Some Expensive items...

Gollnick, do you know how much it costs to make one of those $30000 cables?
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I'm gonna guess a few hundred bucks.

The big cost is the custom molded plastic parts. I'm assuming that the market for 30K$ speaker cables is rather small, so they're amortizing the cost of those molds over a small number of units.

The wire itself is probably made from a more pure copper than is found in common lamp cord. They probably do extrude it in an oxygen-free process. The wire is probably made for them by Belden, Alpha, Manhattan, or one of the other major wire manufacturing companies since actually making wire involves large, expensive machinery. But, again, their volume is small so their cost per unit will be higher.

I wish I could find a business where I could sell $300 worth of something for $30,000. 100X is a pretty good profit margin.
 
I've lost the URL, but some time ago someone sent me a link to a website for a company that claimed that a "magnetic residue" built up on the outside of your speaker cables thus slowing down the electricity traveling through them and the solution to this was a special cleaning spray that they sold for several hundred dollars a bottle. You were encouraged to clean once a week or every ten hours of listening.

I'm annoyed that I lost that URL because I've been meaning to go to the grocery store and get some household sponges and put of my own website:

Yes, friends, it's true. There is magnetic residue that builds up on your speaker cables and you do need to buy that other company's spray to keep 'em clean. But, if you've been running your system for more than a few months or if you like to listen go very loud music, then your cables already have a baked-on, crusty buildup of magnetic residue that ordinary magnetic residue cleaning spray can't remove. You need my special magnetic residue Scrubbing Pad to quickly and easily scrub off years of dried-up, baked-on, crusty magnetic residue build-up. Just send $9999 to: Professor Harold Hill's Magnetic Brillo Pad, Care of General Delivery, Sherwood, Oregon.

Order now. This special introductory offer ends soon...
as soon as the Postal Inspectors catch up with me.

Not sold in stores...
and when you get yours, you'll know why.
 
I'm not sure if I'm willing to concede to there being a perceptible difference, but let's suppose that there is a very slightly perceptible difference to those with a golden ear. Is the difference worth the price to anyone of a sound mind, when you can induce a larger difference merely by moving your speaker an inch, or by moving a chair on the other side of the room? How about buying a thicker pair of curtains for the windows, or perhaps moving your head a fraction of a degree while listening to your great sound system. Room acoustics are an enormous factor and can be absolutely free to experiment with. The difference made by stacking a few books in the corner of the room is hugely measurable. I would jump off a cliff if I spent a grand on some cables to make my system sound better, to then have that tiny difference compromised by something as small and insignificant as having my chair moved 1/4 inch.

I find it odd that somebody would spend thousands of dollars on something that might make no difference whatsoever, yet not fully explore simple options that are capable of completely transforming the quality of one’s sound.

If I remember correctly, as of the early 90s, no one had yet proven, through double-blind testing, that exotic cables make any difference. Is this still the case? The closest I’d seen of this, which is only remotely close to the conversation, is people being able to notice when sound is played out of phase, which truly is easy to tell by a total collapse of stereo soundstage.
 
Gollnick. That was hillarious!!!

I remember the magic CD cleaning fluid now. It was called Finyl . I guess it softened all of those harsh ones and zeros embedded in my CDs. Best of all, a tiny bottle only costs $40.00.

I also remember the green magic marker now. It was CD StopLight made by Audio Prism. Yes, you too can purchase a green paint pen for only $19.99. Click here to go to Audio Prism
 
So what is everybody running for stereo equipment, if you don’t mind me asking?
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I like to use the word transparency to explain how I want my music. But that´s not exactly what I´m getting with my sound system right now. Don´t have the cash.

Cables: Uh? Copper maybe, came with the Denon/NAD stuff.
Pre-amp: NAD 1000
Post(?)-amp: Harman Kardon, Citation Twelve (doesn´t even have a on/off switch and weighs a ton)
CD-player: Denon (DCD 2560)
Speakers: Polk Audio (can´t remember model, big suckers)

...and the jewel in my home entartainment system, the DVD player:

A SONY PS2 :rolleyes: :D

I hate the fan inside the PS2, got a cabinet to stuff it in so at least I can´t hear it while watching Armageddon or some other loud action flick. Still a pain the first few minutes while watching a Tarkovsky classic (even if the movie is mono).

First two things I will invest in is a new TV and DVD when I get a steady income.

Interesting thread.

