Audioquest DBS system for cables

RBFC

WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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Hi! With a remodel of my listening room, I now have the opportunity to shorten my analog interconnects from 5m XLR to 2m XLR. My dealer now features Audioquest cables, and many of that line are using the proprietary DBS system:

http://www2.audioquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/DBS.pdf

Can anyone tell me of any experience with this, and if this has any potential to improve/degrade sound quality?

Thanks,

Lee
 

amirm

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Apr 2, 2010
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Well, one thought :). It says this: "The AudioQuest Dielectric Bias System significantly reduces non-linear phase errors..." I am surprised when a statement like this is made but not followed with any kind of measurement. Surely phase error is measurable. If it is not, how do they know there was some? Just listening to music and guessing that it was "non-linear" phase error?

For others who have not read the paper, it is a system that puts 72 volts inside the cable in the hopes of having it always be at the right "formation" to conduct audio signals.
 

LL21

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Dec 26, 2010
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I think someone is selling their whole system on WBF...including 3 pairs of balanced Transparent Ref XLMM2 (2 short, 1 long?) i do like their cables.
 

Lee

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2011
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Lee,

I do not have much experience with their interconnects but their digital USB cable with DBS are superb. I'm using the AQ Diamond between my Mac Mini and the MF V-Link 192 and it is the best cable I have tried there, even beating the Wireworld Starlight Platinum. I'm not certain how much of this is the DBS but I do think it help since the non-DBS cables I have tried do not perform as well.

I have tried the AQ Columbia interconnect in balanced mode and just found it to be okay.

Hope this helps with a few more data points.
 

microstrip

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May 30, 2010
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Well, one thought :). It says this: "The AudioQuest Dielectric Bias System significantly reduces non-linear phase errors..." I am surprised when a statement like this is made but not followed with any kind of measurement. Surely phase error is measurable. If it is not, how do they know there was some? Just listening to music and guessing that it was "non-linear" phase error?

For others who have not read the paper, it is a system that puts 72 volts inside the cable in the hopes of having it always be at the right "formation" to conduct audio signals.

Amir,

JBL uses this technique for DC biasing the film capacitors in their top speakers - it is why they need 9V batteries. May be they have measurements, but I doubt they want to supply them ;) From the DD66000 manual:

The network of this system utilizes the proprietary JBL “charge-couple method” to activate capacitors by applying DC bias using battery power; this eliminates unwanted distortions. Please refer to procedures below and install the supplied batteries in the battery holders.
 

dmnc02

Member Sponsor
Jul 10, 2012
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JBL uses this technique for DC biasing the film capacitors in their top speakers - it is why they need 9V batteries.

Same with Vandersteen (since 1997). Richard Vandersteen and William E. Low have a joint patent on the application of bias voltage to the dielectric of cables.
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
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Seattle, WA
Amir,

JBL uses this technique for DC biasing the film capacitors in their top speakers - it is why they need 9V batteries. May be they have measurements, but I doubt they want to supply them ;) From the DD66000 manual:

The network of this system utilizes the proprietary JBL “charge-couple method” to activate capacitors by applying DC bias using battery power; this eliminates unwanted distortions. Please refer to procedures below and install the supplied batteries in the battery holders.
Well, there is science behind the JBL solution :). The idea behind charging a capacitor is to move it above zero volt crossing most of the time. In doing so, one gets rid of the distortion that the cap induces when it is told to switch directions. The biased circuit uses two caps instead of one which provides more flexibility, allowing one to use non-electrolytic/higher-quality caps.

Here is the transfer function of an electrolytic cap:


As we see the part has hysteresis, taking a different path in reverse direction, i.e. similar thing to transformers. Here is what happens when bias voltage is applied to it:



We see a nice reduction in distortion. See the article where the above came from: http://diyaudioprojects.com/mirror/members.aol.com/sbench102/caps1.html

The DBS thing is another matter. It claims to get the cable to the same state as it would be when the signal has been running through it for a while. It claims to align molecules in the dielectric of the cable. Since what they are trying to mimic is an alternating, zero crossing audio signal, then its principal would be something different. Regardless, if there is something to what they are trying to do, then they should be able to demonstrate it like above.
 

WELquest

Industry Expert
Jan 30, 2016
46
8
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Well, one thought :). It says this: "The AudioQuest Dielectric Bias System significantly reduces non-linear phase errors..." I am surprised when a statement like this is made but not followed with any kind of measurement. Surely phase error is measurable. If it is not, how do they know there was some? Just listening to music and guessing that it was "non-linear" phase error?

For others who have not read the paper, it is a system that puts 72 volts inside the cable in the hopes of having it always be at the right "formation" to conduct audio signals.

Hi Amir et al., though such old comments, probably no one else still cares -- but I'm sort of fired up because of the never-ending idiocy over at audioholics, who use a denial of the phenomenon of dielectric involvement as their poster child for snake oil accusations -- but really a poster child for their own ignorance.

