Moving cables around killed dynamics for days anyone else experience this?


I've been experimenting with different cables between components. Nothing sounds right since trying to improve sound with new mix of cables. There is no bass and boring, highs are okay but life is gone from system. So I flipped everything back the way it was still sound horrible. Ran everything 24/7 for a couple days still no go. Let it run a couple more days dynamics are back and bass is full big and has tone again and enjoyable to listen to. Can someone tell me why this happens. I've also moved just speaker cables around without unhooking them and seen this happen, I don't get it.
paulcreed

Showing 20 responses by audiozenology

douglas_schroeder

+1

Bass doesn't magically disappear / reappear moving cables unless you have some serious issues with corrosion on your speaker contacts or on the AC contacts to your power amps. Some tube gear is overly sensitive to line voltage. Were there reasons you were playing your system quieter perhaps? Even humidity can make a difference in larger rooms depending on the humidity swing.
Over typical listening temperatures, it does not make much differences, but w.r.t. humidity it can. Depending on the reference quoted, at 5 meters attenuation of 1db at 10KHz  at the right humidity level will happen. When you consider directed sound is only part of the total energy, the path lengths will average longer so higher than 1db at 10KHz is possible. That right humidity being ~20-25%.

With the exception of phono cables and interconnects specifically designed to filter, I guarantee you no interconnect is going to make a 1db change at 10Khz, and keep in mind this causes a change in direct/reflected energy.

>>>>>Yeah, right. Maybe if you live in the Okefenokee Swamp.

No, but if you live in say Arizona, or you don't humidify you house in a cool climate, then yes humidity can dip into the 10-30% range where frequencies can be attenuate in a large room, especially if you have a "lively" room total energy at higher frequencies is more dependent on bounces extending path length.  10db would be more a concert hall / outdoor venue figure, but completely possible.


^^^^^^

A normal response would be "Oh sorry, did not realize humidity could impact the attenuation that much.".
Who cares? Most systems are too bright anyway.

Depends on how many times you have heard Ted Denney tell you that if you move the cables, you have to wait days for them to settle ... as his excuse for never doing double blind tests, even though he has claimed he would, but then backed out.
Cardas also says things like this below from their website. Note that any standing voltage is DC (music is AC). However, if I take a fairly inexpensive 2 meter interconnect I have lying around that has not been connected up to anything in months, load it with 100K ohms (higher than most inputs), and hook that up to a 6.5 digit Agilent 34465 meter, I measure <10uV, or at least 100db on a 1V signal, and lower than the offset of any practical amplifier. Of course, the source is likely around 2K, so that 10uV, would be much less.

There are many factors that make cable break-in necessary and many reasons why the results vary. If you measure a new cable with a voltmeter you will see a standing voltage because good dielectrics make poor conductors. They hold a charge much like a rubbed cat’s fur on a dry day. It takes a while for this charge to equalize in the cable. Better cables often take longer to break-in. The best "air dielectric" techniques, such as PFA tube construction, have large non-conductive surfaces to hold charge, much like the cat on a dry day.

Also said this, yet I can put an unused interconnect in front of a speaker playing loud, load one end with 2K (mainly to shunt RF via AC), plug the other end to the AP, and not measure anything above -120db except a spike at 60Hz if the cable is not routed properly?
Cable that has a standing charge is measurably more microphonic and an uneven distribution of the charge causes something akin to structural return loss in a rising impedance system
Cardas makes a lot of other claims, and like the ones above, while there is truth in them, it is the old "lie and statistics" thing. Let’s take that standing voltage thing. I measured <10uV. Cardas says in their marketing blurb, MV (millivolt range, or 100 times more). Who is telling the truth??? We both are. The difference is, I loaded the cable with a rather unrealistic 100K load. I should have loaded it with say 10K to represent a worst case source impedance. That would have brought it down to say 1uV or 1000 times less than Cardas’ marketing number. What did Cardas use? ... likely the input impedance of their meter, perhaps 10 meg (million) ohms. A completely unrealistic number for an interconnect, and a ridiculous number for a speaker cable to power cable.

For a microphone cable with low signal levels and high impedance, micro-phonics is an issue. Teflon being stiffer than say foamed PP/PE (or an air dielectric) is potentially much less susceptible to microphonics as you have less moving of the conductors, which causes pumping of the voltage as with any capacitor if you keep the charge constant. Of course in microphones you often have microphones with a high DC bias which forms a way higher charge on the cable than any "standing charge" ... many orders of magnitude.