/Colinz
 
Finyl makes listening to CDs far more enjoyable. This amazing compound draws out deeply embedded tones you never dreamed existed.... [Finyl]Improves image specificity and depth, Improves timbrai accuracy
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Good thing I'm wearing rubber boots. It's getting a bit thick in here.

The important thing is that I've found my dream market.



Yes, Finyl is a wonderful product and you'll certainly want to use it. But if you've been playing your CDs all these years without it (and haven't we all?), then there's a layer of crusty, baked-on laser energy build-up on your CDs that not even an excellent product such as Finyl can remove. You need Professor Harold Hill's Laser Energy Residue Scrubber. Scientific tests (or were they Scientology tests? Does it really matter?) prove that after cleaning your CDs with my new scrubber, you'll hear sounds you never dreamed existed. It will improve general specificity. Your music will reach new heights... improved depth (of your gank balance) as your timbrai accuracy is adjusted for complete harmonic convergence. Just send $19,999 to Professor Harold Hill, C/O General Delivery, Sherwood, Oregon.

Offer void where prohibited by law....
which is pretty much everywhere.

Some restrictions may apply....
like parole restrictions.

Operators are standing by....
to fly me out of the country with the money.
 
Boy has this thread degenerated.

I will agree with Buzz that tremendous improvements can be had in the performance of your hifi by working with your equipment to maximize the performance in your room. Anyone who's been around this stuff for any length of time already knows that your room is the largest single component in any hifi system, and the largest variable. If you've got all glass and hardwood floors, forget it, it's just not going to sound good. But sometimes just moving the speakers a bit one way or the other can bring about startling improvements.

While I will continue to defend the concept that different wires do sound different, I will by no means try to defend some of the silly wierdness that has been propagated by some of the lunatic fringes in my industry. If you want a real laugh, look at the Shun Mook Mpingo discs here:

http://www.shunmook.com/text1.htm

The Combak dots are also pretty hilarious:

http://www.combak.net/

Here's another one, This guy George Tice claims to have a magic treatment proces that he applies to a digital clock. Once treated, the magic clock has a transforming effect on your system just by being plugged into an outlet in the same room as the hifi system. It get's better. It's a cumulative effect, if one TPT clock is good, two are actually better..:) Here's a link where George trys to defend his position:

http://www.stereophile.com/accessoryreviews/784/index7.html

They want serious money for these things!
Then there's the guys who advocate elevating your speaker wires on everything from silk threads to glass insulators. The idea being to remove the speaker wires from interferance caused by the earth's magnetic field. Last time I checked, moving something six or eight inches above the floor hardly removes it from the earth's magnetic field. Speaking of magnetic fields, I've seen several companies marketing devices to demagnetize your CDs. Last time I checked, CDs are made out of polycarbonate and Aluminum, neither of which will maintain much of a gauss field, and even if they would, I'm not sure how it would affect a beam of collimated light coming off of a laser diode and bouncing off a reflective disc sppinning at several hundred RPM.

I firmly believe that we haven't figured out how to quantify every part of the human experience yet. Things like sound, smell and taste are very subjective experiences. Unfortunately, whenever you find a hobby where people get passionate about a subjective experiences, there's usually a few charlatans willing to take advantage (and large sums of money) on the promise of making that subjective experience even better.

Having said that, I have found many times that empirical reality trumps theory again and again. I think someone here even has a sig line that says something like, "The difference between theory and reality is that in theory , there is no difference, while in reality, there is".

John
 
I'm with John on this one.

The Nordost Quattro Fil/SPM's I run in my Levinson/WATT Puppy 7 rig sound better than other's I've tried. May not "measure" better or contain special physics, but they sound better.
 
Darn it! These people are stealing all my ideas! The CD demagnitizer, for example. Bravo!

I love the little wooden disk that you set on top of your CD play to vastly improve your entire sound system.

And that clock... that's the ultimate.

Notice that all of these shams have a common thread:

"The Mpingo Disc... is made from a combination of Gaboon and Mpingo Ebony, treated with a proprietary process..."

Secret sauce.

"the Harmonix engineers discovered their secret: a phenomenon known as harmonized resonance."

Secret sauce.

"The TPT treatment takes place at a molecular level which is not visible to the naked eye. "

Secret sauce.

and

"a large mass of epoxy damping material encapsulates the Opus MM network, which is then encased with carbon fiber. The network pod sits upon a thick acrylic plinth supported by four adjustable feet, to insure stable 4-point contact and decouple the network from room borne resonance."

