More 'Audiophile' bullsh*t

[Funk]

I want to replace some very old Cable Talk Monitor 2 interconnects which are perishing and could do with replacing; bearing in mind the various comments about snake oil in this very thread I've decided to set an upper limit of £100 which I figure should get me a reasonable quality cable without having the piss taken - can anyone recommend anything? 1m length would suffice.

[silentbrown]

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/381442039113

[TonyRPH]

Or even the Amazon basics cables

https://www.amazon.co.uk/AmazonBasics-2-Male-RCA-A...

Twice the price of those recommended in the above post,so they have to be better.

Am I doing this right?

Funk said:

I want to replace some very old Cable Talk Monitor 2 interconnects which are perishing and could do with replacing; bearing in mind the various comments about snake oil in this very thread I've decided to set an upper limit of £100 which I figure should get me a reasonable quality cable without having the piss taken - can anyone recommend anything? 1m length would suffice.

Refer to my noise spectrum in the last post on the previous page - the cables have to be absolutely horrendous quality to cause any issues.

Somewhere (possibly early in this thread) I posted a comparison of measurements of various cables (including Cable Talk) and there was nothing in it.

EDIT

If you really want to see cables utterly debunked, then watch this video from Ethen Winer it's a long video (30mins) but very educational.

He uses a NULL tester to prove there is not loss between different types of cable.

Edited by TonyRPH on Thursday 23 May 12:06

[mgv8]

Funk said:

I want to replace some very old Cable Talk Monitor 2 interconnects which are perishing and could do with replacing; bearing in mind the various comments about snake oil in this very thread I've decided to set an upper limit of £100 which I figure should get me a reasonable quality cable without having the piss taken - can anyone recommend anything? 1m length would suffice.

Do you know anyone with cables your a borrow, and so test your self? If you can hear the difference then spend the cash, if not then Amazon basic all the way.

My view is cables can make a difference but the price does not make it better. Also, it depends a lot on your setup.

[Crackie]

silentbrown said:

Crackie said:

If you still have a CD player, play a track pause it and then turn up amp volume as high as you dare. I'd be very surprised if you can't hear a lower noise floor at 3.00am relative now. i.e. 7.00 pm.

I'm not sure what you think this would prove, anyway. It's on a par with saying your car will be faster if you chuck out the sweet wrappers from the ashtray.

The differences may be trivial to you but I've heard subjective improvements every time I listen in the early hours. The decay of notes during quiet passages and ambient clues regarding the room acoustic are far easier to hear. Subtle inflections, intonation and breathing of singers is easier to make out and at the end of a track; the fadeout lasts longer and contains easily audible details that are masked during the day.

The differences are certainly significant enough for me to seriously consider spending several thousand pounds on a pair of regenerators.

[outnumbered]

Crackie said:

The differences may be trivial to you but I've heard subjective improvements every time I listen in the early hours. The decay of notes during quiet passages and ambient clues regarding the room acoustic are far easier to hear. Subtle inflections, intonation and breathing of singers is easier to make out and at the end of a track; the fadeout lasts longer and contains easily audible details that are masked during the day.

The differences are certainly significant enough for me to seriously consider spending several thousand pounds on a pair of regenerators.

I'm not clear why you think this is anything to do with mains quality, rather than the more likely explanations:

- It's the middle of the night, so there's much less ambient noise from your surroundings
- You've had a few by then
- You're concentrating more due to it being the middle of the night and none of your social media friends are sending you updates
- etc.

[Mr_Yogi]

Very interesting thread, now I agree that much is of the things in here BS, but a quick question to those in the know.

As I understand it Naim sell a range of increasingly more expensive PSU's, which I think can power DAC's, pre-amps etc. do they all sounds the same or have Naim purposely not built the standard one very well, then only addressed a few on the issues in the upgraded models and then only fixed the top models?

Just to say I have no Naim equipment, just interested in this topic

[TonyRPH]

Mr_Yogi said:

<snip>

As I understand it Naim sell a range of increasingly more expensive PSU's, which I think can power DAC's, pre-amps etc. do they all sounds the same or have Naim purposely not built the standard one very well, then only addressed a few on the issues in the upgraded models and then only fixed the top models?

Quite likely the standard one not being built properly and also a bit of psychoacoustics on the listeners' part.

