The adherents of the Naysayer Church will never accept that there exists a multitude of variables, when an accurate simulacrum of performers and their performance in a particular venue, is the desire/goal. If their result differs from that of others, the aspects that they can't discern CERTAINLY MUST BE the product of the others' imagination. Of this they are certain: it CAN'T be THEIR system, room, or ears! Perish the thought! |
@roadcykler “…things people believe… You can’t prove things with facts or objectivity so you have to have faith.“
I believe Audiophilia is more like a science, careful and systematic observation reveals important nuanced real world changes in sound quality produced by different components, and venues. Very little is taken on faith. It is not that science cannot explain these things, it is that there are so many variable… hundreds operating at once that science is not a useful way to a simply explain performance.
Consider five components, each made up with hundreds of parts with different materials, connected by wires with dozens if different variables, gauge, material, dielectric. This is not a situation that lends itself to say some five variables will explain the output, sound… and even if it did, the sound you get out highly depends on the speaker and room acoustics. I was a practicing scientist for over ten years… anything more than a few variables and simple prediction models become difficult… hundreds, useless. Look at the horsepower thrown at weather prediction. We don’t have supercomputers and dozens of measurement devices at labs developing electronics and in our homes to work out what effect a new preamp might have.
If that is not complicated enough, then you have folks with different listening skills and values in what they want to hear.
Then there is music… it is not a single test tone… but dozens of different tones… all varying in loudness and frequency over time and with harmonics effecting the sound in higher and lower frequencies.
Instead of all that, electronic designers listen to different designs and components to tune their products to perform a certain way. Audiophiles develop listening skills, developed and use a common terminology to describe sound quality in musical reproduction (see Robert Harley’s book, The Complete Guide to High End Audio), and we have professional reviewers review the sound of components and audiophiles on forums try to communicate general attributes of different components and how they might operate in each others systems. In addition experienced folks try to coach those new to high end audio the ways of the Force… I mean audio. |
My favorite speaker cables are 10 AWG, cloth covered, 32 strand tinned copper with a pvc liner salvaged from a 1980's telephone transfer station and had relatively high voltage going through them on a daily basis for years, ie they were very thoroughly "burned in." I don't think there is anything more important than a very thorough burning in. |
I have found all types of audio cables to be very necessary to be optimized for the best sound quality of the system. Once the sound quality of the system is brought up to at least a good level (and the audiophile ear becomes a little trained in identifying these effects), then sonic differences due to the cable design and construction become obvious and very important. This is regardless of whether blind tests were done to verify the cable evaluations. Blind tests are not reliable in finding the subtle effects of conductor purity and crystal size, dielectric, conductor construction (solid core, Litz,, ribbon), cable topology, etc. The trained human ear-brain system is vastly more sensitive than conventional electronic instrumentation. The meter-reader mindset ignores this fact. Concerning the question as to whether digital cable quality is unimportant beyond a $300 or so retail price: The answer is that digital cable quality is very important, despite there being error detection and correction designs with many digital cables. The explanation for this in my experience is that the sonic differences with digital cables are even more important than with analog cables, and (unfortunately) the benefits of very expensive designs are immediately apparent. I think the reason for this sensitivity of digital cable sound characteristics to the quality of the design, is that much or most of the sonic distortion in digital cables is due to pulse timing issues, which are generally ignored in conventional mass-market digital audio cable design. This is where the error logic of the cable interfaces is looking for the presence or absence of pulses within allowable time windows. Accordingly, fine errors in pulse timing within the overall error margins are not corrected for. Exact timing of the data bit pulses is very important to cable sonics, but low cost digital cables don’t try to optimize this parameter.
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