Eiron wrote:
Shock result - interconnects sound the same!

As an interconnect test I soldered up a short adapter (4cm) with a
male phono, two female phonos and a jack plug.
This allowed me to take a mono source and feed it directly to the
left channel of a sound card, while also sending it through the
interconnect under test to the right channel of the sound card.

The source was Donna Summer's 'Bad Reputation', which has a lot of
treble.
I would have used Abba's 'The Day Before You Came' but I get a bit
emotional listening to that which might spoil the results.

Using Goldwave and comparing the source directly with the source
passed through the oldest, cheapest interconnect in my junkbox
revealed that the difference peaked at -57.9dB. After taking the
difference and maximising it, it sounded like the original, with more
noise and a grainy effect to the treble.

If anyone can hear anything at 58dB below the music level he must have
better ears than me.

I haven't yet calibrated the sound card, i.e. balanced the two
channels
but these preliminary results suggest that the squirrel is nuts.



What differences did you see? Did you also look at phase plots or just
amplitude? My experience is that the audible difference in interlinks is
more in the spatial information than the attenuation of high frequenies. So
with better interlinks you get more of the stereo image embedded in the
recording. More depth and better precision in where sounds come from.
Obviously you would need a recording that has that in it in the first place.
Pop/rock music with a lot of electronic instruments is usually not the best
for this.

On the theory side, many people seem to overlook the fact that the energy of
an electrical signal is stored in the electromagnetic field generated by the
signal (Maxwell's law from the 19th century if I remember well). Most of the
EM field is located OUTSIDE the conductor. For example in an interlink, most
of the EM field is between the inner conductor and the shield, so in the
insulation material between them. In my first year in university (electrical
engineering), I learned that various materials have different effects on the
EM field. Polair molecules respond different to changing EM fields than
a-polair molecules. So a coax with a teflon/PTFE (a-polair) dielectircum has
different characteristics than one with a PVC (polair) dielectricum. Air as
dielectricum is quite nice. Think of helix or foams cables. Capacitors come
with various dielectricums for various applications. So why not cables.

Then there's the magnetic influence of various metals. Iron (ferromagnetic)
wire sounds different that copper (non ferromagnetic) wire. Silver sound
different than copper. Many years ago I did a listening test of interlinks
for a Dutch audio magazine together with a student. We did used nice
stereo equipment for this but nothing over the top. Both of us were shocked
by the difference between
the silver (Siltech) cable and the copper cables. The difference between the
silver and copper cables was much larger than that between the various
copper
cables. A guy in Japan, at the time working for Mitsubishu (I think),
experimented with various metals like tin, (OFC) copper, iron, aluminium,
silver,
nickel. He published the results in the french magazine l"Audiophile in the
80's. I read a dutch translation and the outcome was that basically every
metal had its own sound. I recall that the autor thought that silver sounded
overly brilliant.

When dealing with larger currents (speaker cables), the mechanical
characteristics start to play a role. Parallel conducters push/pull on each
other due to magnetic (Lorentz) forces thereby creating a signal dependant
inductance and capacitance which modulates the signal going through the
cable.

Looking into studies about hearing will probably reveal that the human brain
can detect much more in sounds than the avarage person thinks. The ears are
just the sensor (say the A/D converter in your soundcard) while our brain
does the real thing (like the processor and software that you used in your
experiment). The ultimate goal of good sounding cables is to please our
listening experience, not to produce FFT plots. So use your ears initially
and then try to find out what you hear with measurements.

I agree that there's a lot of BS around cables. But to simply dismiss the
whole matter seems a bit short sighted. Specially since there's a lot of
scientific knowledge to back up certain theories. You just need think and
search outside the audio box. And always remember that the whole chain is as
strong as the weakest link. The weakest link may not be the interlink or the
speaker cable.

Menno