Interestingly, I saw a review some time back of an amp (forget which but Onyx springs to mind) and the add on PSU ran into the £100's and I simply could not see how they could charge so much money for it. Naturally the reviewer raved about it.

[WinstonWolf]

outnumbered said:

Crackie said:

The differences may be trivial to you but I've heard subjective improvements every time I listen in the early hours. The decay of notes during quiet passages and ambient clues regarding the room acoustic are far easier to hear. Subtle inflections, intonation and breathing of singers is easier to make out and at the end of a track; the fadeout lasts longer and contains easily audible details that are masked during the day.

The differences are certainly significant enough for me to seriously consider spending several thousand pounds on a pair of regenerators.

I'm not clear why you think this is anything to do with mains quality, rather than the more likely explanations:

- It's the middle of the night, so there's much less ambient noise from your surroundings
- You've had a few by then
- You're concentrating more due to it being the middle of the night and none of your social media friends are sending you updates
- etc.

You're more relaxed (take it from a now fairly deaf bloke, hearing varies throughout the day!)

[Funk]

mgv8 said:

Funk said:

I want to replace some very old Cable Talk Monitor 2 interconnects which are perishing and could do with replacing; bearing in mind the various comments about snake oil in this very thread I've decided to set an upper limit of £100 which I figure should get me a reasonable quality cable without having the piss taken - can anyone recommend anything? 1m length would suffice.

Do you know anyone with cables your a borrow, and so test your self? If you can hear the difference then spend the cash, if not then Amazon basic all the way.

My view is cables can make a difference but the price does not make it better. Also, it depends a lot on your setup.

I don't unfortunately. My take on it is that there's probably an improvement in things like construction quality and shielding to a point, hence I would be happy spending £50-100 on an interconnect but I've no doubt that any 'improvements' or returns tail off pretty hard as the price goes up.

Slightly off-topic but if it helps the setup is PC with FLACs in MusicBee (using ASIO) running USB into an Audiolab M-DAC into an XTZ A100 D3 amp with Celestion A2 speakers.

Edited by Funk on Thursday 23 May 16:13

[Crackie]

outnumbered said:

Crackie said:

The differences may be trivial to you but I've heard subjective improvements every time I listen in the early hours. The decay of notes during quiet passages and ambient clues regarding the room acoustic are far easier to hear. Subtle inflections, intonation and breathing of singers is easier to make out and at the end of a track; the fadeout lasts longer and contains easily audible details that are masked during the day.

The differences are certainly significant enough for me to seriously consider spending several thousand pounds on a pair of regenerators.

I'm not clear why you think this is anything to do with mains quality, rather than the more likely explanations:

- It's the middle of the night, so there's much less ambient noise from your surroundings
- You've had a few by then
- You're concentrating more due to it being the middle of the night and none of your social media friends are sending you updates
- etc.

I don't claim to have golden ears, in fact my hearing isn't great any more however, the noise floor is very easy to distinguish from any ambient noise or the other potential issues you mentioned above.

I have a background of listening critically to audio equipment. For 10 years this was only the repair game but it did involve listening critically during fault diagnosis and subsequent testing. For the next 20 years I was involved in manufacturing and testing of active and passive finished speakers for B&W, Mission, Acoustic Energy, KEF, TDL and many others. I've designed a few passive commercial speakers and the managed the design team for some active speakers and amplifiers. I've been lucky to work at a company that had its own anechoic chamber housed in a dedicated building. It had £50k worth of Bruel and Kjaer test gear in there and a full MLSSA setup.

Calibrating and using reference test equipment gives you a good insight into various types of spurious noises and the sources responsible for it.

Edited by Crackie on Friday 24th May 13:28

[TonyRPH]

Funk said:

I don't unfortunately. My take on it is that there's probably an improvement in things like construction quality and shielding to a point, hence I would be happy spending £50-100 on an interconnect but I've no doubt that any 'improvements' or returns tail off pretty hard as the price goes up.

Slightly off-topic but if it helps the setup is PC with FLACs in MusicBee (using ASIO) running USB into an Audiolab M-DAC into an XTZ A100 D3 amp with Celestion A2 speakers.

Most of the improvement is not in the quality of the cable and shielding, but the quality of the plugs.

Even the Cambridge Audio cables from back in the 90's / early 2000's were quite decent cables, only let down by the plugs.

