The Ten Biggest Lies in Audio

[RLA]

It' early here on the West Coast so I might have missed it. HIGH END POWER CORDS This is the snake that will kill you dead before you take a step.

[Cincyborn]

Wayne A. Pflughaupt wrote:

Here’s my favorite quote from the article:
I pretty much agree with all of it, except for the cables. I generally not a believer in that stuff, but I have seen two instances where I could hear a difference. Which was surprising, because I wasn’t expecting anything at all. So I’m hesitant to denounce the idea outright.


Aesthetics that no one will ever see... Now that I don’t get.

I never could figure out the ABX foes, with their complaints about additional switches, etc. How many switches and relays does the signal go through as it is? Let’s see, the pre-amp source selector, the amplifier relays (that many have), the amp’s speaker selector switch, etc. Silly, just silly.

Regards,
Wayne

What about when your New Home Theater is finished and your giving your PROUD Private tours to the Envious Neighbors, Relatives, Friends, etc, and you take them into your Sound Equipment Room and show them the Neatly Routed, Color Coded, Low Resistant, Cables. There is something to be said for HIDDEN Aesthetics. If nothing else ..... for YOU the Installer.

Just an attempt at Realistic Humor. More laughing at myself than anything else. My step-daughter calls me MONK.
I personally have an Obsession with Cable Routing.

Order minimizes Confusion, and it looks Really Cool.

Thomas

[Cincyborn]

Many years ago, I was a salesman, at a, now obsolete, Hifi store in Southern California. Pacific Stereo, for the curious. Anyway, I have never bought into, or at least understood the concept of frequency response for speakers being advertised way beyond the realm of Human Hearing. I always thought. "Am I buying this for me, Or my Dog, which has much better hearing than I do?

Just another LIE

Thomas

[Sonnie]

I agree Thomas... and I cannot believe there are too many over 40 folks out there that can hear that well anyway... probably not many and much over 8-10KHz.

[Cincyborn]

Back in the days of Analog, I witnessed a person so obsessive with a perfectly flat response that he not only EQ'd his room flat, but also adjusted the EQ frequencies to include his own personal hearing test. I guess if you want it perfectly flat, that too must be considered.

*Just a note off the subject... I am very happy to have found this forum. To all of you who welcomed me, my sincere thanks. Nice folks here!

[hjones4841]

RLA wrote:

It' early here on the West Coast so I might have missed it. HIGH END POWER CORDS This is the snake that will kill you dead before you take a step.

I love that one also. What those folks that spend $500 for a 6 foot power cord don't realize is that on the other side of that wall receptacle is 10 cents a foot romex - and a lot more of it than 6 feet, too. Then there is the "audiophile" grade $50 wall receptacle, connected to, yep, the same cheap romex.

Then, let's go back to the power generating station itself. I have designed those for 38 years. Nothing "audiophile" about that atmosphere, I guarantee. Tens and hundreds of thousands volts and tens of thousands amps.

Like the old saying about a fool and his money...

[HiTracey]

A very interesting discussion, about much of which I have nothing worthwhile to add.

I would remark however that I've just set up a stereo system in my new games room (aka "The Shed"). This room does not have the best acoustic, therefore there was no point spending money "unneccessarily" (we'll come to that later). The system is based around a 1976 Pioneer receiver which has basically been out of action for most of the last twenty years, having gone through a dozen repairs for the same fault but it always failed again. Anyway, the last engineer (a brilliant one mind you, and I don't exaggerate ... in this case) insisted on having the unit back after it failed after his repair, as I was about to bin it, partly because I'd given up, and partly because the thing had got a lot heavier over the years. On getting it back, he asked "What speaker cable are you using?" After describing the massive diameter hawser, he said ... "There's your problem. Use lighting flex."

Well, that's not the point of the story, just an amusing aside, to anyone but me. I thought, "Well, if I'm using lighting flex, I'll search out all the tatty RCA interconnects I can find, clean the plugs, join it all up and hear what we shall hear." Nice. And not only did I not have to care which way round the little arrows on the cables went (there weren't any), the whole system cost less than one pair of speaker cables from my "reference" system, even though the receiver originally cost me more than a brand new car in the days when cars were expensive.

That said, some of the respondents are missing some of the point. If it makes you feel better spending $10k on a pair of cables, you'll get more pleasure listening to your system for having them. I have a "clean" supply, power conditioning, nice cables, and it all cost less than a year's depreciation on my car, so where's the harm? Actually it's the car that bugging me, not the claims of cable manufacturers and hi-fi cranks.

Can I hear the difference between the two systems? Well, my reference system may not be high end, but yes, and it pleases me, even down to the fact that I'm still happy with my behemoth CRT projector BECAUSE it's the pinnacle of the old technology, rather than a transient phase of the new. Can I put that difference down to cables and power supply? Who knows, but it can't be doing any harm. Apart from to my Pioneer ....

[Sonnie]

Good story Tim... thanks for sharing

[hjones4841]

HiTracey wrote:

because the thing had got a lot heavier over the years

I love this part

Funny how the weight of things increases as our age (and yes, our own circumference) increases.

I have a 90 pound Denon receiver sitting about 5 feet up on a reinforced shelf. Many times I have thought about moving it to a lower shelf to make it easier to see the display and get to the connections on back. Then I think of the day my son and I hefted that thing up there and decide that it is fine right where it is

[salvasol]

hjones4841 wrote:

I love this part

Funny how the weight of things increases as our age (and yes, our own circumference) increases.

