I’m not convinced
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsBoy oh boy, my simple post about our lunchtime conversation concerning cable elevators has once again let all the worms out of the can.
Of course, the controversy is to be expected. Anything involving cables, tweaks, isolation bases, fuses, and whatever manner of heresy I write about will naturally draw ridicule. And that’s alright. I can remember when the notion that electronics sound different or the idea that CDs sound different than vinyl were thought to be subjects worthy of burning one at the stake. Today, that’s mostly accepted.
What truly tickles me is when I get notes from readers announcing they are not convinced. That my words and opinions did not sway their opinions. Thank you for those comments. Anytime someone reaches out and connects it’s welcome.
Here’s the thing. I am not attempting to sway opinion or convince anyone of anything. What I do is to openly share my thoughts with you, our HiFi Family—our community. Think of it like standing at the bar of our local pub, mug of frosty white in hand, chewing the fat about what we believe and why.
We’re community. Family. Friends. I am not out to change the world nor sway others to my thoughts.
Mine is about sharing.
I always expected that highend systems not only deliver the best sound quality achievable with existing state-of-the-art technologies but also are immune (or insensitive) concerning all kind of tweaks. But obviously the contrary is true!? But this means that highend equipment demands the most careful set-up!? And the end-user will never be content with the result of his tweaking because a new tweak will again change the sound (quality). No wonder I often prefer the simplicity (seen from the end user) of active (battery driven) wireless loudspeakers with an internal DSP to be controlled via my iPad.
I believe that tarheelneil’s 3:56am comment on the 30th of July, “If A Cable Sings In The Woods….” can be extrapolated to include all tweaks & basically that it encapsulates the subjectivity of this, our very personal hobby.
Paul, the problem with having a chat about audio tweaks over a few beers at the local pub is that when the passion turns to self-righteousness fueled by the sixteenth pint of ale, look out! 😮 😉
By the 16th pint of ale they are floating out the door and stumbling into the gutter. No problem.
Lp,
…arms over each others shoulders & laughing about how antiquated vinyl is!
Touche sir 😉
Vinyl may be antiquated, but it’s my 1991 CD transport that is broken, at the moment, not my 1981 turntable. Draw your own conclusions, FR.
Lp,
Conclusion: Fat Rat is so-o-o-o over vinyl 😉
Personally, I’m bi-lingual. I speak both CD and LP. Unfortuately (or not), I don’t speaker steaming.
Now I feel so unworthy 🙁
I know how you feel, FR, English my only spoken language, save for a few words of Spanish, “cerveza” being one of them. 8~)
Lp,
For me it’s English, of course, und ein bischen Deutsch.
Of course, very helpful when shopping at “Beers of the World.” 😎
Okay Paul, while everyone else is concerned about cables, I just want to know one crucial fact you forgot to mention. What’s the name of the beer? Inquiring minds want to know.
Bud Zero!
Can we assume that “frosty white” is a beer? It doesn’t sound like one I’d care to drink. ;^)
I think Paul drinks milk.
At a pub?!
Even more bewildering, Paul chews fat? I thought he was a vegetarian.
Hi Paul.
I have my cables off the floor on foamed pipe insulation discs at no real cost,but a friend of mine has not long since bought some new speakers.
So that started me thinking about that too,but limited room size and placement issues made me think about improving the sixteen year old Lumley Lampros 200/s2 loudspeakers I already have.
First came the Gaia feet which did help,but may I need the spiked cups on my carpeted floor.
Next is the thing that made the biggest difference I’ve ever had was a set of Synergistic research carbon XOTs,I’m happier now with the sound than I’ve ever been and they work on my friends speaker at four × the cost of mine.his words a significant difference.
I know I’ve opened my self up for public ridicule.
Happy tweaking.
Do you know if professional sound and altering engineer apply all there tweaks in their studios? I strongly doubt. But maybe they have perfect room acoustics and perfect (active near field) speakers and sources?! 🙂
Paulsquirrel, I am a professional audio engineer with more than 40 years experience, close ties to manufacturers in that industry and wonderful memories of working in and with hundreds of studios and engineers.