Secret sauce.
 
Wow Mike, that's a serious hifi! Levinson and Wilson. That Nordost is silver stuff if I remember correctly. Analogue or digital sources? I hope for your sake your Levinson gear doesn't need any special attention in the near future. Great sounding stuff, but the Madrigal division of Harmon is being, well......, Harmonized at the moment (and that's NOT a good thing).

John
 
Bladeforums.com members can be assured by the BladeForum Dot Com Musical Director himself that all CDs of the internationally famous Bladeforums.com Marching Marimba Band (which are available in our gift shop) will sound just as good regardless of how your hook up your speakers: $30,000 cables with epoxy damping material and carbon fiber networks, or a rusty old coat hanger.

Some things just can't be improved upon. :D
 
John-

So far it's built like a tank, works perfectly (just jinxed myself, I'm sure).

I'm running a Sony SACD player as my only source.

Toying with the idea of in-walls; the Radia series from BG (www.bgcorp.com) look good and we just started distributing them. And with an 18 month old running around.....

Gary- Shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you a digital coax interconnect. It's my parent company's house brand and performs well.
 
Originally posted by MikeD60
...Gary- Shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you a digital coax interconnect. It's my parent company's house brand and performs well.
Click to expand...

Email heading your way and much thanks sir!

As to system in house, it's growing but it's good to have with no cable tv. So DVD's are pretty major for me ;)

Receiver: Sony DA5ES
DVD & SACD: Sony DVPNC685V
CD: Sony C8ESD
Speakers: Klipsch RF7 mains
Klipsch RC7 center
Klipsch SB2 surrounds
Velodyne SPL1200 sub
VCR: Sony
TV: Sony 27"

Seriously need a better TV...:)
G2
 
Yeah, I always thought some of that hi-fi stuff was overblown. I've always been much more interested in the content of the music I listen to (mostly raucus rock) rather than just the quality of the sound. But I admit I always have had a secret yearning for a nicer stereo......Two years ago I was happy to finally be able to afford an NAD CD player to go with my 1980's vintage Onkyo receiver and my fantastic $250 Paradigm Mini Mark II speakers. Sounds good enough to me! :p :D
 
Hey Mike,

Where'd you land anyway? The BG stuff is pretty nice, but to me planers are all somewhat dynamically constricted. Thinking of inwalls, check out B&W's new Signature 8NT (in the interest of full disclosure, Yes, I am affiliated with B&W, sort of). It's like a Nautilus 803 that can be built in, although the voicing is a bit sweeter (new tweeter design). Think industry accomodation.

John
 
10-15 years ago they did a double-blind study of cables. Cheap-ass cables actually did very slightly better (presumably they had better quality control because of working the bugs out of their manufacturing).

Anyhow, the audiophile magazines, rather than admitting "it's all a big lie, we admit we're marketing shills for audio component manufacturers desperately looking for people even dumber and more insecure than the clowns who bought our last line of pseudo-scientific gibberish" instead started inserting phrases into their editorial like "and if you'll believe that then you're probably one of those people with a tin ear who believe that study that cheap cables are just as good as audiophile cables."

My favorite ads were for CD players where their digital bits were somehow higher fidelity bits than the one's you'd get off of their competitors CDs.

I've noticed that there is a high correlation between people who buy audiophile cables and who buy Compaq servers ... (our Xeon processors are extra special Xeon processors that you really ought to pay 3X what the street price for).
 
Gabe,

Don't believe everything you read. Magazines are not in the business of delivering the absolute truth (not even The Absolute Sound), they're in business of selling magazines. Controversy helps that. The old "bits is bits" argument is pretty tired. All CD players do not sound alike. There are well documented differences in how CD players behave. There are also many contributing factors such as jitter (small timing errors in the digital bit stream), quantizing errors, differences in the types of filtering used in th edigital to analogue conversion stage. Here again, take home a couple different players and see for yourself. The bits are certainly the same on the disc, it's how you ge tthem back, and how you treat them after retreival that makes the difference.

If you're to believe that everything printed in a hifi mag as gospel, then just cut to the chase and believe the now deceased Julian Hirsch, the long time editor of Stereo Review who claimed that all amplifiers sounded the same as long as they measured the same. According to him, a 100 watt tube amp and a 100 watt solid state amp should sound identical. Anyone with any practical experience knows that to be patently false.

I would never accuse you of having a tin ear, just perhaps being a little lacking in practical real world comparative listening.