You never really get all the way there, you sort of keep halving the distance to zero. Some charge is always retained. It is generally in the MV range in a well settled cable.

To be fair, it is a valid concern for MM cables.

You can listen to Miller and believe his guesses at how things work, or you can verify what I have written is what has been learned by people who actually have spent years, decades researching these things whether in psycho-acoustics or other fields of human perception. Unfortunately, some people refuse to learn from or accept the knowledge that academic oriented researchers generate (except when it helps their point of view).

YES soundstage is a macro effect. Soundstage comes predominantly from timing, but also from relative loudness. Timing is picked up from the leading edge of the loudest sounds. Even relative loudness is based on current loudest sounds. This is going to all be in the top 20-40db of your dynamic range, not buried 70,80+db down (or more) in some effect that may or may not exist with cable settling.

I am sorry this is a first for you Miller. I have not seen much evidence you keep up on the latest in psycho-acoustics, so that could be the reason for that. Others are not are uninformed.

Wow. So when you haven’t heard it in a while you forget what you learned so when you hear it again you have to learn it all over again but this time it happens instantly because, magic. Fascinating.

I knew my statement would give certain people "difficulty". Today you are accustomed to one form of "crap" for lack of better term. If you look at most people’s room response, "crap" is probably an appropriate term. Change something and you have a new form of "crap" which is significantly different from the old "crap", and it is made worse by the expectation often of "better". Human psychology does that to us. Our disappointment is influenced by our expectation. Don’t listen for a while and the brain goes back to a baseline that is somewhere in the middle of "crap-1" and "crap-2" so does not sound as bad. We have also had time to get over our initial disappointment. Now that we start to actively listen to this "new" system, our brain has the ability to start adapting and we start liking it more.

Douglas_Schroeder is 100% correct, and likely
"You may disagree, but I am not going to argue about it. :) "
because he is tired of people who have relatively little experience setting up a diversity of systems and refuse to learn or accept how we as humans behave. I can certainly understand his frustrations.

Nobody is saying we "believe" what we are saying is WE HEAR! "WE" hear.
No, what you are saying is your brain takes in all this auditory sensory data, adds in visual data (and other senses), compares it to highly faulty memories, then attempts to arrive at a perceptive result that is influenced by your biased interpretations of knowledge you have been exposed to which includes biases however developed, emotional attachment to a desired result, influence by people you choose to believe, peer influence, etc. and then add on top of that the modifiers of mood that day, stress level, etc. etc. .... and the end result is a claim "I hear this". What exactly did you hear? It is like proudly proclaiming to have taken the navy sock out of the sock drawer, only to find out they are actually black when in different lighting, and not only claiming they are navy blue, but the exact match to the other navy blue sock you took out 10 minute ago ... which they turn out not to be when you see them side by side.
paulcreed,

In my experience, people who feel that way about their systems usually have fundamental issues, and usually means bad room acoustics. Every time you move your speakers, you are changing the room frequency response as it relates to your listening position, quite possibly by a large amount, especially if you have limited or no room treatment.

Your brain becomes "accustomed" to your system, essentially trying to, at some level, correct the frequency response to what feels right. Technical term is neural adaptation. It is real, and you ignore it at your peril.  You will frequently hear real acoustics experts discuss this.  It is a learning process so it does not happen instantly.   (There are other processes that occur more "real time" as well). You can both "learn" and forget ... hence when you come back to your "new" system after not listening for a week, things are magically better .... bass response is back, soundstage seems more "normal", dynamics are right.  It is probably still not "perfect", but listen more and things fall into place (to a point).


Moving cables, if it makes any difference at all, is going to make difference at only the finest details, and things like dynamics, perceived bass response, soundstage, are not fine details, they are macro properties. If you continue believing that simply moving cables (with the exception of significant electrical interference) is going to significantly impact your system to the level you describe, then you are going to have a hard time ever being really happy.

Since you keep moving your speakers, let's get back to that fundamental problem. Your brain attempts to adapt, but can only do so much. Do you have a properly treated listening environment? If not, then that is something you need to address.  There are great tools out there and cheap microphones, and a ton of information on how to setup a room. Once you get the hang of it, it is a heck of a lot more interesting and fun than swapping cables, and for the most part you won't be "guessing" ... was that better ... the results are often dramatic.