As I demonstrated at the bottom of the previous page - I have a (very!) cheap screened cable running adjacent to a mains cable, and yes it does pick up 'hum' however it's only -30dB above the noise floor @ -130dB so you probably wouldn't hear it anyway....

EDIT

Just to add - Interference pick up generally only becomes a problem when the output impedance of the source device is high.

Typical devices with high output impedance are valve amps and passive pre-amps (a typical passive pre-amp has a variable output impedance).

So you shouldn't have any issues.

Additionally, using a device with a high output impedance with certain types of cable (e.g. cables with high capacitance) will result in the high end of the frequency response being 'rolled off'.

IMHO - all the hype surrounding cables stems from valve amplifier days - as with modern transistor / IC devices, output impedance is (should!) be low enough as to be a non issue.

Earlier I posted a link to Ethan Winer's Null cable test, which conclusively proves that cables do not 'lose' or change information depending on the cable.

The NULL test works by isolating all differences between signals passing through the wires, and then allowing you to hear only the difference (which if there is no difference between cables, should be nothing at all).

Watch the video - it's very enlightening.

Edited by TonyRPH on Thursday 23 May 16:37

[Angrybiker]

The theory actually makes sense. Mains current is the raw signal which components use to drive the speaker cones. Make that cleaner and the cones will react more accurately to input signal (assuming the speakers are good enough to resolve the difference)

The practical application though and whether it makes a difference is purely a subject for your ears to determine. Those sci-fi marketing terms from OP make me laugh.

It's hard though to completely debunk all snake oil. There are numerous articles that cry snake oil at cables in general but this doesn't necessarily mean that their scientific analysis isn't missing something. Case in point - I wanted to upgrade my power amp last year and brought many units back home to listen to. Mrs. AB had never been an audiophile, to the extent that I was starting to conjure Machiavellian schemes in order to hold on my SF Cremonas which took pride of place in the lounge. Mockingly greeted initially by Mrs. AB as useless boys toys and completely un-necessary she soon changed her mind when she heard the difference in music. She rapidly became an integral part of the auditioning process and now speakers will remain pride of place (unless the new cat destroys them).

When my dealer handed me a couple of Tellurium black power cables I thought 'snake oil' but decided to give them a try. Cleaner input power -> better sound? really?? Mrs. AB definitely thought so, totally against the vast expense, seriously how much difference could they make? Well suffice to say now I have 2 of them in my system.

I'd already spent a fair bit on cables however dealer lent me a set of Tellurium Silver Diamonds (both interconnects and speaker cables), saying "I know what you think but you HAVE to listen to these" and I thought "OK, I'm now well at the point of diminishing returns, there's no way I'd be able to justify the additional outlay". Mrs. AB was even in the kitchen when I finished installing them and put on 'prelude to war' from the BSG soundtrack, having already pre-concluded that there was no way the system could realistically sound better.... Within 5 seconds there was a "WOW" from the kitchen and Mrs. AB ran in and plonked herself on the floor right in front of me. We swapped and swapped and did blind tests galore, we not only picked the diamonds every time but we did it almost instantly. Luckily the system still sounds great so we're not constantly disappointed with the current sound, however we both yearn a little for the day when we can stick in the diamonds.

Dealer came round with some room analysing kit to see how much the room was adding, was interesting to see frequency strength at various parts of the room. For fun we ran the tests twice, with current cables and the diamonds, and we saw notable difference in the graphs. Repeated results confirmed that:
a) it wasn't just a fluke or coincidence that cables had a tangible measurable effect (covering both frequency response and 'soundstage' implicitly (I guess) via the spatial distribution of the frequency response. And that's just a small part of what makes up the total audio experience.
b) therefore it wasn't just cognitive dissonance that both me and Mrs AB noticed a difference in the cables

We haven't done similar tests with 'active' power conditioning / grounding. Dealer has and says it steps up again, however further upgrades here would be both too much for my budget and also I wouldn't like the added complexity. I might at some point do one more change to power amp and also a pair of Amati Homage's if I find them cheap enough.

All I can say is - In the face of both heuristic and hard evidence that cables, at least, make a tangible and measurable difference, if your theory suggests otherwise then you're missing something in your theory.