John
 
Here's the problem:

E=I*R. It's called Ohm's Law. E stands for "Electromotive Force." Electromotive force is an old word for what we, today, call "Voltage." I stands for what we call Current (they don't use C because the letter C is also used in electroncs for Coulombs, a measure of electrical charge). And R stands for resistance.

P =I*E. P is power in Watts. I is, again, current. E is, again, voltage.

Simple substitution says that if P=I*E and E=I*R, then P=I*I*R.

Let's say that your amplifier is capable of delivering 150 Watts of power into an 8 Ohm load. P=150Watts. R=8Ohms. P=I^2*8. 150=I^2*8. Therefore, I=4.33Amps. E=I*R. Therefore, E=35V, 35V coming out the amplifier.

Our goal is to get that electrical signal, 4.33A at 35V, from the amplifier to the speakers and to do it over a frequency range of about 20Hz - 22KHz.

Cables have electrical resistance. The AWG (American Wire Guage) #16 wire which is commonly used for speakers, as about 4 Ohms per 1000 feet. A typical home stereo system might use 20 feet of wire on each side. That's about 20 miliohms (twenty thousandths of one ohm). But, you have to double that because there's two conductors in the wire to form the complete circuit. So, 40 miliohms.

When voltage is lost across the cable, that's energy that's not getting to the speakers.

E=IR. When 4.33Amps flow thorugh 40/1000thOhms, the voltage loss across the cable is 173milivolts. That's not much loss. But here's the problem: Most of that 150W is in low frequencies. Most of that 173mV error results from low frequencies. But most of the so-called "detail" in the music comes from the higher frequencies. That "detail" can exist in variations of just a few hundred milivolts.

So now you see the problem. The large currents drawn by the low frequency energy can affect the "detail" in the higher frequencies.

The easiest solution is simply to reduce the cable's resistance by buying heavier wire and by keeping cables short. Going to AWG #14 wire almost halves that resistance. Shorten the cables to just 15 feet and you'll cut it 25% more. Now, that 173mV problem is down to about 65mV.

Another great solution is "Biwiring" This simply means running separate wires from your speakers back to your amplifier for the low- and high-frequency components fo the sound. Now, the high-current stuff which generates the majority of the voltage loss across the wire is going on a separate wires from the high-frequency stuff which has the majority of the "detail" in it. You can do this on any amplifier. The speakers need to have separate terminals for the low- and high-frequency parts, the woofer and the midrange/tweeter. Most better speakers have this. The last requirment is that the two cables be closely-matched for length (they should be the same guage too). But, this is just a matter of being careful in cutting your cables. Biwiring doubles your wire cost, but wire is cheap. If your speakers support bi-wiring, do it. For a few extra bucks, your gains will be noticable.
 
He he he,
high end audio and snake oil go together like Ella and Louis.

I once went to an audio shop to listen to different cables to see if I could tell the difference. The sales lady was glad to help and I compared two or three different cables. I couldn't reliably tell them apart but of course she was claiming that they sounded very differently. She even told me how important it was to let the cable "settle down" because the sound of the system was disturbed for a while after the cable has been jostled.

I went back a week later to listen to some more components. Something sounded awfully wrong to me. There was no stereo sound stage. I asked the nice lady (edit: same lady from previous week) to check the system but it sounded fine to her. I asked if it was set up properly which she confirmed. I asked her to double check the hook-up and she humored me. Embarrassed she found out that polarity was reversed on one of the speakers.

Ever since then I have learned to trust my own ears. I read Stereophile and used to subscribe to a few other hifi rags but more for amusement than for advice.

I have a Foreplay tube amp, a pair of Caztech SET monoblocks using 845 triodes and lower end Sonus Faber speakers. If you were to measure this system it probably wouldn't do so well but it is musical and warms my heart and soul (quite literally actually since it draws about as much power as a space heater).

I have a no-nonsense Marantz CD player and a Fisher tuner that was built when JFK was still alive. Try getting that kind of life cycle out of electronics these days. Oh, speaker wire: Radio Shack solid hook up wire. Probably about five bucks for a spool.

Don't make yourself a slave of your system and jump on the upgrade carousel. Find something that works for you and then remember to enjoy the music.
 
She even told me how important it was to let the cable "settle down" because the sound of the system was disturbed for a while after the cable has been jostled.
Click to expand...

We just went from boots to hip-waders.

I'll bet she demagnitizes her CDs too.
:D
 
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