John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

Placebo effect is worth paying for. Audio and visual perception, in the end, is all in the mind. It all ends up as a psychological phenomenon - pure interpretation. Thus a placebo effect, especially for audio or visual interpretation, is entirely real in my opinion. And worth paying for.

Everyone's brain is wired differently, thus we all "hear" and perceive things in an individual way. Belief systems rewire the brain (memory is electro-chemical configuration). Thus scientifically, believing in something can in fact alter its perception to you.

Note that Dunlavy does say that cables have very different electrical properties which are measurable. As an engineer, Dunlavy has decided to build cables that focus on optimizing these electrical properties. They might even sound good? Too bad their appearance is crap.

I personally find that good looking speaker cables (fat, color coordinated, well terminated) "sounds" better. Thus I pay.

Grungle, you know it. I'm on the placebo hunt right now for some AudioQuest Anaconda interconnects!!!

I was a sceptic until I recently did my own tests. On interconnects I did repeated testing playing the same 1 minute section of music over and over. I was swapping the $4 per pair generic black interconnects you get with most cheap stereo gear, with Kimber Select KS-1030 silver interconnects $800 per pair. The effect was quite pronounced. In particular, with the cheap stuff, a section with a tambourine on top of a drum which was being hit, was muffling the drum and blending in with it. The drum was just a "thumping" sound. With the great interconnects, the entire effect was different: the drum was hit first, it was nicely pronounced and tonally rich. A fraction of a second later, the tambourine rattled and jangled... it was clearly subordinate to the drum. Here is an example where the entire sonic precedence of instruments changed by varying the interconnects.

Are the Kimbers 400 times better than the el-cheapos? No. But they are much much better.

Speaker cables: last night I decided to experiment with ultra-cheap 20 gauge zip wire speaker cable. (I lived with this stuff all through my twenties. :-) I removed my 12 gauge thick copper speaker cables with gold plugs and replaced with the cheapo zip cables. Did repeated swapping on a well memorized 2 minute section of classical music.

With the cheap stuff, the imaging was much blurred. There was no crip 3D soundstage either. Many instruments congealed together into a fuzzy, ill-defined image. Bass tonal richness was gone (color, as they say, went from bronze to grey). I repeated the test over and over and it was clear that the thicker cables we much improved.

I will repeat the test soon with some nice Nordost Blue Heavens, which have more silver content.

It's pretty obvious to me now that the material of the cable (silver versus copper) can make a big difference. I cannot really quantify the effects of wire topology or biwiring without more experimenting.

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Methodology. It seems to me that the best way to test all this stuff would be to put a computer on the end, next to a speaker, and to AtoD what comes out of the speaker cable. Swap the cables. Then compare in the digital domain the differences. It would be pretty possible then to have a quantifiable way to measure what is going on.

I say to put the AtoD in parallel with the speaker only because speakers create demand on the current that will affect what comes across, whereas replacing with a computer will have completely different current characteristics.

Is there some nice hardware and software for a PC that can do this? Must be.....

Sqjudge,
Can you suggest any components for doing this measuring and testing.
Only 96db sensitivity?
What about taking an A/D converter from someone like dcs which is really high quality and take the digital out of that and do the measurements?

Is there a PC interface for TOSLINK or ST link????

Thanks Chris. Clearly you're knowledgeable! Seems though that digital source equipment can't produce quality up to what we can hear, so we can probably measure at a similar quality level and get some meaningful results.

The dcs 904 will sample at 192 khz 24 bits.

But then of course, the cables could have such subtle effects that these measurements won't be meaningful. The differences I have heard with interconnects though lead me to think that they could be measured fairly easily. l liked lemme's idea of inverting channel polarity and comparing that way with different cables on each. Very clever.

Trappist.

Well I'm impressed by your diligence. Thank you very much for sharing your results and for taking the time and putting in the effort to do this. Here I am conjuring up all kinds of digital computer measurements, and you just go out and do the obvious test. Bravo!

Since I've heard big differences in midrange performace from cables, I can easily believe a 1db difference from cables. Frankly, from what I've experienced in the difference between the cheapest and some of the best silver cables, I'm surprised it isn't closer to 3db difference in the 3k-5khz band.

Gpalmer, you rule.

Apparently the way to measure these things is with a nice high end digital oscilliscope with storage and analsysis capabilities.