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Audiophilia - From skeptic to believer

brettDbass said:
You mean stuff like the Pete Cornish cables? http://www.petecornish.co.uk/cable1.html

Yes, they're built strong, made to last, but they're 5 times more expensive than anything else on the market and might make a 1% (subjective) improvement on your actual sound, max.
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To be fair, I'd pay five times more to get a cable that doesn't die in a few months. I'm sure I'd get more than a 1% improvement over cables that I've soldered back together a few times. On the other hand, £50 is a fair amount of beer. I guess I just don't have what it takes to be an audiophool.
 
ohp said:
I think this section is the most telling:



What, exactly was broken?
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My external pre-amp was broken and I had to use the internal pre-amp inside Benchmark DAC1 ($975). It sounded grainy, boomy and muddy. So I had to compensate for it by taking my whole system apart and starting over.

I removed $24 000 worth of gear from my system and did extra vibration isolation and star grounding. I also cut my cables shorter, I only need 1/4th of the wiring now, it saved me a lot of money because I can sell the rest.
Eventually I ended up getting better sound than before my system broke, and for a fraction of the price!
 
Cuddles said:
To be fair, I'd pay five times more to get a cable that doesn't die in a few months. I'm sure I'd get more than a 1% improvement over cables that I've soldered back together a few times. On the other hand, £50 is a fair amount of beer. I guess I just don't have what it takes to be an audiophool.
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I of course have no problem with quality manufacturing of wire and/or equipment, but with woo-woo about it, oh please.

The wire BS is just that BS. Like I have said many times before, I have radio equipment that is in the 450 MHz range, and if the BS they say about wire where true I would not be able to use the radio because of all the distortion they say happens.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
Modified said:
Well, obviously he lives beneath a radio tower.
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Yes I live next to two radio towers. I always thought that the environment I live in was the bottleneck in my system. But I have found that the audio components themselves interfere with each other, and that is the problem all audiophiles have.

The biggest improvements I have heard was removing the vibrating transformer out from the chassis and separately isolating it. A new world of low-level detail opened up. Rear soundstage got deeper and everything sounded more distinct at different depths.
I removed the shielding and chassis and isolated the components in the nude, overall I got more low-level detail even when I live next to radio towers. When I put the shielding back, I got even more low-level detail. Vibration isolation makes a bigger difference than shielding does.

The 2nd biggest improvement I have heard was modifying the Nordost Valhalla cables thinner. More low-level detail and resolution opened up. Smooth sounds turned into tiny transients.
All round conductors change the signal, that's why there are so many cable manufacturers with different sounding cables. Nordost is supposed to have the most detailed cables, but even more detail is possible when modifying them.
 
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The biggest culprit in picking radio is probably the diodes in your stuff. You should carefully remove all the diodes from your gear. They don't really do anything except pick up interference anyway. Considering that a transistor is just a couple of diodes placed together you should pull them out too.

It will be much, much quieter after this.
 
jimlintott said:
The biggest culprit in picking radio is probably the diodes in your stuff. You should carefully remove all the diodes from your gear. They don't really do anything except pick up interference anyway. Considering that a transistor is just a couple of diodes placed together you should pull them out too.

It will be much, much quieter after this.
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Right. And don't forget that albums/CDs can suffer surface contamination, so taking them out of their shrink-wrap is a big no-no.
 
ExtremeSkeptic:

What do you think about doing double blind tests, comparing different components, like cables for example? Do you understand the problem with comparing components without blinding?
 
jimtron said:
ExtremeSkeptic:

What do you think about doing double blind tests, comparing different components, like cables for example? Do you understand the problem with comparing components without blinding?
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Do you think in your wildest dreams that he is even reading what you have to say, let alone that he has any knowledge of how to do a true double-blind test.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
ExtremeSkeptic said:
A new world of low-level detail opened up. Rear soundstage got deeper and everything sounded more distinct at different depths.
I removed the shielding and chassis and isolated the components in the nude, overall I got more low-level detail even when I live next to radio towers. When I put the shielding back, I got even more low-level detail.

The 2nd biggest improvement I have heard was modifying the Nordost Valhalla cables thinner. More low-level detail and resolution opened up. Smooth sounds turned into tiny transients.
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Yeah... but did it sound as if you were there?
 
Yeah... but did it sound as if you were there?
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audiophiles are people who spend $300,000 on equipment instead of buying a $600 season ticket to the orchestras. go figure.
 
audiophiles are people who spend $300,000 on equipment instead of buying a $600 season ticket to the orchestras. go figure.
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They seek perfection without realising that their minds makes the more expensive option more perfect, not any intrinsic audio property of the options.
 
the high end AV equipment was vastly superior when VHS was popular. for instance the use of digital video, line quadruplers, and CRT projectors.
 
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the high end AV equipment was vastly superior when VHS was popular. for instance the use of digital video, line quadruplers, and CRT projectors.
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That's due to intrinsic audio/video properties - not the expense.

A $50 cable is not x10 better than a $5 cable because it costs x10 as much.
 
ExtremeSkeptic said:
My external pre-amp was broken and I had to use the internal pre-amp inside Benchmark DAC1 ($975). It sounded grainy, boomy and muddy. So I had to compensate for it by taking my whole system apart and starting over.

I removed $24 000 worth of gear from my system and did extra vibration isolation and star grounding. I also cut my cables shorter, I only need 1/4th of the wiring now, it saved me a lot of money because I can sell the rest.
Eventually I ended up getting better sound than before my system broke, and for a fraction of the price!
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It's interesting that you describe everything in terms of price. Why is that?

Imagine a civil engineer working on the same principal:

"The cable stays we used on the bridge weren't strong enough to support the additional weight of traffic passing over the bridge, so we replaced the stays with more expensive ones."

That's silly isn't it.

"We bought stronger cable stays" would be more appropriate.

Surely stronger cables are more expensive? perhaps, but so are cable stays made of solid gold, or cable stays sold by a man who can see a sucker coming a mile off.
 
ohp said:
It's interesting that you describe everything in terms of price. Why is that?
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I'll answer! It's because that's the only quantified number he can understand. He doesn't really know the difference between, say, 10 microfarads and 10 picofarads, but he does have a vague concept of the difference between $10 and $10000.
 
vibration could be an issue with LP or tubes or loudspeakers. in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of BS about skin effect and metal purity in cables. it's hard for anyone without engineering training to separate the wheat from the chaff.
 
A $50 cable is not x10 better than a $5 cable because it costs x10 as much.
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yep, there's the law of diminshing returns. in the case of cables, i think the traditional L/R/C and other well-known parameters determine its performance. particularly, i can't see how skin effect would matter except in long and thick cables.

intuitively you can see how damping factor, speaker characteristics, etc, would swamp most cable differences.

He doesn't really know the difference between, say, 10 microfarads and 10 picofarads, but he does have a vague concept of the difference between $10 and $10000.
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ironically, a good portion of the megabuck gear is measurably inferior than cheaper equipment.
 
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