The HiFi Five Episode 42: Truths About Cables

0:02 Welcome to the 42nd episode of the Hi-Fi 5. Please like this video and subscribe to the channel. Tonight's show, Truths About Cables. Tonight is after the Hi-Fi 6. We have five guests tonight, a packed roundtable. Matthew Bond is the founder and designer of Matthew Bond Audio, formerly the founder and designer of Tara Labs.

0:21 Galen Garis is the designer at Iconoclast Cables, and formerly principal engineer at Belden Wire and Cable. Ralph Karsten is the founder and designer of Atmosphere, Tube, and Solid State Electronics. Bill Lowe is the founder and chief designer of AudioQuest. Eric Neff is a reviewer for Hi Fi Plus magazine.

0:38 Good evening, gentlemen.

0:39 Good evening.

0:41 Question number one. If you were given a completely unfamiliar cable and asked to determine whether it was genuinely high performance, however you define that, what objective measurements would you make first, or would you simply put it in the system and judge it strictly by subjective listening? Bill, you first, please.

1:01 As as I warned you, this is a loaded question because the word subjective really needs to definition. I and I suspect at least some others of us are on guard about the term subjective. Outside of specific fields of inquiry, subjective is understood to be idiosyncratically personal, not universal, not verifiable, and therefore scientifically irrelevant.

1:26 Within our field, subjective also means using human senses and perception in a scientifically methodical manner in order to measure performance in the only way that matters, which is to correlate the product and its ingredients and those parameters that can be isolated and measured with more or less successful musical engagement.

1:49 That is a form of measurement, despite what uh certain people believe. It approaches an absolute truth to posit that one could almost deduce from external electronic measurements that a cable will not sound good, but one cannot deduce that a cable will sound good when such measurements do not themselves reveal flaws.

2:10 This is true in electronics and many other areas. Cable is just a subset of a much larger phenomenon of audio and music. An example of the first would be an eye pattern test for an HDMI cable, a clearly uh illuminating test that can tell you bad. Uh it can't tell you optimal performance, but it will guarantee a minimum level of performance by passing an eye test.

2:37 An example of the latter uh might be a full range, full-range analog cable using silver plated conductors. Almost no normal measurements will show that the very real, predictable, and functionally understandable tweeter in one's faced oral signature of silver plated conductors carrying an analog audio signal.

2:59 Uh our field has extremely muddy waters in the overlap between the three perspectives: subjective as personal, subjective as necessary scientific methodology, and humans can't be trusted. Uh, which is certainly the attitude of those who are not interested in the human being used as a measurement tool.

3:20 Uh, the confluence resulted in the horror of misapplied, could be valuable, blind ABX testing, or the appropriately famous, but also Okay, well, we're gonna we're gonna get to the objective stuff later.

3:32 Uh so am I to deduce from this introduction that you would go primarily by subjective listening?

3:38 That is the short answer, is that listening is the only thing that matters. Okay, Galen, you go.

3:44 Pretty easy. The iconic last is designed with straight up engineering, and I would measure swept RS, open short impedance, individual insulated wire loop DCR, and start from there to give you an idea of the cables in the ballpark of being what I would consider an analog specific product. Do it all the time, make those measurements.

4:07 Okay, Eric, how do you start evaluating a cable?

4:11 Um so not having a room full of measuring equipment, um, I plug them in. But typically, uh when I'm working with uh a high-end cable, I'm gonna be uh I'm gonna be replacing a cable that's in a system that clients have listened to and understand instantly. So any change within the chain, whether it's a piece of electronics, a new speaker, or a cable, um, is going to be very readily apparent as soon as I install it into the system.

4:49 So in that case, uh I guess to kind of uh be a little bit on the Bill's comments, you know, it's going to be objectively subjective because I've I I've heard it, I understand where the differences go, and um I'm able to um you know make my judgments based on what I have previously been uh listening to in that core system.

5:13 Matthew, if somebody gives you a mystery cable, what's the first thing you do to evaluate it?

5:17 I'm gonna take the example of an interconnect cable. Um the thing that I would do would be to measure its capacitance. If it were high, that is to say, 40, 45 picafar a foot, I can already know that it's gonna have high frequency roll-off, and I'm gonna hear that in the upper midband as well. Um, and then when I take it into the audio system with an interconnect that may have uh a capacitance figure of 10 picafarers a foot, those two interconnects are gonna sound remarkably different.