You are correct… professional audio engineers (if you include all levels of expertise) are much less interested in getting perfect sound in the studio and more interested in either A) getting a great performance or B) tweaking things with effects and creating new songs.
Sound tweaking happens with mix engineers and then at the ‘last resort’.. the mastering engineer. But even then, the gear marketed and easily available to audio engineers is not at the level I’ve found at audioshows… and that (unfortunately) includes cable.
At the same time, much of the audiophile gear doesn’t hold up to the rigor that is required for pro engineers. Gear gets moved for remote recording, accommodating session, repeated plugging in and out.
A pro engineer is looking to please a wide variety of people who don’t always have the best gear. Before I knew what an “audiophile” was, it happens I cared about good sound. But I know for sure that many engineers don’t.. because I’m often mixing their music and have to fix things all the time. And in today’s world of musicians buying cheap gear, it’s worse than ever. Few audio schools are teaching good sound.
Any audio engineer reading this is in a small subset (like me) of engineers who care about sound as well as music. Somehow, we found a niche who appreciates our attention to detail.
Cookie Marenco
Blue Coast Records and Music
I take my hat off to audio engineers. Many of them do a great job. I’ve got thousands of wonderful recordings from so many of them of all different eras. Yes I have to tweak my sound system for each one individually but results are worth the effort. When I get one exactly the way I want it I write the critical settings down, about a dozen of them on a slip of paper I put in the Jewel box so that I can get back to them whenever I want to hear that recording again. I have a very complex system I invented and all tweaks are control settings so I never have to buy anything. As long as it continues to function it’s the last sound system I will ever build.
Once upon a time I invided a young electronic musician to listen to his music on my system. He was absolutely amazed to hear how much more “music” there was on his CD than what he heard in his basement studio.
I tried similar devices on my speakers from SteinMusic called Speaker Match and got zero improvement. However, I have a Bybee IQSE on each set of speaker terminals ( as recommended by one reviewer) and I can’t live without them. I tried removing them several times, but each time I was compelled to put them back.
Ned….. Its all your fault. I might give the IQSE a try.
Sorry…… I have them in other places too but I don’t want to financially burden you.
Don’t worry Ned… My back burner is set at a real low heat. From what I could find out they do change the sound. But in a way I may not prefer, unless one likes the tube like ease and lushness that some enjoy.
Being a musician I understand and can live some real life distortions that take place when you are right there in the room with the instruments live.
I was going to label this ‘off topic’ but think it falls into the ‘convinced’ category.
For anyone that enjoyed the link the other day about ‘The nature of the Hi-Fi industry’ (expletive deleted) I found this a fascinating read.
https://www.13thnote.net/2020/07/31/letters-from-the-editor/
I can only admire Simon Price for his attempts, in what I take to be honest and truthful, a real breath of fresh air from the usual magazine content. At the same time I sympathise with his plight, and apart from Alan’s comments have no other knowledge of his personal situation.
A lone voice versus an ingrained industry is a huge undertaking and an uphill struggle. As a consumer I think we could benefit from more of this approach which would be appreciated by many, though perhaps not some manufacturers. Readers will draw their own conclusions.
Of course this is all just opinion and an area where we choose want we want to believe, our own truths if you like.
Simon is a seriously troubled individual with mental issues and suicidal tendencies:
https://www.13thnote.net/2020/07/30/failure-of-website-driving-suicidal-thoughts/
A disgruntled “reviewer” who went “rogue” against the audio industry after a couple of manufacturers refused to pay him a compensation in exchange for positive reviews he wrote in his site. At this point, I wish him well, and hope he finds professional help to save his life.
I’d not seen that. It’s a very troubling link and like you, I wish him well.
With that in mind, I found his response to Alan rational and well thought out.
Google “rebar chairs.” I use the dirt-cheap red ones to carry my subwoofer and speaker cables. Not because I think it aids the sonics but because I was forever tripping over the wires when they were lying on the floor. If there’s an SQ benefit, so much the better.