Edited by Angrybiker on Thursday 23 May 16:56

[TonyRPH]

Angrybiker said:

The theory actually makes sense. Mains current is the raw signal which components use to drive the speaker cones. Make that cleaner and the cones will react more accurately to input signal (assuming the speakers are good enough to resolve the difference)

Again - a properly designed, well smoothed power supply should be largely immune to this.

Remember - the mains is stepped down by a transformer, then rectified to DC and then smoothed by (usually) huge (in value) smoothing capacitors.

Capacitors are storage devices - they store DC current for a finite time (depending on the value of the capacitor, the load etc. - all of which can be calculated).

Angrybiker said:

When my dealer handed me a couple of Tellurium black power cables I thought 'snake oil' but decided to give them a try. Cleaner input power -> better sound? really?? Mrs. AB definitely thought so, totally against the vast expense, seriously how much difference could they make? Well suffice to say now I have 2 of them in my system.

What amplification do you have?

Angrybiker said:

I'd already spent a fair bit on cables however dealer lent me a set of Tellurium Silver Diamonds (both interconnects and speaker cables), saying "I know what you think but you HAVE to listen to these" and I thought "OK, I'm now well at the point of diminishing returns, there's no way I'd be able to justify the additional outlay". Mrs. AB was even in the kitchen when I finished installing them and put on 'prelude to war' from the BSG soundtrack, having already pre-concluded that there was no way the system could realistically sound better.... Within 5 seconds there was a "WOW" from the kitchen and Mrs. AB ran in and plonked herself on the floor right in front of me. We swapped and swapped and did blind tests galore, we not only picked the diamonds every time but we did it almost instantly. Luckily the system still sounds great so we're not constantly disappointed with the current sound, however we both yearn a little for the day when we can stick in the diamonds.

This could be expectation bias. although not sure if your Mrs knew you were adding new cables...

Angrybiker said:

Dealer came round with some room analysing kit to see how much the room was adding, was interesting to see frequency strength at various parts of the room. For fun we ran the tests twice, with current cables and the diamonds, and we saw notable difference in the graphs. Repeated results confirmed that:
a) it wasn't just a fluke or coincidence that cables had a tangible measurable effect (covering both frequency response and 'soundstage' implicitly via the spatial distribution of the frequency response.
b) therefore it wasn't just cognitive dissonance that both me and Mrs AB noticed a difference in the cables

All I can say is - In the face of both heuristic and hard evidence that cables make a tangible and measurable difference, if your theory suggests otherwise then you're missing something in your theory.

All very well measuring the room with a spectrum analyser, however so many people forget that if they are present in the room during the measurements, that they should not move even a fraction of a mm as this will change the spectrum.

A recent example of this is a chap (in a FB group I'm in) who claimed massive differences between cables and posted a spectrum analysis of his room.

When asked if anything had moved in the room - or if he was present in the room and moved in between tests, he went very quiet....

[Angrybiker]

Again - a properly designed, well smoothed power supply should be largely immune to this. -

....yes and I have those too but not for Dac/pre or power. But 'largely' might be an operative term here too. Every little helps. Even the guy who designed my DAC/Pre said good power cables would make a difference, even though he'd done his best to make the unit immune.


What amplification do you have? -

... BMC UltraDAC (DAC/Pre); Son of Ampzilla II power (....yes I know)


This could be expectation bias. although not sure if your Mrs knew you were adding new cables... -

....I don't think so, we did repeated blind tests to compare current vs new; and the Mrs. was initially not keen on any upgrades, so she was looking for a reason to say no


All very well measuring the room with a spectrum analyser, however so many people forget that if they are present in the room during the measurements, that they should not move even a fraction of a mm as this will change the spectrum. -

....We know, we were all out of the room for the duration of all the test runs. Not a spec of dust moved (well, maybe one or two).

Edited by Angrybiker on Thursday 23 May 17:15

[TonyRPH]

Angrybiker said:

<snip>
But 'largely' might be an operative term here too. Every little helps. Even the guy who designed my DAC/Pre said good power cables would make a difference, even though he'd done his best to make the unit immune.

Looking at the DAC (just pictures no schematic so my comments are possibly impertinent) but judging by the amount of large capacitors sprinkled about (almost certainly for power supply duties) I find it impossible to think that a ~1M length of mains cable is going to change the sound (not I used 'change' not 'improve').
I was being generous using largely.. ;p

Angrybiker said:

... BMC UltraDAC (DAC/Pre); Son of Ampzilla II power (....yes I know)

Again - no schematics but only 2 smoothing caps per channel for a 220w per channel amp??? Yes, I see additional caps on the main amp PCBs, and of course I have no idea what values were used, however it's suggested that multiple caps and resistors (I won't get into detail here) are more effective than just a single cap per rail.