5:52 I just know that from experience. Ralph, how do you start?

5:58 Um well I would probably do three things. Uh first thing is I'd be very tempted to uh open up the connectors and see how the cable is constructed. Just look at the materials. Uh secondly, uh if I measure the capacitance of the cable, I can then calculate what the um roll-off frequency is going to be.

6:20 Um, you know, uh with uh termination at the other end, which is probably gonna be 100,000 ohms, it's very typical, a lot of stuff. But you know, you can also set up a microphone in the room where the cable is to be played and uh uh play uh uh sweep tones on a control cable, shall we say, and measure distortion at various frequencies, and then switch the cable and see if you can measure a difference.

6:49 Because stuff like that. Uh a lot of the things that you uh you measure in interconnect cables occur at RF frequencies. Um how much correlation there may or may not be with audio is uh is gonna be tricky. Um I would say it's the sort of thing that I wouldn't necessarily try to forecast. Um however, uh I'm used to working with balanced lines.

7:13 And when you're dealing with balanced lines, uh this is almost a non-issue.

7:18 Well, but we're gonna deal. No, no, hold on. We're gonna deal with balanced lines later. I didn't say that the mystery cable is a balanced cable, so let's put that to one side. Question number two. Yeah, this is a biggie. Can everything that matters sonically about a cable be measured objectively? Or are there some things we hear?

7:35 Now, in fairness, the measurements objectivists would say we only believe we hear, but let's put that to one side. Are there some things we audiophiles hear which cannot be measured? Feel free to answer with just yes or no if you want. Galen, you start.

7:49 Pretty easy. With a common class, we originally used copper. We switched to silver plated copper primarily as a process aid so that tin solder would flow better on the connectors. When we marketed the silver plated to beta testers, they all unanimously said, we like the way this sounds. I said, I have no measurements to really tell you what you're hearing.

8:13 The foundation it's based on in terms of the cable design is the same, but the material is different. So our customers pretty much said, yes, indeed, you can hear the differences, you know, between the silver plated and the solid. They like both, but they preferred the silver overall. Like say 80% of our customers prefer the silver plate.

8:30 So it went from being a process aid to one of those, okay, if it's going to be placed on top of a good cable foundation, the silver plate's gonna work to the best of its ability, but we have no way to measure it or suggest the customer is actually paying for it other than the cost of the material. So our stance is we can't measure it, we can't explain it, but the customers definitely demand that they can hear it.

8:53 Matthew. Ron. Um I'm with Bill on this regarding silver plated copper conductors. I know from my own listening experience that it sounds like the tweeter's in your face. Silver plating over copper is not a good conductor material at all.

9:12 But hold up, let's let's put to one side the metallurgy. I'm trying to discuss the more the higher level question. Whatever subjective things you're talking about, is it the case or is it not the case that everything we subjectively hear can be measured?

9:28 The thing is we know what we should be measuring for. We just don't know yet how to measure it.

9:38 Okay. So you would agree that there are some things we subjectivist audiophiles hear that we cannot measure.

9:44 Not yet.

9:45 Okay, Ralph.

9:47 I'm of the opinion that we can uh we can measure everything that we hear. The trick is um to know how to do the measurements such that we can uh obtain a correlation. Uh measurement techniques, uh measurement equipment is so much better than it was back in the 80s or something like that. And the whole idea that was bandied about back then was that we can hear things that we can't measure, but these days I simply feel that is not true.

10:15 Um, you can define easily why amplifiers sound different. Um, you know, I proposed a technique in my last uh comment um about how to do it.

10:28 Well, Ralph, how would you go ahead and measure differences in conductor sizes and the fact that different gauges sound different? Some larger gauges roll off high frequencies and smaller gauges don't. How do you measure that?

10:42 Put it in the system, set up the microphones, and do the measurements.

10:47 What measurement though are you are you looking at?

10:50 Well, I'd look at bandwidth, I would uh look at uh distortion. Uh, you know, we had a customer that changed a capacitor in one of our pieces, and this is exactly what he did. And he was able to show that yes, he puts this different capacitor in the power supply, distortion is lower.

