[Wind Chaser]

Oh, so you're giving up a little performance...

  Not the least bit concerned!

Who is that btw?

Reality Cables.  They do offer white and black sleeves for those who cannot look upon red cables, but they don't advise black.  Read the FAQ... http://www.realitycables.com/faq.html

[jtwrace]

Reality Cables.  They do offer white and black sleeves for those who cannot look upon red cables, but they don't advise black.  Read the FAQ... http://www.realitycables.com/faq.html

 

Why do you not put sleeving over your cables?
In listening tests we determined that the black or colored sleeving that other cables
manufactures use degrades the sound of the our cables. We heard a collapsing of
the soundstage as compared to no sleeving at all. Also, by not using the sleeving it
helps us keep the cost down so that we can provide you with reference caliber
cables at near entry level pricing. We will put sleeving on if you ask. Our feeling is
that the cotton sleeving does the least amount of damage to the sound. We only
recommend the black sleeving if you require it for cosmetic reasons.

[Wind Chaser]

Given how much impact a silly small piece of wire can make, nothing surprises me any more.

This is a terrible time for electrical engineers who cannot measure or find any scientific explanation for these things.  The safest thing for them to do is deny that these things make any difference at all.

[TooManyToys]

Most black colored compounds use carbon black as the pigment

[Wind Chaser]

So in other words don't bother painting your black cables red.

[BudP]

Bud,
I have a pair of near field studio monitors (Klein + Hummel 0300s) which are internally tri-amplified. Would this tweak have less effect when the speaker wires are as short as they are likely to be in this instance?
In a similar vein, would it have effect at microphone levels?

thanks, Russell

Can you get to the drivers involved? If not and the input is an unbalanced RCA cable and there is a spare RCA female input, an RCA GC will work very well with the amplifiers in question, especially if they have a common signal return amongst them.

It is entirely possible to provide GC's to apply directly to the negative lug of the individual drivers, at the join between selvage wire from the voice coil and the lug itself. As soon as our web site is up and running, for the Ground Plain units we intend to market through it, we can provide this sort of custom, individual service. We should have this completed by mid December.

As for color in polyolefin dielectric, red is best in one place and black is best in another.

You are quite correct Wind Chaser, this is a very mutable technique. You will want to keep copious notes and teach your self to recognize all three categories of change available. I will strongly recommend that you purchase a pair of the Standard Ground Controls, just you you have a yardstick to go by.

Also, please note that it is extremely easy to overdo these improvements, the result is a suddenly murky and dulled sound. No damage done of course, unless you have spent money on products where the folks responsible for the manufacturing decisions and controls were not aware of this possibility. Even GC's can be used to an extreme, with no more than two being recommended for any stage in the reproduction chain, but their use will not interfere with any other stage in that chain.

This Ground Control thing is amenable to engineering solutions, with repeatable results, but the phenomena involved are very subtle in nature and gross changes in any constituent part of the controlling device is not usually beneficial.

Bud

[JohnR]

This is a terrible time for electrical engineers who cannot measure or find any scientific explanation for these things.  The safest thing for them to do is deny that these things make any difference at all.

I'm getting very tired of the constant slurs and misrepresentation of my profession. Stop it please.

[planet10]

... they don't advise black

Black insulation is often black because carbon black is used to make them black. Carbob black is conductive.

Other colours will use different colouring materials, each with their own properties.

dave

Edit: got beaten to the punch

[Russell Dawkins]

Can you get to the drivers involved? If not and the input is an unbalanced RCA cable and there is a spare RCA female input, an RCA GC will work very well with the amplifiers in question, especially if they have a common signal return amongst them.

It is entirely possible to provide GC's to apply directly to the negative lug of the individual drivers, at the join between selvage wire from the voice coil and the lug itself. As soon as our web site is up and running, for the Ground Plain units we intend to market through it, we can provide this sort of custom, individual service. We should have this completed by mid December.

Bud

I have yet to remove the back on these speakers, but I imagine I can easily get to the drivers. The only inputs are balanced XLR3s.

In general, do you find that the effect is lessened with shorter speaker wire lengths you would find in an internally powered speaker?

Have you tried this tweak with ultra low-level signals, like ribbon microphones or phono cartridges?

[Wind Chaser]

Also, please note that it is extremely easy to overdo these improvements, the result is a suddenly murky and dulled sound. No damage done of course, unless you have spent money on products where the folks responsible for the manufacturing decisions and controls were not aware of this possibility. Even GC's can be used to an extreme, with no more than two being recommended for any stage in the reproduction chain, but their use will not interfere with any other stage in that chain.

That's exactly what happened with a second pair installed at the back of the amp.

BTW, how did you come up with this idea?  Do you think there could be other applications ground enhancement?

[BudP]

Wind Cheater,

This novel tech can be used for every stage of the reproduction chain. I have had claims made, from people I have no reason to mistrust, that analog video signals are helped to as strong a degree as are audio signals. I have zero experience here and only anecdotal evidence. If you have a stand alone CD player, take your wire loop, solder it to an RCA male plug ground tab and plug it into a spare Analog out. You should find some interesting results. Be ready to decrease the loop size. Under no circumstances should you apply this tech to a digital ground. The CD player will have buffered grounds and so it is safe to apply to an analog output. It is not safe to apply it to the SPDIF output.

Russell,

I have applied this to both phono cartridge, just at the solder pads for the shielded cables. Also to the magnetic reader heads in my Teac X7R tape player. Both were successful, both needed far less materials than speakers or line level signal equipment needs.

I'm getting very tired of the constant slurs and misrepresentation of my profession. Stop it please.

