I started out to say how much I love reading all of the back and forth here, but that didn't really ring true. I sort of, kinda... Well, let's just say I get a chuckle.
First, I want to let everyone know where I am coming from. I have been in this business longer than many of the readers have been alive. Beginning with my discovery of high end (at that time it really meant something) audio in 1972 when at 14 years old I had the totally accidental experience of meeting Saul Marantz and Jon Dahlquist at the world premiere of the DQ-10 loudspeaker. What I heard that day blew my mind-- I was hooked for life and I never looked back. We listened to a recording of Andre Segovia that Saul had made in his living room--he and Andre apparently were pretty tight. I could have sworn that real guitar strings were being plucked... that speaker was pretty amazing. I ended up working for the dealer where this took place. In order to work there we had to attend a live unamplified musical event monthly and make a live recording quarterly, using the owner's Sennheiser condenser mics and a Revox A-77. All of this was just to keep our ears in tune to the sound (and for most of us, the beauty and passion) of live music. 18 years of high end retail followed by 6 years at Sony, 11 at Marantz, several more consulting, and currently doing engineering for high end DLP projectors at Panasonic.
I've always been one to question why. When I asked Saul and Jon that day why what I was hearing was so fundamentally earth shattering for me, they had answers. Lot's of them. And they all made sense. Because here were two very good engineers that were taking a novel approach to improving a somewhat flawed electromechanical design to the limits of what was available at the time. The next revelation didn't come until John Bau introduced the Spica-TC-50. Another paradigm shift, that was backed by SCIENCE. The last one was the Dunlavy SC-IV, that I had demo'd to me by John Dunlavy himself, several decades later, while working for Sony and finding myself in Colorado Springs with several hours to kill, and literally stopping in at Dunlavy Loudspeakers out of the blue and simply hoping to see the place. John ended up spending most of his day with me, just talking about this stuff... those were the days.
I am bringing this up for context. One of the things I learned quickly was that some things I heard didn't make any sense at all, and that drove me nuts. I HAD to figure out why. Tube amplifiers for example. The first Audio Research rig I heard was "night and day" better than anything else I had ever listened to. But when I looked at the specs, it made no sense. The amp started rolling off the highs at around 16k, and had THD in the single digits! But it sounded so damn GOOD, so obviously there must be more to it than what specs can measure, right? I loved spouting that one off to customers-- I really knew what I was talking about. NOT.
It wasn't until listening to a recording that I had made myself and knew intimately, that I realized that the ARC amplifier wasn't as good as I thought. It was DIFFERENT. Really different. But it wasn't what the recording sounded like. Yet, there was something really attractive about the sound, which I soon learned were the even order harmonics. Many people say that's why tubes sound better. Nope. Tubes don't sound better. They are just more fun to listen to. Seriously more fun. But that doesn't make sense either. If accuracy is the goal, then tubes should suck. Same thing for the vinyl vs digital debate (today, not in 1983, when CD players actually hurt to listen to). By the way, the real debate there should be analog vs digital, not vinyl. Compare a 30ips half track master tape to the vinyl that gets cut from it if you don't believe me. I have. Ain't close, even on a SOTA Star Sapphire turntable (science again).
After several decades of getting paid to enjoy my hobby, meeting and spending time with people like Doug Sax, Tom Jung, Jack Renner, etc... here are some of the conclusions I came to.
- Accuracy is absolutely the goal. It can be measured and quantified. And the more accurate we get, the more we realize how far we have to go. "Better" isn't necessarily more enjoyable, or more emotional involving, because the clearer the window, the more flaws are revealed, and flaws distract. Distractions are bad.
- Most audiophiles are not music lovers. I apologize to those who are--you know who you are. I sold too much stuff to too many people for way too long, knowing that they should have stopped a long time before. But I have the bug too, so I can empathize to the fullest. "What should I do to my system next?" How about listen to it? Or even better, listen to music?
- People will hear what they want to hear. This is particularly true of cables. Why cables? I don't know, except that they cost so damn much relative to what they are, that they better sound good. I had the opportunity to meet Frank Van Alstine at a CES show shortly after he had written an article crucifying cables. Now there was some passion. What he said still rings true today. "If a cable makes a difference, something is wrong" Which leads me to...
- To most audiophiles, "different" means "better." But is it really? Make a change, hear a difference. Should be good, right? Not without a reference. And here is where the rubber meets the road...