11:09 Bill, what do you think? Uh well, picking up on what uh well everybody said, but but Matthew in particular, big conductors do not roll off high frequencies. Big conductors have more time smear. They do not roll off amplitude, they do more damage to the integrity in time. And pretty much everything that's kind of been alluded to so far has to do with amplitude.

11:35 And amplitude is actually a minority phenomenon relative to phase timing and the smearing of uh of data across time, like touching a finger painting or an oil painting. So skin effect, which is measurable and predictable, uh, is for the most part, engineers only know about it for the because how do you get energy to a rate radio tower or TV station or the dew line or something?

11:58 Uh power dish dish loses 20%, lost 99% of their power going between the building and the satellite dishes themselves, and we're in the process of co-locating the amplifiers when I was there. That's measurable. But the correlation to the fun house mirror effect that happens in our brain uh when we hear energy spread across time, uh, I've not yet found anybody who knows how to measure it.

12:25 And yet it's obvious and it causes people, even as high who know much more engineering than I'll ever know, as the case of uh Matthew here, uh, that uh we it's we're still prompted to speak in terms of our subjective judgment of how we perceive the sound is being rolled off because the data intelligibility has been rolled off, not the amplitude.

12:48 Eric, what do you think of this issue? Can we measure every oh go ahead, sorry?

12:52 You can measure swept RS and see the difference between customer, you know, conductor. This isn't a mystery at all, and it's quite measurable. What Bill's alluding to is a VP nonlinearity that is basically plagued with the analog frequency band. At DC, it's zero at RF, it's a limiting velocity of the dielectric, the group dielectric.

13:10 Between there, it's a gradually changing curve from zero to whatever the dielectric is at RF. And basically every frequency is its own thing. Uh, so Bill is somewhat right in that what we're hearing in analog cable is time-based differentials, not amplitude. Our ears very sensitive to time-based. But as far as measuring differences between large conductors and small, absolutely, you can measure it with swept RS.

13:33 Do it all the time. Not a mystery.

13:36 And is that the same thing as saying we can measure there's a measurement that we can use to test everything we think we hear?

13:43 No, it's basically specifically: hey, is conductor A amplitude different than conductor B? Yes, do a swept RS measurement and you can see the measurement, and it occurs as low as 7,000 kilohertz.

13:56 Eric? So this is what's interesting. I get asked all the time by uh readers um, you know, why I like certain cables or why I come back to uh you know what I'm using for interconnects or whatever. And then half the time the follow-up is because it shouldn't make a difference because you know the cables just carry the information.

14:21 Um and this I guess is is why I'm not going to try to fight the battle of the measurements. Um, I'm gonna go with when I assemble the system and the cables being an active component of the system. Do I have a sound that at the end of the day, I don't care if my friends are there, but you know, I can just sit back and listen and enjoy it and uh you know not be nitpicking everything, but I'm really getting the enjoyment out of the music that I have listening to at the time.

14:53 And um and so this is I've been fascinated with this because I've been I've spent 40 years on this side of the business um writing about it, selling it, you know, and you get into almost religious conversations around somebody has ascribed to you know the classic objectivist, subjectivist mentality. And you know, I guess what I'm kind of enjoying about uh where our conversation is going here is we are part of that chain also.

15:25 But at the end of the day, we are the ultimate arbiter of the success of that chain because it's our system. Are we enjoying it? Are we not enjoying it? The more that um everyone else in the in the group can find ways to measure it and and get our arm around what are these things that separate less enjoyable from more enjoyable that we've got that we can come up with hard numbers on.

15:50 I'd love to see that because I think it makes it a lot easier for the consumer to be able to build a system and not have to um go through so many different things. But as it is right now, um it does seem to be very elusive trying to come up with that truly hardcore numbers-driven. This is going to be the success thing.

16:11 So um I'm left with uh me as the end of the chain, knowing that I have replaced something within the chain, interconnects, speaker cables, whatever. And there is a clear difference, and I enjoy one versus the other, and I'm gonna go with it.

16:30 I have a host comment on this particular question. There was a lot of predicate discussion prior to the show on Facebook about whether or not I should have a pure measurements objectivist on the show. It was not easy to craft tonight's guest list. Uh, people on Facebook wanted me to have a pure measurements objectivist type person.

