Just think what it would be like if instead of electrical cables we used pneumatic tubes like in some older passenger airliners. I think the Boeing 707 and the earlier DC-6 had headphones that plugged into air ducted through what seemed to be a rubber aquarium tubing. There was very gentle positive pressure and sound. You never felt like it was blowing in your ear, those planes were noisy and distinctly different environments. As I recall you could switch between 1 or 2 programs of music.
We’d have discussions here of tubing materials and diameter, deci-newtons of pressure, foam or surround tips.
I really don’t understand how or why you can insist that I’m not practicing what I preach when the very first line in my response is:
“Fair enough, I’ll concede that my initial blanket statement was wrong. That vid was really informative, thanks.”
I.e. “not even taking a cursory introspecting to see if you are even on the same topic”
The very first thing I did in response was adjust my view on the topic.
And I don’t even see how continuing the conversation is condescending when the topic being continued is being discussed generally. Are we supposed to cease discussion of a general topic because one of the people who once spoke about it doesn’t wish to anymore? Bizarre.
IMHO there is no discernible difference in mega-high dollar cabling vs stock in most circumstances. And I have spent a few thousand on cables. The big difference is in ergonomics and aesthetics. Like everything else, if ya got the bucks to throw at it, well step right up! I think the best application for the audio dollar is going to be in dac, amp, and headphone.
I find it’s always the questions with money that gets people.
“Do expensive cables make a difference?” sort of questions are so potent to the majority. Most people just aren’t financially capable of justifying something that costs a fortune and a limb for something that may affect the sound by a slim slim margin, let alone a perceivable one that may or may not be favorable to the individual.
If you can’t justify it, great. Have fun within your budget.
People have different values and goals. Like how a college kid wouldn’t shell out all his summer-time pay on a 50year old Macallan just to get piss drunk on a Friday night frat party.
Bashing potential snakeoil products are just so unnecessary. They’ll eventually perish if they don’t get enough attention anyways.
Do wireless antenna types and or design make a difference? Should the same type be on sending and receiving units? Since many may be oriented differently, are they directional? What are the parameters? I’ve read antenna guides in the old days for long distance antennas but have not seen anything for the small Bluetooth or Wi-Fi paddles. It’s certain that reception can affect sound at the margin by reducing transmission speeds but what about good connections? Can musical time or phase be affected?
This question started out as subversive, but is actually part real. I use BT5 and DECT (for sub) in my office system, both over short distances.
If I have time, I would like to compile the various subjective thoughts from cable manufacturers and different cable reviewers and see how exactly they all line up, if at all. Then I remind myself I have better things to do with that time.
Assuming it’s using TCP, which UPNP and Squeeze at least do, (I had assumed Roon was aswell until recently, when I had problems with it randomly dropping connections mid playback over WiFi), there isn’t a way an ethernet connection good or otherwise can affect the bits a streamer sends to the DAC, it’s for all intents and purposes just a file copy, with no timing and no clock information.
As long as the data gets there fast enough and isn’t interrupted, you’re playing it from memory.
However now we get into the actual impact including WiFi, or the Ethernet connection on the box. WiFi obviously puts a radio transmitter in the box, but just running ethernet into the box introduces an external connection that could include additional noise. There is also some processing involved in copying packets of data around, that could vary CPU load based on how it happened to be packetized, or retransmitted.
There is at least one streamer manufacturer who claims WiFi is cleaner than Ethernet.
They were not a night and day difference when I tried both, on one specific streamer, I preferred Ethernet, but one of my two systems uses WiFi, just because it’s what’s practical in the location.
Excellent whacko video. I knew you’d come through with something tangential to my thought process.
I still haven’t started stirring up questions and answers like the cable wars. Maybe I need to treat my Bluetooth 5 signal cryogenically. Or figure out a way to project holographic directional arrows.
I am far less concerned about Wi-Fi for the reasons your state than I am about Bluetooth which will drop back to lower data rates, DECT is probably more than adequate for a sub. I stream via Bluetooth from an iPad Pro on one side of my office to an IFI DAC in my small audio cabinet on the other side of my office.
That seems like n easy test to me, listen with it in the usual location, stick the iPad right next to the DAC, and see if you notice an a-predicable difference.
If you don’t forget about it.
Modern Bluetooth seems to be remarkably robust I stream from my iPad to Sony noise cancelling headphones, and I don’t get dropouts even walking the 30ft into my kitchen.
And there are people who have the time, money, passion, and an open mind to try stuff before making any personal judgments to see if that product in question works in favor in their specific setup, no matter how ridiculous the marketing claims are
I’m not going to delve into the debate about antennas and sound quality, because the antennas contribution is about how much signal can be recovered - after which it is about the nature of the RF electronics in the RX, the CODECs involved and the corrected data rate you can sustain on that much signal.
I will say, as someone that does a lots in the RF/radio world, and also as an FCC AE ticket holder, that antenna design, placement/orientation, topology, and setup are enormous factors in real-world RF/radio performance.
I’ve routinely DX’d into Eastern Europe on <1W of TX power via FT8.
Bluetooth connections over a mile? Sure. Just by using different antennae. No power changes, no other electronics, standard protocols.
WiFi over 6 miles? Again, sure, just by using a different antenna setup (and different placement, have to get the antennas up in the air at that distance).
WiFi “Cantennas” (sometimes called “WiFi Guns”) are a real thing - and they do work.
@Torq every word you said is true. I’m an old Scanner / Ham guy. Built many antennas and delved deep into the ( almost black magic ) design thereof.
Had a VAR friend that I helped get WiFi from his ISP in the downtown to his home some 5 + miles to the north of the city. Directional & Mounted High antennas did the trick.
