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Hey you are in 2012. You are just down the hall from me.
I don't need the believers to feel sorry for me. Those that ignore science are doomed to waste a lot of money.Doc
That's the good news. The bad news is that I'm going to swap your fancy cord for a Home Depot extension cord when you're not looking, then have you go on to explain to me how great it sounds .Already told Dave I'm bringing my demo cd to your room, maybe early Fri or Sun when it's slow...assuming it slows cheers,AJ
I think you'd be surprised how much real science goes into the production of a lot (not all) of these top level cables. You just aren't going to see it made public because the findings are proprietary knowledge.
Isn't it all about 'audibility', this audio thing?
The comparison of a $25 soundblaster soundcard to other sources was interesting as well.
I'd be willing to accept that, but....How can you explain that million dollar professional studios don't use special cables at all. So the signal has traveled through tons of 'stock' cabling before being recorded, only to be played back with special cables that do what, add resolution that was never there in the first place? (Not to mention the power lines before the sockets in your house, and the 'normal' wiring on the inside of components themselves.) Even the cables that are used for mic'ing vocals with $20,000 microphones are nothing special. Are these audiophile cable technologies so proprietary that they haven't made it to the professional engineers and producers yet? Secret indeed!
On a related note, I thought one of the more interesting parts of the video were the demos that EW did introducing noise at various volumes. Noise seemed pretty much inaudible to me as high as -60 db. This says to me that, even if there are measurable differences in distortion/jitter/noise attributed to gear/cables at, say, -100 db, it is just not worth spending money to correct/address/'upgrade', because that is just miles below the threshold of audibility. Isn't it all about 'audibility', this audio thing?
On a more polite note. Studios are on the recording end of it. They use balanced cables to reduce noise. That is really all they need. All their tweaking is done with mics and on the sound board and including mic pre amps. We are the on the playback end of it. We use cables to reduce noise and tweak our sound stage. Two completely different scenarios are at play here and don't reflect on one another.
Uh... I"m so torn. See here's someone who's opinion I trust, Danny, telling me another thing.
FYI, Ethan wasn't selling anything in the vid, in fact I don't think he talked about room treatment at all. It's a really great video, you should actually watch it.
The part where "JJ" talks about fooling audiophiles and EE's into choosing a messed up, burnt out McCintosh tube amp against a cheap transisitor amp in a fake AB comparison was pretty telling.
And the part where Miss Crumb performs that trick where you think you're hearing the word Legislature when in truth the S is removed....
But his points, Ethan's, on placebo effect and thinking you're hearing an improvement with a power cable is quite telling. After seeing that Furutech cd demagnetizer I'm going to hold off on power cables and such until I see an evidence for them.
This says to me that, even if there are measurable differences in distortion/jitter/noise attributed to gear/cables at, say, -100 db, it is just not worth spending money to correct/address/'upgrade', because that is just miles below the threshold of audibility.
These guys are looking at a sound that is specific and pushing it down to a level that is hard to hear. Is it hard to hear because we can't hear that low, or because it is now at a level that it is covered up by everything else?Look at it a different way. What if we take the noise floor (this is across the board noise level) and we go from a 50db level to a 40db level. Now how audible is that? Try listening with or without your air conditioner on.How about the effects of a capacitor? Look at extremes. The speaker has an electrolytic cap on the tweeter. It smears the signal to some degree. You replace it with a poly cap with a faster discharge rate. Now the signal sounds much cleaner. Hey guess what. The amplitude is the same and it looks identical on a measured frequency response.If it measures the same but doesn't sound the same then you could be measuring the wrong thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0