I have a 90 pound Denon receiver sitting about 5 feet up on a reinforced shelf. Many times I have thought about moving it to a lower shelf to make it easier to see the display and get to the connections on back. Then I think of the day my son and I hefted that thing up there and decide that it is fine right where it is

What about removing the dust from the receiver and the load of the speakers

[tonyvdb]

Dont forget to clean out all of the 0's and 1's that have gotten stuck inside the inner workings of the signal path usually a good abrupt thump with the fist jars them loose. you would be amazed as to how much better and lighter the receiver is after that.

[hjones4841]

tonyvdb wrote:

Dont forget to clean out all of the 0's and 1's that have gotten stuck inside the inner workings of the signal path usually a good abrupt thump with the fist jars them loose. you would be amazed as to how much better and lighter the receiver is after that.

Does that work on cables also to free used electrons? Maybe I need to whack my interconnects with a yard stick tonight. Might need a hammer for the speaker cables, tho.

We joke about such things, but these are no more ridiculous than some of the stuff for sale. I saw a picture of a guy who put his single conductor speaker cables up on 12" or so "transmission towers" on the floor - bragged about how much better it sounded. Very large gauge wire, of course, for that 10 foot run...

A fool and his money... are soon departed.

[gobrigavitch]

I think the most common offender nowadays is the high end HDMI cables. Their adds will even say things as better picture clarity and definition along with more transparent sound. This despite extensive proof that an HDMI cable either works or doesn't at any particular resolution. How else can they get someone to spend 10x more money for an equal product.
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[lcaillo]

While I would not argue that the claims of high end cables are exaggerated, and many times very close to dishnonest, it is simply NOT true that HDMI cables either work of they don't. When you get to the limits of useful lengths, you can get symptoms that can get a number of symptoms while still getting a useable image. You may get intermittent signal or you may get none at all. Changing to a different brand of cable may get better results, though the correlation to price is not assured at all. I have had very good results with cheap HDMI cables at varying lengths.

Please don't propogate the naive assumption that HDDMI is an all or nothing matter. Like most matters audio and video, there is more to the story.

[gobrigavitch]

What you say is true. What I was getting at is that it is usually quite obvious when an HDMI cable isn't up to the task. There will be dropouts, sparklies, flashes, or even complete loss os picture. There really is no way that an HDMI cable can cause subtle variationd in picture quality such as "inproved detail and transparency" and the like. That's why I say it either works or it fails. The degree of failure may vary however
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[lcaillo]

It can cause what appears to be a low level noise, somewhat like activation potential noise in a PDP or the "hash" that appears in low res color info in NTSC, or in early LCD panels. Some of the problems that I have seen have been somewhat subtle. It also seems to vary with source device. I have seen several situations with cables too long where I could hook my signal generator up and it worked fine, but a cable box or sat receiver looked horrible until a shorter, better, or less defective cable was used.

[Zeiggie]

O.K. So I disagree with the BiWiring and Power Conditioning items. That being said, I also agree with them.

BiWiring - In my personal experience and equipment, I own a pair of Original series Klipsch LaScalla speakers. The way the cross over is wired, you can connect a separate amplifier to each speaker. They end up being electrically isolated from each other. In this situation, BiWiring, or Wiring each speaker to a different amplifier can provide better sound. However, with a good quality amplifier, I doubt that anyone could hear the difference. But with a cheap amplifier ... That is a different story.

Where can I see the benefit - When pushing amps to their limits. If the amp driving the woofer were to clip, it would only affect the woofer while the amp driving the Mid and tweeter would (most of the time) have a lower power output and not be driven to the point of clipping resulting in cleaner audio and reduced chance of damaging the tweeter. When I bought these speakers I was in the military living in the baracks. I had A LOT of guys wanting to show off their amps by connecting to my speakers. So many of their "High Power" amps sounded horible - especially at very low and very high volume. At the time, I owned a clean 100 W Marantz amp that could blow theirs away - Why? It did not clip except af full volume, and I would stop before that point.

Power Conditioning - Once again, when I was in the military stationed in the middle of nowhere, the local power was so dirty that you could hear noise in your audio equipment. I did not have any high end equipment out there, but with a power conditioner or filter you could reduce or eliminate the noise. Then this leads to a question I have - Power Inverters. (I.E. running off of battery power, generators, camping, RV, etc.) There is a big selling point for the far more expensive "Pure Sine Wave" power inverters and that some A.V. equipment cannot work right off of a modified sine wave inverter. So far, I have not been able to tell a differenct with what I have run off the grid.

Zeiggie

[kouack]

Zeiggie wrote:

O.K. So I disagree with the BiWiring and Power Conditioning items. That being said, I also agree with them.

BiWiring - In my personal experience and equipment, I own a pair of Original series Klipsch LaScalla speakers. The way the cross over is wired, you can connect a separate amplifier to each speaker. They end up being electrically isolated from each other. In this situation, BiWiring, or Wiring each speaker to a different amplifier can provide better sound. However, with a good quality amplifier, I doubt that anyone could hear the difference. But with a cheap amplifier ... That is a different story.



Zeiggie

This is called bi-amping not bi-wiring, bi-wiring you just 2 set of wires connected to one amp and the other end to the same speaker so 2X 12AWG=10 AWG

[Zeiggie]

kouack wrote:

This is called bi-amping not bi-wiring, bi-wiring you just 2 set of wires connected to one amp and the other end to the same speaker so 2X 12AWG=10 AWG

Ah, that makes sense and clarifies the original document for me. Thanks - Zeiggie

[Ledzeppac]

CD treatement LIE!