Need answer to simple question.

[Brandon Hartwick]

Personally I use the Iso-Quad RCA cables from these guys, they look cool, are well built and they're not super expensive. The husband and wife owners are also super nice people. Unfortunately I think the descriptions of some of the products are nuts lol.

https://sites.google.com/view/pine-tree-audio/home

 

[Robert D]

Personally I use the Iso-Quad RCA cables from these guys, they look cool, are well built and they're not super expensive. The husband and wife owners are also super nice people. Unfortunately I think the descriptions of some of the products are nuts lol.

https://sites.google.com/view/pine-tree-audio/home

That looks like a good company, and a value.

 

[Leporello]

I don't agree. What I hear isn't all that simple.

First, I don't listen to pure tones. In reality, there are no pure sine waveforms, no pure monotonic sine waves with spectra made up of a singular line. No waveform that started in the infinite past and continues into the infinite future. More than my time span. It's not that simple. And not only are single-note waveforms complex and riddled with non-harmonic related content, but ...

I listen to Chords. A lot of them And Polyphony. And Choruses. And when I listen I like hearing their so-called voices individually as well as melded together.

And I hear this phenomena in truly non-linear ways. My ear is not a Fourier analyzer. When two tones are played together, I hear beats, well enough so that I can tune a piano's unisons.

But no matter. I want to make us both happy, and I see ways to do it, so humor me a bit more.

If I claim, "The outrageously expensive cable is markedly better than the far more reasonably priced cable," I should provide a test or evaluation of the samples so that BOTH of us are convinced.

Suppose I show that, for ANY chosen waveform fed to both cables simultaneously, the outputs of said cables are indistinguishable from one another. That is, the difference between the two is below any possibility of discernment. Isn't such a test a step in the right direction?

If a vendor claims his cable produces purer results than his competitor, or that his cable is directional and it matters, that vendor should be obliged to show that the competitor's cable is producing something different under identical test or evaluation conditions. If not test gear and measurements, then double-blind testing with a large numbers of audiophile listeners under controlled listening conditions.

It isn't enough for a grey beard to pontificate or wax poetic. Certainly not a salesperson in a lovely hi-fi showroom preaching this or that. It's not enough for a vendor to extol the virtues of its products. Nor even a bunch of well-intentioned enthusiasts on a discussion forum expressing opinions ad infinitum.

None of these really resolve the matter as well as an honest and proper scientific test.

Just my two cents.

In fact, the hairs in your cochlea comprise a filter bank that could be construed as a Fourier analyzer. That shouldn't matter because as you know, despite how audiophiles use (abuse?) the terms "frequency domain" and "time domain", they're just different mathematical representations of the same thing, uniquely connected from one to the other (save for a few pathological functions mathematicians can come up with) by a linear transformation. Of course there's more going on with spatial location (what audiophiles now call "soundstage") involving subtle movements of the head and pinnas--not to mention the processing going on in the brain, which nobody can claim to understand on a high level. And the listener/loudspeaker/room interaction cannot begin to be captured by the most sophisticated scientific analysis tools we have now. But on one thing we agree completely is that up to the loudspeaker, if situation A produces one waveform at the terminals and situation B produces an identical waveform, the two situations sound the same.

The transmission of electrical signals through passive conductors is extremely well understood. There is no new physics going on. The Drude model works fine here, even though it can't even explain why some materials are conductors and some insulators. Today we even have a fairly firm grip on how high temperature superconductors work, something not fully explained by the Bardeen-Cooper-Schriefer model for low temperature superconductors from the 1950's. In short, new physics of electrical conductivity and signal transmission is extremely unlikely to be found by audiophiles speculating on why different cables sound different, without providing any evidence that they in fact do.

The "all amplifiers sound the same" geeks (from my own anecdotal experience I don't believe this) always add the caveats they're not driven into distortion, and assert residual nonlinearities are unimportant. I think there's a lot of honest work that can be done regarding amplifiers. and DACs. That these things measure differently is beyond dispute, the only debate is the audibility of the different measuring things. And there are well established scientific principles as to why these things measure differently.

I agree completely that a lot of hotly debated topics in the home audio community could be resolved by fairly simple but well designed scientific experiments. Maybe it would be a good topic for a master's thesis in EE or psychology.

 

[amey01]

But on one thing we agree completely is that up to the loudspeaker, if situation A produces one waveform at the terminals and situation B produces an identical waveform, the two situations sound the same.

Precisely.

Regardless of all the magical voodoo fairy-tales going on (if any, but let's say there is lots) - it can all be isolated because we understand what we are putting into a cable.

If what we are getting out (of a cable, or anything) is equavilent to what we are putting in, then there can be no improvement made.

Unless you believe in alchemy.

And I think that is more than proven by my earlier post about these things coming in fads. There is clearly not enough substance to any of these claims in order to sustain any of these audio fads for more than a few years (or drive adoption with more than a few nutters with too much money).

 

[Rascal]

In fact, the hairs in your cochlea comprise a filter bank that could be construed as a Fourier analyzer. That shouldn't matter because as you know, despite how audiophiles use (abuse?) the terms "frequency domain" and "time domain", they're just different mathematical representations of the same thing, uniquely connected from one to the other (save for a few pathological functions mathematicians can come up with) by a linear transformation. Of course there's more going on with spatial location (what audiophiles now call "soundstage") involving subtle movements of the head and pinnas--not to mention the processing going on in the brain, which nobody can claim to understand on a high level. And the listener/loudspeaker/room interaction cannot begin to be captured by the most sophisticated scientific analysis tools we have now. But on one thing we agree completely is that up to the loudspeaker, if situation A produces one waveform at the terminals and situation B produces an identical waveform, the two situations sound the same.

The transmission of electrical signals through passive conductors is extremely well understood. There is no new physics going on. The Drude model works fine here, even though it can't even explain why some materials are conductors and some insulators. Today we even have a fairly firm grip on how high temperature superconductors work, something not fully explained by the Bardeen-Cooper-Schriefer model for low temperature superconductors from the 1950's. In short, new physics of electrical conductivity and signal transmission is extremely unlikely to be found by audiophiles speculating on why different cables sound different, without providing any evidence that they in fact do.

The "all amplifiers sound the same" geeks (from my own anecdotal experience I don't believe this) always add the caveats they're not driven into distortion, and assert residual nonlinearities are unimportant. I think there's a lot of honest work that can be done regarding amplifiers. and DACs. That these things measure differently is beyond dispute, the only debate is the audibility of the different measuring things. And there are well established scientific principles as to why these things measure differently.

I agree completely that a lot of hotly debated topics in the home audio community could be resolved by fairly simple but well designed scientific experiments. Maybe it would be a good topic for a master's thesis in EE or psychology.

Glad you agree.