16:50 In my experience, debating pure measurements objectivists, sooner or later you reach the precipice of that person saying, if you think you hear something I cannot measure, then you are delusional. And that is a showstopper which precludes any further productive discussion. So on this particular episode, I did not want to have somebody with that particular view because the discussion would simply have ground to a halt.

17:16 Ralph, Ralph who described come to you in a second. Ralph describes himself as somewhere between an objectivist and a subjectivist, was the right calibration, in my opinion, for sort of the objectivist side of things on this show tonight. Ralph, you go ahead. Do you want to say something?

17:34 Oh, I was just gonna point out that the subjectivists and the objectivists, because of their exclusive nature, are committing the same sin. Uh there's a uh an assumption that they make that uh, you know, the other side's observations, whatever they might be, is invalid. And uh there's uh a confirmation bias that occurs on that basis alone.

17:59 Uh it's uh I I just see uh uh being polarized in such a way as a completely uh useless position to take. It's not helpful to anyone. Uh Daniel von Recklinghausen, the uh chief engineer of HH Scott said it pretty well, and I'm gonna have to paraphrase, but uh if it um measures good but sounds bad, it's bad.

18:25 If it measures bad but sounds good, you've measured the wrong thing. And that pretty much puts it in a nutshell. That has not changed from when he said that in the 60s to now.

18:38 I like that. Question number three: how much of the sonic character people attribute to a cable actually is explained by the electrical interaction with the equipment it's connected to? In other words, explained by the output impedance of one component and the input impedance of the other component. In other words, can't the same interconnect sound different simply because it's connected between pairs of components with different electrical characteristics?

19:03 Galen, what do you say?

19:05 Absolutely. You there's an innumberable combination of cables, amplifiers, and of course, different amplifiers as well. But the amplifier is trying to drive a reactive load. It doesn't see the cable, it doesn't see the speakers, it sees a total load. The minute you change any of those three, the it's going to be different.

19:24 You can do Laplace transforms, you can see how the amplifier the joke in NE when I went to Purdue is that you know amplifier is just an oscillator made wrong. All amplifiers want to oscillate. And when you put enough reactants on them, every amp will eventually oscillate or stop working properly. And we measure amplifiers into a resistor.

19:43 Why? Because we don't have a standardized dynamic reactive load with which we can say, okay, here's a standard by which we'll measure amplifiers. We don't have that. So we basically measure them into a resistance, basically say, okay, they'll measure pretty good into a resistor. They're probably going to do okay into a reactive load, but you don't know.

20:00 You basically have to hook them up and listen, no cable's gonna be a panacea in any one given system. So you're kind of left with what your amplifier is doing and hear it all the time. People say, hey, this amplifier doesn't like those speakers. Well, it doesn't like the cable either because it's part of the network that it's driving.

20:17 So absolutely it has a difference. No question.

20:21 I really like what Galen had to say. Um, we have to consider the system that the amplifier is driving as a reactive one, the cable is included with that. The cable may have more inductive reactants or capacity reactants, the loudspeakers they vary in terms of their reactants at different frequencies with different drivers.

20:41 So we can't know what kind of a combination is going to be driven by the amplifier, and the uh sonic character of the cable is going to be judged not because of the sound of the cable or the measurements of the cable, but because of the reactive load of the uh three components the amplifier, driving the cable and the loudspeaker.

21:04 Eric.

21:05 Yeah, I having swapped out a crazy amount of gear over the years, including cable, um, there are just some combinations that don't work. And and it could be the cable, it could be the amp, it could be the speakers, but something in the chain isn't happy because what you're hearing doesn't add up to, you know, if you let's say I've I've heard several different pieces of equipment in different environments with with different combinations of gear and they and the chain sounded great.

21:36 Suddenly you swap something out, suddenly the chain doesn't sound great, but wait a second, everything in this chain I've heard previously in a good sound, and now suddenly I've got a combination that I haven't tried before and it's just not working. You know, do I have an SET in a tube setting versus I had a solid state with a class D with class A B or the class A, you know, um do I have ported speakers?

22:04 Do you know all I mean the variables just keep going on. So um inevitably um you know that's why we we keep exchanging pieces to try to put together something so that the end result is me the end of the chain is now happy again. And um you know that's why I've got a pretty good wall full of cables sitting over here because um you know sometimes a cable that I've really enjoyed doesn't work with the new combination of electronics and you know amplifiers specifically to get put into the system.