Getting a small room right can be very difficult, and depending on the speakers, can be near impossible, and to top things off, you have a square room. This is not a cable issue, it is an acoustics issue. Panel placement and usage will need to be careful, you may need base traps, and your sweet spot is going to be smaller. That bass suck-out you experienced sounds like a listening position/speaker issue.


You will have to navigate your acoustics path a bit on your own. There are those out there who promote "live" rooms, equating music playback to music generation (it is not), but they are also right that the other camp can go overboard on dampening, though it is a much safer path. "Live" rooms tend to be inconsistent and create a sound of their own. Problem with that is it may sound great with some recordings, and awful with others. It won't be what is on the recording. A more balanced implementation with controlled reflections allows you to get all the timing information required for accurate placement (soundstage) as intended on the recording, while recreating the illusion of being in a space where the music is being played.
You don’t lose bass when moving cables. It just does not happen. If you truly lost bass, you have some corrosion issues or as Erik_Squires pointed out, a piece of equipment that has warm-up issues, though that seems unlikely unless you are using tube-equipment and something is out of whack / tubes are getting old.

After moving interconnects around that’s when bass and air was lost.

Thinking about this another way, you may not be loosing bass, you may have a high frequency emphasis that is going away which also happens with equipment warm-up.  An initial high frequency emphasis will make the bass seem weak.  Again, taking cables on/off, unless you have serious corrosion issues will make almost no difference in frequency response (think small fractions of a db).
And some of us, like douglas_schoeder and myself, have been involved in the setup, design, and testing, of 100's of audio systems, or maybe analyzed high hundreds of variants of audio products during the R&D phase (or both), and back it up with a solid technical background, keep up to date on related topics including psychoacoustics and developments in understanding human hearing and processing, and engage a broad technical community. Maybe we have been doing that for decades.

We can also conduct our own empirical listening tests while drawing our own conclusion's without the lecturing, insult, and misinformation that so commonly springs forth from those who's knowledge is mostly confined to developing intuitive conclusions based on the research of others without any first hand experimentation!

Maybe, just maybe, anything interpreted as an insult is a response to an insult directed their way. Maybe they know the difference between a properly implemented experiment and one that carries limited value.

Maybe they consider the use of your term "misinformation" without backing it up as inflammatory and abusive, and certainly without merit. Saying "misinformation" without identifying where would be interpreted by many as dishonest and misleading.


Communicating knowledge that is the result of people experienced in the field obtained through proper research is not lecturing.
The evidence does not support your position. Trained listeners of no particular experience or skill, other than no hearing defects, are better able to detect differences than untrained listeners and though they want to think they are, most audiophiles are not trained listeners. One of the more successful training methods is rapid A/B switching to illustrate differences, something many audiophiles refuse to participate in.

In my experience, the people certain audiophiles make fun of, the ones you claim "can't hear", the "propeller heads", who have far more actual diverse experience with a variety of systems, not only can "hear", but understand far better what they are hearing and are much more likely to point out an issue if one exists. But feel free to keep believing what you want to believe. I know I am willing to test my claims day in and day out, but can others say the same?


Something I did learn, in the over four decades spent professionally, in devotion to helping others better enjoy their music(live or at home): While you can teach others how to listen more closely, no one/nothing can improve another’s aural acuity.  

Paulcreed,  when you read what I wrote below, I want you (and everyone else) to understand that I am not implying you are lying or dishonest. I am going over all that you have wrote and trying to understand what is happening, and why. I am not going to tell you you were imagining things that the system seemed to "collapse" after swapping cables. I am going to work from the position that that is absolutely what happened. I am just not going to accept that it is anything to do with the cables (unless they or the connections are faulty).

My personal opinion, based on a lot of experience and knowledge is that something is "broken", and/or there is a design flaw in some of your equipment. 

1) It could be a poor connection that is impacted by movement. ICs can have seriously poor connections before it is obvious they are broken. Poor soldering and soldering debris can make a parasitic connection between pins/conductors that can impact performance in ICs as well, and would be affected by movement. You also noted an external cross-over. This would be my first guess.

2) My second guess is a bias issue induced by turn on / turn off of the equipment, but potentially by simply connecting and disconnecting interconnects while the units are on. This could be from an equipment fault or a design fault. By bias, I mean an operating point of your amplifier, but also DC bias across a capacitor (which is still an operating point). This can especially be an issue with DC floating grounds. Turning off/on the amplifier, even disconnecting and reconnecting cables, can induce a DC bias across capacitors. One would expect with input impedances that are low, at least w.r.t. to capacitor sizes (i.e. 1uF into 100K ohms) that the bias will quickly disappear, but I am working from the broke/design flaw angle. Fully differential and pseudo differential circuits will work just fine with a reasonable amount of DC bias, but that can change their sonic character.