- It is OK to say, "I like the sound better." But don't ever say, "It is better sounding," unless you are prepared to prove it. And double blind, or triple blind listening doesn't prove anything, unless you are comparing it to a reference. And very few of us can do that. Because the reference is the original event.
- We will probably never be able to truly and accurately reproduce the experience of live music. It is way too hard. I was fooling around with a buddy of mine at Carnegie Mellon University sometime in the late 70s and was snapping my fingers in front of a lab microphone connected to a seriously fast scope. We froze the waveform and I realized that we had a long way to go. From about 1 foot away, a finger snap created a peak SPL of over 122 dB! It was brief, lasting less than 1 ms.. If you don't believe me, hold your hand about a foot away from your ears and snap your fingers ten times or so. Bet your ears will be ringing. And this is just your fingers and friction. Imagine the peak dynamics of a rimshot. Dynamics and microdynamics are what makes live sound live. And even around the corner or down the block, you can always tell. This is why horns, for all of their tonal flaws, can be so convincing. But we don't even have a method to capture anywhere near the totality of the experience that is live music. We would need an easy 150dB of dynamic range in both capture and playback to do justice to the real dynamics of live. And let's assume that there was a loudspeaker that could do it, and for argument's sake we will give this mythical speaker a sensitivity of 95 dB/1W/1m. Assuming you could supply the power, and the speaker could take the power, to deliver 150dB instantaneous peaks (like the finger snap, rimshot, etc...) would require instantaneous power delivery of over 260 THOUSAND Watts. Ain't gonna happen. So we compromise.
- To anyone who spends lots of money on cables: If you haven't spent at least as much as what your speakers cost to fix your room, you are wasting money. You want night and day? Fix your room. Get yourself a copy of the Stereophile Test CD Volume 2, and learn how to use the Music Articulation Test Tone (read Feb 2000 Stereophile for an explanation of MATT) HUGE. Get a second subwoofer and spend a month or so finding the best spot for both of them. HUGE. Learn to live with a butt ugly room that has one of the two subs somewhere out in the room, maybe a foot or so from the wall, because when you listen to Jaco Pastorius, not only can you hear and feel the bass, you will experience a little of his soul. Because if your system can't give you goosebumps with the right music, cables aren't the answer.
- Even if only half of my conclusions are right, paying money for a fancy POWER CABLE? Give me a break. Not only does that power go sometimes hundreds of miles before it gets to your house (as many of you have rightfully pointed out), it goes through ALUMINUM conductors! And bunches of step-up and step-down transformers. Compared to that, the Romex in your walls is like six-nines copper. But... people will hear what they want to hear. So to you, here is the test. Put your money where your mouth is. Because I would bet a month's salary that you can't hear the difference. 50 separate tries. Your system. Your house. You leave. I will connect your fancy schmancy cables OR... one of Kurt's Blue Jeans Cables. You come back. Listen. As long as you like. Write down which you think it is. Then you leave again. Repeat. Statistically, you could get 50% if you were completely deaf and guessed. If you were lucky you could guess and get 30 out of 50. But from what I have read here, everyone can hear the difference. So you get over 40 out of 50, you win. If they really make that kind of difference, then it should be like taking candy from a baby. So you gotta ask yourself, Do I feel lucky?
Sorry for the long winded rant. I was looking to see what BJC had to say about Cat6a cables, because I'm rewiring and I want to do it right, and i stumbled across this thread. It just made me feel like writing.
Final funny story. When I first discovered the MATT (see above), I stopped at the Stereophile booth at CEDIA to buy one. I was asked, "Fresh or Frozen?" Huh? They told me that if you cryogenically treat your CD's in liquid nitrogen, they sound better. Personally, I wondered what would happen to the green ink on the edges... I bought it fresh, thank you. A couple of months later I was visiting one of my dealers in Melbourne Florida. One of their customers was there and was wearing a NASA windbreaker. We started talking, geek stuff mostly. I found out he was a thermodynamic engineer out at the cape. So I asked him about the freezing thing. He laughed because he had read it as well. And tried it. And heard a difference. So he decided to find out why. As it turns out, because the coefficient of expansion/contraction is different for the plastic and the aluminium substrate of the disc, separation occurs and microfractures form in the plastic. Your eyes can't see them, but the error correction of the disc player absolutely can and it goes into overdrive while playing the disc. Thus, you hear a difference. And since you paid 5$ more to have someone essentially ruin your disc, it better sound better.