I hear you brother. I suspect real quantifiable data will have to wait until Tom Simon (of the excellent investigation of cable differences in Audio X press some time past) can turn his extremely sensitive sniffers loose, before we begin to see what is actually going on. From logical derivation and manipulation of the various materials ratios, it does appear to be an unterminated wave guide, with extremely low RAC and RDC. Exactly why this scheme would make the difference it does is something of a wonder. I do know I am manipulating very subtle fields, that they are not related to antenna structures, as the material I use is true type 1 litz, basically immune to frequencies below mhz range. My assumptions lie around a super rich outer orbit electron density, held in slight and short stasis by the overall triboelectric charge, developed by the seething electrons slipping in and out. Certainly the true, individually insulated strand, Litz wire and tiny amounts of extra, low dielectric constant and absorption material, show a very high Q, with respect to changes in perceived performance vs changes in material type, amount or structure. I invite you to participate and would value your observations. My expertise is in transformers, very high information density audio transformers to be more exact.


Wind cheater, the above is where this investigation arose. Developing and utilizing a dielectric circuit, within the confines of a transformer coil. The development of absolutely uncolored cables and the use of speakers with coherent information capability some 90 db down from signal level (as opposed to the much more ordinary 40 db down) and untroubled by resonance echoes from the emitter surfaces, were required to allow me to learn the "voices" of differing dielectric materials and coil winding structures.

This information was then applied to developing a successful lineup of "voices " for out put transformers for guitar amplifiers and other amplified musical instruments. To apply the resulting information to extremely high information retention, audio reproduction outputs, interstage's etc, was almost trivial by comparison. To get some anecdotal information on the results, goggle O-Netics Ltd or Bud Purvine.

After all the above was finished I noticed that I still was not hearing a complete rendering of music. There were some obvious lacks in spatial presentation and the voicing of instruments. Since I was quite certain that signal side design was about as complete as anyone could ask for, and so, not the problem, I began to investigate the other half of the complete signal circuit. The development of Ground Control was really just a result of following a series of logic trees, starting with the realization that there actually was a problem to look into.

Bud

[*Scotty*]

Bud,why does the Litz wire have to be in a loop?
Scotty

[BudP]

Scotty,

Works better. The loop is amenable to "tuning" for specific driver differences, a straight piece of wire, same type and length, not so much.

[shep]

I got lost somewhere along the way. Why if the Litz is better, are you selling the straight wire version?

[BudP]

over here..... OVER HERE..... ah... better. We aren't selling a straight wire version. We will be selling a speaker cable and interconnect cable that were fore runners of this tech and they are, of need, straight wires and they use the same materials, mostly.

All Ground Control and Ground Plain devices use a loop of Litz wire.

Bud

[shep]

ok then. I mistook the picture, with the piece of wire coming out, to be the thing. Some of us, OVER HERE are a bit slow.

[chrisby]

over here..... OVER HERE..... ah... better. We aren't selling a straight wire version. We will be selling a speaker cable and interconnect cable that were fore runners of this tech and they are, of need, straight wires and they use the same materials, mostly.

All Ground Control and Ground Plain devices use a loop of Litz wire.

Bud

and when the loop is covered in cotton sleeve and terminated with spade lug for speaker level or RCA for line level, you can't see that

[shep]

Right then, one last question: is it significant to have BOTH the amp end and the speaker end "treated"? It is not clear from the glowing reports if everyone is using pairs or just singles on the speaker end.
Seems this is being answered on the other thread. I'll just sit back and wait till it's all sorted out and there is a concensus.

[BudP]

In my own system and seemingly in the systems of those who get addicted to Ground Control, the following steps occur.

1. Application of a Standard GC to speakers Significant improvements in the illusion of space and coherence of sound stage, modest improvement in tonal vividness and dynamic colors (jump factor) and a noticeable reduction of noise in most systems.

Step 2 Addition of a standard GC to the amplifier speaker terminals same as above but with about half the level of change.

Step 3 Application of a Reference GC to either place, leaving the other end as a Standard. Greater transparency to the musical events, greater treble differentiation, more coherence to the illusion of separate instruments within a group. Variable by system reduction in the width and in some cases the depth of sound stage illusion. Return or retention of the Reference Ground Control per individual taste.

Step 4 Application of a Standard GC RCA to stand alone CD player: Restructuring of Red Book high frequency hash, noise and hardness into the musical event it was, before the op amps lost the back half of the wave form information required for this. General extension of "ease" throughout the rest of the FR. Differences in quality of musical values between Red Book and all other forms of information storage narrowed significantly. Greatly improved respect for the Electrical Engineers that have already provided these increasingly musical events being uncovered by Ground Control.

Step 5 Application of Standard and Reference GC RCA to preamp: For tube preamps, the combination aids all categories noted above, at about another half of the gain originally found in the speaker amp combo. For solid state preamps the grain and hashiness (if any is available) are returned to musical information and the results are stunning transparency to go along with the already fine benefits of low distortion and a lack of noise.

Step 6 A desire for even more places to hang these things and the subsequent discovery that you can have too many GC's on a particular piece of equipment.

Step 7 An investigation of EnABL speaker process and a contact of Planet 10 Hi Fi to see about obtaining pre treated drivers. A descent into the wonders of DIY that actually works better than anything you thought possible, even if it isn't for your "main" system.

Step 8 An email to Bud asking about availability of cables.

So, an 8 step plan to get you into the poor house. And if you have a home theater system, well, our first Ground Plain product will be an even greater enticement than are the Ground Controls.

Bud

[shep]

Sometimes it's better not to ask