22:41 Bill um I think this all every what everybody has said and maybe to a certain extent the nature of the question uh is is is a tiny little peephole that's almost irrelevant except for when it is make or break. So if it's a high output impedance to pre-amplifier uh not looking into a high enough impedance power amplifier and there's too much capacity that's in the cable situation is somewhat like Matthew described in the beginning then that's no go.

23:08 But that's easy and is irrelevant the other 98% of the time. The directionality of a cable of drawn metal is not going to show up in any of the measurements. It has to do with RF conductivity at gigahertz or megahertz uh and yet it has profound effects on the performance of the amplifier it's attached to so yes uh context is everything for how does the associated equipment cope with the mistakes made by the cable uh and that so there's that's compatibility but it's not it's rarely LCR.

23:50 R in the case of a speaker, yes, you change the damping factor, you change the frequency response, those are measurable although what I was talking about earlier with skin effect is that the bigger the conductor, the lower the impedance which supposedly is desirable, the more the high frequencies will seem to be rolled off because of the smearing in time not group delay but the same frequency arriving across time the bigger the conductor the the worse the damage.

24:18 So there are contravening opposite priorities sometimes uh and the world of external measurements is is just so incredibly small that it's better to use no external measurements than it is to rely primarily on external measurements.

24:35 Ralph well anybody who spent time with a square wave generator and oscilloscope knows that uh the cables whether it's at the preamp level or uh a loudspeaker level uh are going to have a difference you can uh see that hey for some reason this square wave isn't coming through without getting rounded uh on the leading edges or you can see ringing on it and uh you know you go uh to technical school and they teach you how to use a scope and that's one of the first things they taught tell you about so yes absolutely changing the cables whether it's an interconnect cable or speaker cable uh from one system to another the cable's going to behave differently question four how do you separate the human

25:18 psychological problem of expectation bias which weighs in favor of blind A B testing from your desire to sell cables Matthew oh what a question um I'm very well aware when I talk to customers about expectation bias and what I've observed with so many customers and so many dealers is that B sounds better than A.

25:50 It's preferred they're expecting a difference and they hear it. I prefer to play A several times they will notice on the second playing of A that uh the drum suddenly is noticed or the vocal is to their ears a little louder and I've I've I noticed that the perception of people at times is is unreliable.

26:19 I don't like to play B until I've heard A a number of times and I am very well aware that the expectation bias is something that everybody has in every in every um endeavor of the arts it's uh something that people expect to hear or to perceive uh the second time around they want it to be better.

26:48 Bill um I'm thank you Matthew I uh ABX testing is primarily an opportunity for embarrassment so it is such a psychologically inappropriate way for to be judging the effectiveness of emotional vulnerability in the human in in response to the emotional provocation of software so it can be used to be illuminating but it is primarily used by naysayers to prove something that's not true.

27:16 So it's contaminated but it doesn't have to be uh methodology is crucial it's impossible for humans to be neutral but if we're aware of our lack of neutrality I fall in love I drive an I go test drive cars I love them all how long will it take before the love affair ends is my question. I take everything that I have a preference for and I turn the prior the bias upside down over and over uh it's like approaching a limit I can never be perfect.

27:46 But number one that I would go back to the very beginning is there is no reference other than a bypass. Cable is all bad uh and there should be an a priority towards comparing a cable to no cable whenever possible and there's not a perfect system for doing that and all cables are an antenna so you're introducing additional ingredients but you can at least try to compare a cable to no cable it's the only part of the system that you can and cable and power are basically the only parts of a system that should only be bought for their neutrality whereas every other part of a system is so colored it is necessary to choose the color and the character in order to have a system that works together.

28:29 Galen basically we sell the electrical superiority of our products and measure and demonstrate why in our tech pages but the buyer can contrast any quality cable they want from a simple zip cord all the way up to our series two there's a 30 day trial period and the reason it's 30 days is like Bill alluded to you tend to be euphoric when you first get something because you have an expectation that it's new, it's going to be better.

28:54 That's just how we are especially if it costs more after 30 days you basically decide hey is there really a difference in the cable can I hear it if you can hear it well stop. There's no reason to spend more in your particular system and that goes back to what we were saying earlier in terms of what amp cable speaker you have in your system.