I mean, you can’t miss seeing these red things, so no more tripping over them. Fortunately WAF is not a factor for me (my wife likes their cheery look. as long as I keep them out of the living room).
About 50 years ago (wow , time flew by) I remember attending a lecture by Julian Hirsch, a voice in the then audio community who’s sole purpose was to preach that if two amplifiers had identical crucial specs that they would sound “exactly the same”. He went to his great reward still believing this BS. For a highly intelligent man, he was really ignorant or in the pocket of the major corporations. I laughed up my sleeve that evening and laugh out loud today at the big “to do” that these Flat Earthers rattling their swords over their belief that certain tweaks, cables and cable lifters are a joke. For these people, ignorance is not bliss, it is their Holy War against the more rational folks and these non believers are looking to start another Spanish Inquisition. Don’t they realize that we don’t know at present what potential new findings will bring to light and then we may have a better understanding why we hear these sonic improvements. In the case of Mr. Hirsch, many new types of distortion have come to light since his passing and his life mission was all for nothing. I believe there are many missing puzzle pieces that haven’t come to light yet with regard to the cable topic. In any event, why should any of us who can discern the differences give a damn about the Nay Sayers ignorance. To them I say “Use your mind as if it were a parachute, it works a lot better when it’s open”.
Well said and spot on!
There is a very small pack of these kind of individuals. But they are very vocal and participate full time in every single audio forum in Internet and all audio group in Facebook. That Holy War is their hobby, not audio. In fact, I seriously doubt they even own any audio system at all, other than perhaps Alexa speakers or “vintage” crap from half a century ago, which was crap even back then
Exactly why I wonder why we give a damn about what they say.
Julian Hirsch was right. Bob Carver proved that in his challenge where he duplicated the sound of one amplifier with another by matching its transfer function. The problem stems from the fact that the method of measuring amplifiers is incomplete so that critical audible differences are not reflected in the measurements. So blame it on the state of the art of measurements. Funny that nobody in this industry has bothered to investigate to find out why differences in performance aren’t reflected in their measurements. The tools to do it are there but there is either no interest in it by people with the technical chops to figure it out or those who try don’t have sufficient knowledge of electrical engineering to get the right answer never figure it out. I say it again, in the world that I come from while all of these people have great enthusiasm and determination, and many of them are pleasant and friendly, compared to the real heavy hitters in technology, these guys are in the little league. How do I know this? Because much of my life I’ve been surrounded by people who are star performers in the major leagues. Those are the people I look up to.
Good for you SM. I’d rather use my ears to enjoy the music rather than pontificate. My only claim to fame is that I’ve got many years of listening as well as being involved as an audiophile under my belt and the music is my primary motivation. So, that’s why I only choose to know a little bit about this and a little bit about that and don’t need to dig any deeper because my ear brain connection is my bottom line not my affiliation with the heavy hitter engineers.
BTW, I was a young EE working with over 40 heavy hitter engineers in my lifetime. A few of them loved being audiophiles and others didn’t give a damn about the equipment, just the music, even from a table radio.
I do both. If you are a trained EE and have done all the math and circuit analysis then you know I’m correct. If you’er not and many EE’s I’ve met are self trained or are little more than glorified designers or technicians then nothing I say will convince you.
BTW FYI, the problem of high fidelity sound reproduction is not an electrical engineering problem, it’s a problem in fluid dynamic fields, the working fluid being air. For this reason acoustics is actually a branch of mechanical engineering. Lucky for me I took some tough courses in fluid dynamics. Very tough subject, as hard as any EE course.
Paul, I don’t remember any controversy over whether CDs sounded different than vinyl (someone claimed they sounded the same?), only which one sounded best — a debate that has now raged for about 35 years!