This could be expectation bias. although not sure if your Mrs knew you were adding new cables... -

Angrybiker said:

....I don't think so, we did repeated blind tests to compare current vs new

Still doesn't beat a blind test with multiple different cables (as against A vs B) as you always know it's going to be one of the other - which means a 50% chance of getting it right (or wrong!).


All very well measuring the room with a spectrum analyser, however so many people forget that if they are present in the room during the measurements, that they should not move even a fraction of a mm as this will change the spectrum. -

Angrybiker said:

....We know, we were all out of the room for the duration of all the test runs. Not a spec of dust moved (well, maybe one or two).

It's the invisible pixie dust that made the difference don't you know?

Of course any open doors should be in the same position - in fact everything needs to remain in the same position...

[Angrybiker]

Well it did indeed make a difference - though has to be said less for the pre than for the power. I was actually trying quite hard to not notice a difference, have you seen how much those bloody power cables are?

I must confess to not checking the schematics of the amp, all I know is we tried about 6 in the 4-10k range and this was our favourite (although it does get very hot and ultimately gets a warning light, at loud volumes - I don't like that. Would be nice to find a pair of the monos for 5k)

Seriously, multiple different cables? Even A-B is hard enough remembering how each sounded across a whole range of tracks. Even interpretation of copious note taking would be hard to do. Might be more scientifically accurate but practically impossible to do, I'd think.

50% chance initially but 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% = 6.25% chance that one of us would pick consistently over 4 blind tests; and thus 0.3% chance that BOTH would consistently pick over 4 tests. So there!

Yes, yes, we were very careful with all of that. My weekends are precious, I'm not about to waste an afternoon on a crappy test.

[Crackie]

@TonyRPH

Here's a fairly recent test of one of PS Audio's latest products. Robert Deutsch is on of the most respected reviewers in the industry.

In percentage terms the measured THD improvements are large and RD certainly believes the subjective differences are large too. Every PS Audio review I've seen has reached similar conclusions irrespective of whether entry level or high end gear is being used.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/ps-audio-direc...

[TonyRPH]

@crackie (David) I view it this way.

The mains regenerator is ultimately a dedicated 50 (or 60) Hz amplifier / power oscillator.

So for it to produce low noise and low THD, it too would need a clean mains source.

They magically clean up the 'dirty' mains, using that same 'dirty' mains as their power source, but why aren't they themselves affected by the dirty mains?

After all, they will need a standard power supply derived from the mains to kick start the whole process, and then said dirty mains is used to generate 'clean' mains.

I realise they don't need the bandwidth of an audio device, and circuit design is ultimately far more simple (in relative terms).

But I still don't see it.

As I've stated previously in this thread, in a scenario where the mains is really bad - then perhaps yes - but if the mains was *that* bad, then all other devices connected to it would suffer one way or another - overheated transformers (caused by DC on the mains) overheated motors (caused by harmonic distortion) and so on.

And yet all the people that seem to need regenerators don't seem to suffer from constant appliance failures...

Not to mention computers that would continually crash if the mains was that bad - but they just don't, because it's not bad enough.

Until somebody can demonstrate the benefits to me in my presence (both in measured performance terms and audible terms) I'll have to step away from the debate.

ETA: With a lot of kit, it's actually possible to interrupt the mains for very brief periods (micro seconds) with no apparent detriment to performance, and yet we have all the above...

Oh well....

Edited by TonyRPH on Thursday 23 May 19:05

[S6PNJ]

TonyRPH said:

Interestingly, I saw a review some time back of an amp (forget which but Onyx springs to mind) and the add on PSU ran into the £100's and I simply could not see how they could charge so much money for it. Naturally the reviewer raved about it.

I seem to recall from the late 80's / early 90's that the 'new' Cyrus II kit had the option to add a PSU to each stage (pre amp, pwr amp, cd, tuner, etc etc) for around the £300 mark. Being a teenager with bugger all money - suffice to say i couldn't afford it but still lusted after it. There's a fighting chance I still have a flyer for it somewhere....