Amir, I appreciate your not-on-the-attack attitude, but I think you do know enough to know that I'm not "guessing" about non-linear phase errors due to dielectric involvement -- as the story below explains. You were "guessing" that such highly visible and technically well understood phenomena don't exist, haven't been recognized, and that engineers haven't been coping with this challenge for many decades.

It's pretty obvious to anyone with a hifi that it sounds better if left turned on. This is in part due to thermal stability, but much more generally the great majority of the improvement is from partially "forming" the dielectric, the insulation on internal wiring, or attached interconnect and speaker cables, the caps inside a loudspeaker crossover, the circuit board material, etc. The more formed, the more adapted-to-a-charged-state, the less the dielectric involvement (for any signal, nothing peculiar to audio) -- the less energy is stored in the insulation, and then as with a more traditional cap, released later, out of phase with the energy coming in.

Audio is peculiar in that I am unaware (I keep asking to be corrected) of any other single data package that covers 10 octaves. In this way, analog audio is peculiarly vulnerable as pretty much no electrical value is constant over a 10 octave bandwidth.

If all energy took this bypass, and all came out at the same time, regardless of amplitude or frequency, so what if there's a nanosecond or several seconds of delay -- but in fact only a portion of the signal is absorbed, none of which comes back out at the same time it went in -- and, the delay is not the same for different frequencies and different amplitudes. This is textbook stuff. In fact, the fellow who explained to me what is so easy to hear, was the has-to-know-more-than-anybody-else chief vetter of technical papers published by TRW.

Unfortunately, those who know enough to know about dielectrics at all, are usually fixated on loss, which at audio frequencies is generally not a concern. In fact, if all the energy that went into a cable dielectric never came out, there would be no added distortion and no need for the Dielectric-Bias System.

Why forming a cap, leaving one's system turned on, using DBS, reduces distortion is much better understood by engineers with sufficient depth of knowledge in the specific area, though I accept the TRW explanation that a polarized dielectric exhibits less non-linear phase errors that unformed dielectric. Biasing a dielectric to reduce dielectric involvement is a very old idea, even employed in JBL speaker crossovers decades ago.

BTW, phase error in this case is not about group delay, a much more easily measured and essentially unrelated phenomenon. Those not schooled in the specialty often fall victim to thinking that all phase problems are group, ignoring dispersion, just as the same people are likely to think that skin-effect is only relevant when amplitude is at stake, conveniently ignoring the textbook knowledge that skin-effect also (1:1) raises inductance, with all the problems which ensue from having the same signal subject to different impedance and different inductance at different distances from the surface of the conductor.

I don't have to measure any of these phenomena in order to believe the textbooks, or to hear the result of these well-known distortion mechanisms.

Bill Low/AudioQuest
 

Jinjuku

New Member
Apr 18, 2011
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I don't have to measure any of these phenomena in order to believe the textbooks, or to hear the result of these well-known distortion mechanisms.

Bill Low/AudioQuest

Could you point me/us to some of those textbooks that present on Dielectric constant state biasing? I have access to the libraries of the engineering colleges here at UofL.

Thx
Mark
 

Jinjuku

New Member
Apr 18, 2011
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Thanks. I'll keep looking around. Feel free to PM me if you have any suggestions for 1.5m XLR cables. Need 3 pair.

Lee



Upon my suggestion to another member here Amir purchased Mogami Gold XLR's and replaced his Transparent Audio XLR's with them to no detrimental effect.
 

JmCamrn

New Member
Jan 4, 2015
24
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DBS is the same thing as what JBL and Vandersteen uses. It keeps a charge on the dielectric to keep it formed. This is real science. Has been done for decades. There are multiple patents for it. And those who call it snake oil are uninformed.
 

Gregadd

WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
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Please do not 'cofuse us with facts.The Pope has spoken. The world is flat.
 

Jinjuku

New Member
Apr 18, 2011
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0
DBS is the same thing as what JBL and Vandersteen uses. It keeps a charge on the dielectric to keep it formed. This is real science. Has been done for decades. There are multiple patents for it. And those who call it snake oil are uninformed.

Actually it's not. Empirically it's not. Provably it's not. Factually it's not.

You do understand why they are applying a constant voltage to the dielectric of a SET of capacitors? You do understand that capacitors are not cables?

You are having a failure to understand what is going on technically.

What is happening with the Zero Cross over distortion is when the cap/s switch from positive to negative that if you where viewing the AC signal on a scope where the signal goes from + to - there is a gap at 0 (zero region, basically no current).

That is the wave form is not consistent and you have an extended no energy time.

crossover distortion.PNG

This should give you a good indication of what is going on and why AQ should be able to send out a set of DBS cables and some straight up BlueJeans Cables to an independent lab and have them properly analyzed.

Mr. Low is maintaining that their DBS stops the error you are seeing on the right by bringing up the JBL solution in relation to his cables.
 
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