This wanders into the Digital Transmission arguments where, once again, cables come into play. As far as I know, the cable ( or WiFi, other medium ) is not likely to have any impact on the Digital portion of the ( Audio ) signal other than if it fails altogether. The supporting equipment for that Digital signal CAN have an impact, as was mentioned above.
To me it seems that we could describe the Signal / Cable interaction like this:
Signal > Cable > Measurable Differences > Audible Differences
Where each " > " marks a rather large degree of magnitude.
It isn’t that there can’t be Audible Differences ( I’ve heard them ), but they can be really hard or outright impossible to detect.
This is just a lie. It’s simply not true as I’ve explained this in a prior comment.
I even acknowledged that shielding and construction (of which cable geometry is one such factor) matters in my very first comment on the topic in the HE-1 thread. So all else being equal other factors matter.
“Disproving” something unfalsifiable (someone’s report of their own perception) is almost impossible by definition. But we can still gather empirical data that shows the magnitude of differences between cables via FR and treat those differences with the appropriate focus, especially when talking about humans generally, since we have quite a bit of research on human perception of loudness at different frequencies. So yes, we need to focus on audibility rather than objective differences, unless even objective differences do not exist. Which is actually the case in many situations, where people claim to hear a difference in minimum-phase devices that doesn’t show up in the FR recorded by the best measurement rigs available, which in many cases can show differences far more precisely than normal human hearing.
As for individuals, blind testing (which still wouldn’t “disprove” a reported difference) can expose that someone’s report of what they’re hearing isn’t reliable when we’re talking about differences well beyond the precision of normal or even somewhat abnormal hearing. Especially when you see interesting results like people reporting differences on the same test case, with nothing even being changed.
I’m no fan of messing around with audio cables, nor of getting angry about hobby audio. I think one problem may be that you are cutting the definition of “objective” very tight and excluding aspects of human research methods.
Indeed. Humans created the electrical measurement devices that are routinely considered “objective.” They also created human behavior observer-and-data perception measurement methods that are methodologically objective too.
If humans routinely misperceive volume differences across at certain frequencies or misperceive harmonics as elevated electrical output (aka “more volume”), then this is a routine and objective cognitive bias. There are numerous predictable, documented, objective cognitive biases based on 125 years of psychological research.
This is fully known and addressed in human perception research. Individual differences sparked the development of perception research because ship navigators used to have consistent differences when recording the times that light was seen coming from lighthouses, and this caused uncertainty/discrepancies in ship logs. People can be wrong, and people can be unique – but reliably and measurably predictable.
The methods required to assess perception are multi-stage, multi-layered, multi-perspective, and multi-individual to work around all sorts of methodological issues. Even bloody pigeons and rats pick up on any minor change to a process or environment, and this messes up research findings.
Self-reports (conscious) are often irrelevant or impossible to use with perception and human factors research. Measuring reaction time (response to light or a signal) was an early method and remains common. Another common work-around method is to require a “forced choice” between options – people often deny awareness but reliably get the right answer at least some of the time. Human processing can be fuzzy and gray. Another indirect method is to measure electrical scalp activity (EEG) or use functional magnetic resonance imaging devices (fMRI).
In the end these methods are typically too costly and time consuming for hobby audio and gain nothing on the whole because people vary. So, people may buy a pricey or “tech driven” cable per the placebo effect, buy a cable that looks cool, buy a cable that’s affordable, or buy a cable they think is an “objective giant killer per electrical measurements.” But, they typically have incomplete data or lack awareness of the many unconsidered or untested ways they might be wrong.
If people are so fixated on science, I’ve always wondered why psychology and neuroscience hasn’t been a part of the equation.
Like, don’t you all recognize that there’s a huge mediating factor between the signal being fed and the perception of it called the brain? And it being extremely susceptible to biases and illusions by nature?
And can we stop over-glorifying “science” more than it actually is? There’s more that needs to be studied in this world, and the measurements we have at the current moment are not fully capable of describing what we’re hearing just yet For example, how do we measure soundstage? Can we actually find out the distance from the microphone an instrument is being played at just by looking at frequency response graphs?
Ask more meaningful questions.
Our objective is to find the best gear that works for us isn’t it?
It’s not that people are fixated on science it’s that they are fixated on a very narrow set of measurements, and call it science.
The scientific method has more steps than just measure
Observe phenomena
Design experiment
Perform experiment and Measure results
Refine and repeat
This is no the general approach around most audio forum discussions.
I always refer back to being told in the 80’s that all CD players should sound the same, and people noticing that those with more robust transports tended to sound better, even if they were technically inferior 14 bit vs 16 bit.
It turned out later to be because the better transports resulted in less errors and even though the errors were mostly corrected, the correction process introduced additional audible Jitter.
But at the time no one was measuring Jitter.
I’m not going to get into the cable debate, it’s not a debate where opinions are changed by discussion, every single person I know who thinks cables make a difference do so because they’ve “heard” it. And anecdotal evidence isn’t going to sway anyone in the objectivist camp.
FWIW the argument I always use is that there are some DIY speaker cables designs that are so extreme 96+ way braids that the capacitance they introduce is large enough to cause them to not work at all with some power amps. It isn’t a stretch then to assume that capacitance and other cable properties make a difference. And that’s before you get into the more esoteric properties of cables like skin effect, which is at best not well understood.
Digital cables are often the ones people struggle with most, but there used to be an easy test with Firewire cables when they were a thing on DAC’s where some cables would sound different depending which way around they were, which had everything to do with the fact that their shields were grounded at only one end.
It’s not that people are fixated on science it’s that they are fixated on a very narrow set of measurements, and call it science.
The scientific method has more steps than just measure
Meant to write that. I have mentioned it countless times but it never got across to them folks so I thought I’d match the language.
Thanks though.
