John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

Remember, there are 3 fundamental structures to be successful in business; production, marketing, and sales. They are interrelated but have different goals. The cable industry is marketing driven. Marketing people will alot of times just pick a number, they never spend money upfront, they depend on sales to drive money. By marketing, I mean packaging, ads, websites, reviews, any print, etc...Just read the ads and website claims, makes your mouth water. Look at some of the slick packaging. Marketing will make commitments that sales can't possibly deliver in many cases, but 20 million percent markup will cover no matter if sales makes projection or not. BTW, I hear differences in interconnects but no so much in speaker wire, IMO diminishing returns come quicker in speaker wire. Just my 2 cents.

Detlof, I have no qualms about anyone listening to anything and enjoying it. If someone gets pleasure from a Radio Shack or Wal-Mart rack system, that's more than fine with me. If someone thinks that a 12K cable is just the thing, so be it. My point being that things don't look the same, and are not the same, whether you are looking ahead, so to speak, and designing/building any element of a sound system or simply getting the end product and, ex-post facto, auditioning, analysing it. I think that it is dishonest to put out a product, make outlandish claims that cannot be substantiated and ask a price that is absolutely out of step with the cost of bringing the thing to market. When the upshot is that part of the ploy is to say that what you are selling is beyond any scientifically verifiable procedure, that nothing can prove or disprove your claims as a manufacturer, what you have is a situation where people will be had. Now whether they enjoy being had or not is another issue. I fully agree that live music is the yardstick against which to measure the performance of a sound system. I also agree that human hearing is the final arbiter of what constitutes a good system. What I cannot agree with is that our individual hearing is so different from one person to the next that anything goes. That we are not subject to so many vagaries in our ear/brain processor that any number of variables can be thrown in, helter-skelter, and that, somehow, the result will be of some value to more than the one individual listener. If someone wants to provide something significant to listeners in general (and I am not suggesting the population at large, but audiophiles in general) and make some contribution to advancing the state of the art, it has to be based on more than random possibilities and blind faith. Once the product is on the market, people are free to do what they want with it and to claim that it provides them with any manner of contentment. In closing, I have two thoughts: firstly, I believe that a guitar (and any other instrument, obviously) is just that, a musical instrument and, aside from the fact it needs to be tuned properly (and, hopefully, to stay that way for a while) has to be judged on its own merit, and that a sound system is not; the latter is a sound reproducing system and, therefore, there always is a standard to judge it by: the original sound, and, secondly, if cables are now seen as an acceptable means of fine tuning a system by, I guess, adding or subtracting something to make it more euphonic, why have audiophiles eschewed tone controls long ago as being low fi?

Is Dunlavy really an electrical genius? I can easily improve every one of his speakers with a very simple circuit modification to each of his speakers' drivers.

Now don't get me wrong, I do feel that John is better than most speaker designers, and he offers tremendous value in terms of what his speakers sell for, but to use his opinions as the benchmark to base this cable argument is a quite a stretch.

Pbb, I do not have the least difficulty with your argument. Besides I think it is very well written and thought out. My experience is, that people who have trained their ears to judge the performance of live or reproduced music,.i.e. in judging the performance of a given system, generally "hear" pretty much alike, although their emphasis on the parameters given for their judgements may differ. Of course, you could use tone controls instead of selected wires to fine tune a system. Only tone controls mostly degrade the sound over a broad spectrum, whereas a well chosen IC or speaker wire may in fact enhance it.
In reading your lines again, I am wondering what your basic hypothesis or assumption is, which you are building your arguments on. Would you assume, that a well designed music system, built and devised to the state of the art of accepted scientific knowledge, would, apart of the vagaries and uncertainties of room influences, be able to reproduce the original musical event in your home, provided the software is of the very best quality? And.... again, say in a truly SOTA system, how much is there "science" in its design and how much "intuition" and "art"? Or in other words, is there sufficient measurement savvy, to design a truly first class system through measurements alone?
Regards,

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.....