When you first set your system up, you seemed to be quite happy with it, even more when you got your acoustics, then you seemed to start hating your system. That sounds like something is broke to me. Given you just moved, it is a reasonable conclusion as well. It sound from your other post you have some extra equipment. I would swap out equipment related to the cables you are swapping out including the cables and see what happens.


**************************************

This is what you said about listening to your system before and after letting the cables settled in a few days:
There is no bass and boring, highs are okay but life is gone from system. So I flipped everything back the way it was still sound horrible. Ran everything 24/7 for a couple days still no go. Let it run a couple more days dynamics are back and bass is full big and has tone again and enjoyable to listen to.


This is what you posted w.r.t. this system (which is your small room system), perhaps a day, or maybe hours after you installed it.
After all I have read over the years how bad a square room and chair up against wall is I was very surprised how good it sounded. Speakers totally disappeared, that was big concern. I wanted to try the most bass dominate recordings I could think of so I put on Herbie Hancock Head hunter and Allison Krauss/Robert Plant Rasing Sand first. The bass is fairly tight but there can definitely some boominess with the bass but it's not bad at all. I did not find it to be overly bright which was a little shocking, I think the copper foil Jupiter and Miflex in Preamp and speakers may have helped. I was very happy with highs very airy and detailed with out being fatiguing in the slightest.  I do have rear firing tweeters, I did notice it was very sensitive when turning the dial vs the previous room.

So with a new system with cables that would have had little time to settle:
  • "surprised how good it sounded"
  • bass is fairly tight
  • did not find it to be overly bright
  • very happy with the highs ... very airy and detailed without being fatiguing in the least


Contrast that later with:
This is now making sense why every time I try to change things up to improve sound I get discouraged and can't enjoy listening to this system. I told my son yesterday I'm thinking of selling off this system or throughing it in closet that I just can get it to work right and don't even want to look at it anymore. I get mad at it and leave it alone ( I still leave it on 24/7) for 4 or 5 days come back and it sounds great.


What seems to escape some people is the holes in their own knowledge and ability. You obviously do care, or you wouldn't have felt the need to post this, which it turns out is completely wrong. It turns out we are all born with perfect pitch, however, some of us keep it, and some do not. There may even be some good reasons not to keep it.

Apparently: the definition of, "aural acuity" even escapes some geniuses.     As with EVERY sense; abilities/sensitivity levels vary, widely.     ie: Some are born with perfect pitch and others, tone deaf.     The first can’t be taught, or- the second, corrected.      Some will wrestle with the concept.    I couldn't care less!


https://news.wisc.edu/born-with-the-perfect-pitch/
My "intuition" does not suggest otherwise. A huge base of knowledge, experience, and actual scientific/engineering facts w.r.t. cables and the effects of what can/cannot happen with a cable when you connect it, disconnect it, and move it around rules out stated effects. I appear to be the only person actually "thinking" and trying to help the OP out with what is highly likely an issue as opposed to "ya, that must be it".

Perhaps if you were not so pedantic, misinformed and misdirected, you would stop your trolling, obsessive, and compulsive behaviour and stop misstating, misrepresenting, and misquoting me, in a failing attempt to discredit, embarrass, and denigrate, while only repeatedly kidnapping threads.


clearthink1,067 posts01-06-2020 2:11pmAudiozenology I heartily suggest you Google "scientific method" and read some authoritative information on its standards, theories, and practice because you can not with a broaad sweep of you’re hand rule out a factor as being an influence simply because you’re intuition suggests otherwise.


Hey moderator, can you give me some license here. Someone decided to attempt to insult me with a Nassim Taleb quote, so I would like to expand on his (Taleb's) quote. Let's look at who he considered "Intellectual yet Idiot". There were maybe 15 points, but I thought these were the most salient.

  • doesn't know that there is no difference between "pseudointellectual" and "intellectual"  (cough cough)
  • has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years (cough cough)
  • has attended more than 1 TEDx talks and watched more than 2 TED talks
  • never curses on twitter  (how about we interpret that as always trying to police other's language on audiogon? .. cough cough)
  • has The Black Swan on his shelves but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence
  • has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen   (or maybe name drops higher ups at Shunyata repeatedly ... cough cough)

What is with the personal attacks on members here. If you can't deal stick to the content of the people's posts, then don't post. This is nothing but a deflection.