I’m fascinated by the ingenuity of this industry. Do all these tweaks work? Different fuses, cable elevators, all the rest of it? I don’t have a clue, I never tried any of them and I don’t intend to but I enjoy watching the debate. The reason it’s fascinating for me is that you start with a technology that was supposed to produce sounds from recordings that would convince you that you were hearing live music. Most people who are in this industry and those who have this as a hobby will tell you the results don’t sound like real music. In some cases they’ll even tell you it can’t be done. Yet they trey every possible way no matter how extreme, espensive, and obscure to squeeze the last bit out of what they admit is an inherently failed technology. It’s pointless to argue with them but it is fun to watch especially when they go brickbats at each other. I wasn’t around in the days when clerics argued over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin but this is the next best thing. Kind of reminds me of women’s mud wrestling. Funny you don’t see much of that anymore on YouTube.
Not sure if you count yourself among us SM :-), but don’t we humans always try to make the best out of the flawed technologies we have to live with at a certain time? Seems not limited to audio.
OMG you guessed my secret. I’m from another planet in a galaxy far far away come to earth with mental powers far beyond humans. I’m here to observe you and report back to my people. On my planet problems like these were solved eons ago. I’ve said it many times in the past. Watching your subspecies audiophilia neurosa is like humans watching mice trying to run a clear plexiglass maze to get to cheese they can see, smell, but have no way to get access to because they are trapped in what is essentially a two dimensional enclosure but the prize is only accessible from a third dimension by reaching in from the top and just grabbing it. They never give up because they want that cheese so badly they dream of tasting it but try as they might it’s always beyond reach. And the mice are constantly fighting over which path in the maze leads to the cheese. They’ve even given some of those paths names. There’s the horn path, the electrostatic path, the tube path, the class D path, and hundreds of others. It’s a very complex maze and they are always finding new paths that haven’t been tried before while most of them travel down side paths of the best known ones. Just call me Clark Kent.
Dude! It’s a hobby. What you describe as a disease is the very definition of a hobby. Like pleasure, fun. Not a life or death situation
Actually for me it’s a matter of a technical challenge of my knowledge of science and engineering. It was just one more problem to solve which is what I love in life to do best, solve problems. If I’m interested in them then the harder the better because I get the most satisfaction when I solve them. I’ve been studying sound for a good part of my life. Why? Because that is where the crux of the problem lies, where the answers are, and what the electronics must address. So this is a different kind of game for me than it is for audiophile hobbyists. That is one thing I enjoy doing. Another is watching the mice trying to run the maze and always unhappy in the end with their latest thing they bought, always looking for that silver bullet, that yellow brick road that leads to Oz. I think they fell asleep in the poppy field the wicked witch of the west laid down for them and they just keep dreaming about it. In retrospect this industry has been asleep for 60 years since I’ve been following it. I listen for the snoring. It’s music to my ears.
Sure! I realize some are into the hobby to enjoy something, as in get pleasure, and some are into this to solve problems, and get the satisfaction that way. Different strokes for different folks
I’d be happy to give you a problem to solve.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardest_Logic_Puzzle_Ever#The_solution
It may take you a little while. The first person who solve it, George Boolos was someone who I knew pretty well. He was my former girlfriends Brother-in-law. He was kind of smart. Let’s see how you do with it.
One’s only smart if he’s able to realize when he’s the one observed and not all the others 😉
We all watch each other. People watching is one of life’s most popular hobbies. This trivial pursuit is one of the rare amusements I have these days that are so troubled. Right now during much of my time I’m absorbed in what may become the most catastrophic humanitarian event in history happening right now on the other side of the world and most people I know aren’t even aware of it.
Sm,
The whole stupid logic of advanced aliens coming to Earth to study us has always caused me to chuckle. Imagine drawing the short straw on planet Krypton & being sent here to watch & report on a planet full of sub-Kryptonians for 5 years…I think that I’d rather kill myself!
jazznut,
Great observation!
I definitely agree.
“The Ego is always at work and needs constant feeding”.
Sounds like your ego has been a little stimped.
I’ll take that as a complement.
Frankly I’ve worked on problems I couldn’t solve, I was just plain stimped. Very crushing to my ego. Okay, here’s one for you and if you figure it out let me know the answer and you get the brass figleaf and bronze oakleaf cluster (that’s what Gene Shepherd used to say.) This one has been bugging me for nearly 60 years. They say it can’t be solved but I’ve got some new ideas I’ll try out when I can find a compass and a ruler. Construct the trisect of an arbitrary angle. It’s a problem in Euclidian plane geometry. It’s the subject I knew best in my entire life.
