Objectivist or Subjectivist? Give Me a Break
- Thread starter Jeff Fritz
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Maybe nothing but marketing, but you might hope that it would be more robust mechanically. I recently bought a few £2 cables, and on one of them the screen connection was intermittent.
I would say quality of the materials used. The cable I tested is as inexpensive as you can get. The other cable I tested was a Straight Wire. The price differences is about 20-10 to 1. The cheapy being $5-10 and $100 an up for the Straight Wire. The difference is night and day construction wise and looks as well. You have good quality RCA's 4 conductors and a sheild. With the cheap one well we have all seen them, not sure what's inside maybe a 2 wires no shield or a center with a braid??
All this said there was almost identicle results when both were tested. I am still quite happy I have the Straigh Wires though as I don't like using cheap cables. I like the looks and construction of the more expensive cables.
Rob
RE: cheap cables... I play in a band and I'm the one that fixes stuff around the studio. In the old days I had to repair the guitar cables every few months. Now that the guitar player in my band switched to a more expensive cable, I am repairing it about once every two years. Most of it has to do with the plating quality on the connectors and how well the cable was initially terminated, but when the guitar player got new pickups for the guitar one time, he was adamant that the more expensive cable brought out the superior qualities of the new pickups a lot better. It did have lower capacitance and better shielding than the cheap cables do...
You are referring to the article: A Hard Look at Audio Cables by Philip Newell published in HifiCritic. Curiously it is a paper where people mostly refer to the ending sentence, taken completely out of the context. Philip Newell is one of the few professional authors that shows no surprise with the fact that speaker cables can sound different - but he explains it due to the poor technical practices of domestic audio. I do not have the article with me but he considers that passing 11 octaves of high current signals through the same cable is not good engineering practice. He then clearly says than if we use active filters and short cables then cable differences vanish - and the reference to OFC is made in this context.
Right! This discussion just refuses to die
! Trust your ears and check your wallet. That is all folks. If you don't hear the improvement, simply forget it. If you can't afford, likewise.
It's bandwidth that counts not the number of octaves. Audio is a joke compared to what goes down the 300ohm twin conductor of a a TV antenna or a Cable TV line. Let's not forget FM radio either.
Rob
That counts for what ?
What goes down ? Or don't listen so you don't have to check your wallet.
Jack,
You can listen without danger for your wallet if you have the good people taking care of you at WBF
.I would say quality of the materials used. The cable I tested is as inexpensive as you can get. The other cable I tested was a Straight Wire. The price differences is about 20-10 to 1. The cheapy being $5-10 and $100 an up for the Straight Wire. The difference is night and day construction wise and looks as well. You have good quality RCA's 4 conductors and a sheild. With the cheap one well we have all seen them, not sure what's inside maybe a 2 wires no shield or a center with a braid??
All this said there was almost identicle results when both were tested. I am still quite happy I have the Straigh Wires though as I don't like using cheap cables. I like the looks and construction of the more expensive cables.
Rob
I thought you said the cable you tested was $20? You can get 3' RCA cables at Walmart (and probably RS) for $1.50, and probably less at a discount electronic supply store.
Well, it could be a preamp, or a CD or DVD player, or any other device that has line-level outputs. Often such devices, when they have a headphone jack, have a small IC power amp that can put out one or two watts. Being a "power amp" it can output more current, and with a lower output impedance, to better drive longer wires.
--Ethan
Doe's it really matter?? I have purchased $30 cables for a couple of bucks and seen blister pack for $20. What the actual cost was is not important it's the results of the test.
Rob
What I'm unclear is when cables make any difference to an "objectivist"? I think it's been pretty well established that at some thickness (and possibly metal composition) zip cord will not be "transparent" as speaker wire. I suspect the same is true of interconnects? Does it matter if they are coax or twin lead? Shielded or unshielded?
Pretty obviously, I am as skeptical of the viewpoint that "all cables sound the same" as I am of the viewpoint that there are huge differences between two well-designed and well-built cables. The difference is that the first claims to be able to make convincing arguments and present convincing data in its support, which I have yet to see.
Hello rbbert
I lean heavilly to the objectivist side and to me it's the quality of construction and looks that matter. I didn't purchase my CLIO set-up to measure interconnects or speaker wire. I build speakers as part of the hobby. The speaker and placement are the most important aspects to get right. They give you the most change in system sound. That's where I focus.
The measurement of the interconnect just confirms to me that I should not be putting my focus there to get things to sound right. Even if there was a subtle change in measurements then you have to wonder about how just audible it is with program matereial.
I just don't worry about it, get what I like and move on.
Rob
It's out there . Here's the very first reasonably objective thing I came across in a Google search, from a research paper done at MIT:
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/46225/41567257.pdf
Plenty of data in there. Pretty convincing. And it took about 30 seconds to find. There's plenty more out there, just be sure to watch the sources carefully. White papers from high-end cable companies pop up a lot. Obviously they're not objective.
Tim
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