I have yet to have someone show me to be "frequently wrong". IMHO, which is what virtually all the claims on here are, is not proof of being right, or wrong. At least I stick to claim that I can support with evidence based in research, science, and engineering.

Not agreeing with statement's that actually are wrong is not argumentative, nor is it arrogant, nor dismissive. Pedantic would me I get caught up in small details, which is not true either. If detail is important to an point someone is making, and it is critical to the point, it is not pedantic to bring it up.


The question is, why are a certain groups of people so threatened by me? I clearly state my points. I stick to the topic (unless attacked). I don't hurl personal insults to make my point (but will give it back if it is thrown at me). I will even go out of my way and spend real time to help, calculating spring constants and setups for one OP, digging through old emails to find a link to a repair house for another op on an obscure (today) repair. Even in this thread, where many people have thrown personal insults at me repeatedly, I have stuck through it, tried to understand the ops situation, and believe based on significant experience (and knowledge) that there is actually something wrong with his system. What have all the people contributing to this thread done? ... just repeated their biases, when there could be a real problem. How does that help the op?

With regards to who you may think I am, or may not, what I do share with them is a pragmatic approach that recognizes human limitations and bias, and much of the same people attacking and trolling us. I am not at all surprised they stopped posting. It was probably out of frustration. Does that make you proud?   (p.s. I appear to make far fewer spelling and grammar errors, but you conclude what you want to conclude). What is funny is that someone actually accused me of being several people posting under one account as they could not fathom someone having such a wide/deep knowledge base.


I would worry less about other people and look at yourself and ask yourself why do I, and apparently others, make you feel so threatened? This is not about me, this is about you. I refuse to be crammed in the round hole, and some people here can't seem to deal with that.

steakster895 posts01-06-2020 5:56pmmember: atdavid
Joined: 10/30/2019 Last post 12/10/19
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member: audiozenology
Joined 12/14/2019 Latest posted 1/6/20
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Similar writing style:
- argumentative
- arrogant
- pedantic
- dismissive
- frequently wrong

What a coincidence!

Posting some of Nassim Taleb’s definitions again. You know that guy who wrote a book considered one of the most influential in the 20th century, and has held many distinguished posts, not some guy who has no science training, never worked in the sciences, and has no scientific accomplishments, but seems upset that actual scientists don’t take him seriously so wrote a blog only geoff quotes. Now let’s look at who Taleb considered "Intellectual yet Idiot". There were maybe 15 points, but I thought these were the most salient.

  • doesn’t know that there is no difference between "pseudointellectual" and "intellectual" (cough cough -- remind anyone of someone we know??)
  • has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past 5 years (cough cough -- remind anyone of someone we know??)

Confucious say, "Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."
I am sure you will attempt to come back with some "witty" retort, but I did not write those words, Taleb did ... oh, and so did you. Guilty by your own actions. You also quoted someone who is literally a joke within any "normal" community, i.e. one that is not laden with tin-hat conspiracy theorists. I didn't quote him, you did. Guilt by association. If that is the type of person you want to be associated, have at it. It's far more a compliment to me than an insult.
HEY MODERATOR, before deleting, note this is a reply to a post by Clearthink, unrelated to the topic, meant only to be a personal attack on me, one based on his lack of understanding of a previous post in a different thread. He has repeated this attack numerous times and on several threads.

Gee thanks for creating this link Clearthink and saving me the time. I mean I could have gone to the trouble of showing that you did not even attempt to read the whole thread or to understand what I was discussing in my thread before repeatedly attacking me with the same misrepresentation, but it was nice you did the work for me. Now everyone can follow the link and SEE WHAT I WROTE WAS A COMMENT ON ANOTHER POSTER’S POST, and that all these similar messages attacking me and hijacking threads by you, in an attempt to attack me, are like the other posts, misguided.



clearthink1,068 posts01-06-2020 12:45pmbecause you seem unable to accept corrections to you’re incomplete, inaccurate, and ignorant grasps of even elemental theories. And yet that does not stop you from proclaiming with self-appointed authority:

I am not "average", I am Superhuman!! My words have far more value than anyone else’s!

I made that a link to the actual page to remind other’s hear of you’re expertness! You have allso claimed a "moral authority" to post hear and I’m not even sure what that is about!