I’m not interested. You’re the guy who said you love to solve problems not me.
I’m getting tired of playing emotional ping pong with you.
How can anyone get emotional over this? That’s one thing that fascinates me about all this, that people work themselves up over it like is was their religion or nationality or something that really matters in life. These are just machines.
I always assumed that you never have made any experiments with these countless tweaks permanently mentioned here. Could it be that you are a perfect ignorant or that you permanent fall into the trap of your personal cognitive bias? However you permanently tweak the sound of your system using the countless trim knobs for varying the values of specific parameters! 🙂 But you never presented us a solution for better recording techniques – thus you are always fighting only symptoms – as most tweakers do here!
paulsquirrel,
Hopefully, one day, the secrets at ‘Octave Records’ recording studio will be revealed to us.
The recording process is inherently flawed. There are at least two problems with recordings. Most recordings place the microphones much closer to the source of sound than you would be so it does not “hear” what you would hear. For this reason most of the sound comes directly from the source and from the earliest reflections while where you in the audience listen from you hear far more of what the room does to sound, that is a higher proportion of the room acoustic effects. In a concert hall that is almost everything you hear no matter where you sit. The other problem is that all of the sounds that reach your ears including the reflected sounds have directions of arrival. They are what are called”vectors.” But when a microphone converts those vectors into an electrical signal they lose all of their directional properties. The signal only consists of intensity varying with time and is called a “scalar.” It is converted back to a vector field by the loudspeakers but not by headphones. If you were to compare the vector fields you’d hear live to what you get from hi fi sound the distortion would be just about 100 percent. They have almost nothing in common and that is why it is so easy to tell them apart. Your brain is programmed, hard wired to make use of this as a survival strategy that evolved over hundreds of millions of years.
The problem is to take that signal and from it somehow reconstruct what is missing from what you have. It not only takes skill to understand how to do that but it also takes experience with live music of the type you are trying to recreate to take an educated guess at what it should sound like. Therefore people who have little or no experience with live music but are only experienced with music from loudspeakers are in no position to offer an informed opinion about equipment. If they were qualified and were honest they’d reject all of it because to experienced ears none of it sounds like live music. In the words of a guy I met a long time ago and didn’t like Victor Campos of KLH what you like depends on what kind of distortion you are willing to tolerate. Why didn’t I like him? Because at a trade show I asked him what fuses I should use to protect my KLH Model 6s and he told me if I needed a fuse I’d blow them up anyway. He could have said I don’t know, contact our technical department. I just hate people who are that way.
I prefer to ignore speechifiers and wouln’t start discussions. I conclude from your explanation that you primarily try to recreate concert hall acoustics. But there is more than concert hall music. Sitting at a campfire and listening to non-amplified acoustic guitars (and the sound of the fire) I don’t miss concert hall reverbs. Thus shouldn’t the priority be set to capture and reproduce the essence of music and to the correct overtones of each voice and instrument? And those who insist on reverb might add it via a reverb plug-in.
There are no plug ins that work. If they did they would be universally used. LGWAGs don’t amuse me.
I believe it was at the last Rocky Mountain show (remember those days?), Synergistic Research did a simple demonstration….their cable risers in place – cable risers removed. An immediate, repeatable improvement in SQ….discussion over.
About conviction:
The promotion made in this space recently for Octave Records, intrinsically has the intention of convincing for such a product to be purchased, which is within the foreseeable fact that you are the owner of this site.
However, I think that in this space there are many of us who are refractory to being convinced of something with which we do not agree, since otherwise it would be a place that is not only sterile, but boring even for you.
And as for cable lifters, I don’t think many subscribers to this site have heard of the concept: asymmetrical “shielding”. And as far as your recommendation is concerned that patch cables should be shielded, Kimber has several NON-shielded models that I use that work perfectly.
