power cable is nothing more and nothing less than standard 15A three core power cable in a fancy jacket.

IMHO there is absolutely no scientific proof that any of these sanke oil cables improves the sound quality over any standard suitably rated and constructed power cable.

As you implied in your blog – who would admit that after spending $500 on a power cable it made absolutely no difference to the reporuced sound? No one I know of. You’d have to be a turkey to have wasted $500 on something that could be done just as well with a $10 cable.

IMO audiophoolery boils down to a mentality of I spent more money than you on stuff that nobody can tell the difference with. A friend recently bought a fairly high-end Blu-ray player from a respected US manufacturer. It came with a couple of Blu-ray discs in the box, one of which was a video tutorial from AIX Records on how to set up your system for optimim listening. In that the owner of the disc production company dispells the myth of snake oil cables in the context of right from the recording stage through to the reproduction stage. I wonder how well the snake oil merchants and “true believers” on SNA would handle those observations?

Keep up the good work Dave. I like your no nonsense style of telling it how it really is.

Cheers,
Alan

The audiophool gear is as bad as various health-related garbage that is sold.

Seriously Dave, you are responsible for keeping up all night many many EE’s catching up on all your past issues. Once you discovers this blog you are addicted. Nice one!

Nick

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