On the other hand, I am reluctant to believe that the worms of the metaphor mentioned in today’s first paragraph are the ones that disagree with some of your ideas, otherwise, in this case it is better to be a worm than a sheep.
Those of us who witnessed the introduction of solid-state technology heard massive shortcomings in solid state components that had superior advertised specifications to their far more expensive to manufacture tube predecessors. It turned out that if advertised measurements had been to 5% harmonic distortion, the tube gear really had greater dynamic range. These white lies in advertising led to a widespread distrust of all measurements rather than of the advertisers who deserved it. We have advertising-supported magazines to thank for failing to call out the culprits who had been paying their bills.
Bob,
“We have advertising-supported magazines to thank for failing to call out the culprits who had been paying their bills.”
That is essentially what Simon is saying regarding reviews, ref the link in my post at 5.07am, and a sentiment I’d endorse. However the flip side to that must be, who bites the hand that feeds them?
Indeed!
So true.
Same for those folks who already had a high end turntable in the 80s/90s, I guess they laugh since then until today unless they use DAC‘s in or above a nameable 5 digit $ range.
But I think this only led to a disbelieve in basic technology & measurement driven argumentation for the smarter ones. A lot of folks still use the pure measurement orientated arguments to be able to stay where they are in their opinion about what matters.
Are we having fun yet?
I came down this morning at about 7am and my wife was playing the audio system with Roon! That’s audio nirvana, or what ever you want to call it.
The only problem is you can’t search on Roon for “that piece of Schubert we heard last week” (Fantasia in F minor).
Most people who do not believe in the effects of different cable constructions and how cable elevators can affect the signal do not understand how electricity and the transfer of energy works. Electricity in a wire is not the flow of electrons entering one end and coming out the other. No, no, no! It is the movement of charge and resulting changes in the magnetic field associated with that movement. The transfer of energy is from the magnetic field that exists in space. That’s the spooky part that is hard to grasp. Electrons in an electrical circuit move very slowly, at snail’s pace–nothing like the light speed that energy is transferred. In A/C circuits electrons just rapidly wiggle back and forth in small areas. These localized movements of the electrons generate a magnetic field that is how energy is transferred to the equipment being powered. Anything influencing this magnetic field–be it the cable materials, materials surrounding the wire or other electromagnetic fields in the vicinity–affects the energy transfer waves, the “signal.” Just watch this short Science Asylum video all the way to the end and be amazed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7tQJ42nGno
I would add that from the video it is obvious that, despite clever formulas predicting the direction of energy flow and evoking the Conservation of Energy, no one really understands how energy transmission actually occurs–how electrical energy generated at a power plant so far away can near the speed of light manifest itself in the wiring and magnetic field surrounding wires at our houses. All this happens while electrons only move a fraction of a millimeter. The energy transfer occurs somehow through the mysterious medium of space, theoretically the same space that includes and surrounds our cables and equipment, and is influenced by them.
Really enjoyed your comments. Very informational
Thanks, Stimpy. I found the video very enlightening and humbling. Considering energy transfer is via the magnetic field, certain tweaks regarded by many as “snake oil” might actually have some rationale.
One thing established by Fletcher & Munson was not only do people hear different frequency response curves at different volumes, but they vary quite a bit between individual to individual. Then there is the idea that what is a small difference to one person might seem like a big one to another. There will always seem to be a subjective element that is impossible to measure in some meaningful way. I used to work with a guy who would turn the volume knob on a amp up and ask: “Tell me when we get to .05% distortion.”
Perfect response Paul and why I subscribe to your posts, to learn more, consider others and then make up my own mind on what matters!
“High-end audio is about half physics and half Voodoo”.
Rumor has it that Ethan Winer was found unconscious and on the floor in his listening room. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was found on the floor next to him. There was also a pad and pen found under his body… It looks like he was starting to write a note.
They found power cords oddly scattered all over the floor. While disassembling his audio system to be stored away, someone noticed that his source equipment and amplifiers were all connected with brand new high end audiophile power cords.
Good high end cords are the “cat’s meow.”