29:13 Different systems are going to wind up at a different place than others. But the most important thing is again like Bill said let people listen to something for 30 days or so so they can listen to A for a good length of time switch to B and make an active and accurate comparison. So again time is of the essence in this and I don't mean that it has to be fast it actually needs to be slow because people make bad decisions in a hurry.

29:38 Eric yeah I'd go along with Gail a little bit on that um sometimes when you when you're doing a direct switch back and forth and even if you have an ABX or you're able to shut everything down just change the cables turn anything back on and then go from there I'm not sure that our minds are always honest with us.

30:03 So when I'm doing cable reviews and um you know those are always kind of interesting to do and uh ultimately you want to live with the cable for a little bit. And of course you've got an argument out there that people say well you know just like break in of speakers or break in of amplifiers you get a bias and after 30 days you just decide you love that sound because you've been listening to it your mind is adjusted to it.

30:30 If I swap them out once a day and I'm taking good notes and I'm listening to you know familiar tracks um you know that's how I'm able to decide where a preference may lie. Occasionally you'll get something that that just it's either really remarkably better or it's not good and and right off the bat you know at least in terms of like I'm the end of the chain what do I like what do I not like occasionally you'll get something that'll either really trick or switch or you're like nope that's out the door.

31:08 But for the most part I think in order for myself to feel like I've given myself credibility because if you really like something maybe you buy it. So you know I want to give each product a fair time so that I'm able to get a good consideration of its merits across familiar material with familiar electronics surrounding it.

31:33 Ralph well I guess I want to add uh to the expectation bias issue there's something called the Beblin effect wherein a more expensive product um might be deemed to have more value because it's more expensive and for no other reason. For what is worth a lot of people have asked me um what it is that defines high end in high-end audio and it's not price it's intention the intention of the designer is what creates high end not price once you understand that fact uh uh you can make a lot of progress but stay on uh on topic here the um uh for me I'm not trying to sell cables uh for the most part I'm trying to prevent people from making expensive mistakes so uh you know that might be that sometimes

32:31 a cable is a solution but uh you know uh I'm I'm strong on measurements for example uh you know I get asked about uh AC power cords a lot and you know you can measure why AC power cords uh perform the way they do um and you do it by seeing how it affects the equipment it's hooked up to so that's um that's where I'm gonna start uh and I assume we are taking the balance whole ballast line topic as a separate question still.

33:02 Yes no yeah exactly um my take on the testing methodology thing is that there is value to both methods of testing and that neither method is foolproof or dispositive I think there are valid objections to both methods of testing. I personally feel and I see with my friends and myself that uh it is very common for an audiophile when auditioning something to rapidly notice something positive but that it takes much more time with that component as Eric was saying for the audiophile to realize that something not obvious in the first moment may have been lost.

33:44 And it takes time to realize whether there's a net improvement or not a net improvement because I think it's very easy for people to come up with some positive thing quickly without realizing that over time that it takes time to realize maybe something else has been lost. Topic number five what are audiophiles to make of a cable market where a basic Megami interconnect can cost $25 and a high-end audio interconnect can cost $2500 a ratio of 1000 to one put in the question differently where does diminishing sonic returns to increasing price set in on cables Eric you first I think it's the size of your checkbook in many cases um there are some um extraordinary uh cables out there um but um there's

34:35 also some real value players out there um no question about it and um I think that the audio file that does have limitations on their budget should be glad that you've got cable companies out there that can put out a cable and um it it's not the cost of a a used car or a new car.

34:58 So um don't be afraid to experiment with cables of all price categories to find what completes your personal chain. And um you know you don't always have to tell your friends which one you bought if they're looking for the higher price. You know at the end of the day um when your friends are gone and it's just you and your gear are you happy?

35:26 Oh sorry go ahead pretty much the cost to make a cable doesn't really influence its sonic performance it's just the cost. So you can throw together any innumerable combinations of material that are just going to wind up being expensive but you have to do the right things to influence the true electrical differences and what it costs to you know do those things and the creative processes choose to do it right and try to do it at a lower price.

35:51 Iconic glass basically takes building processes and we try to do the right things that we can measure and do it at the lowest possible cost. Now that said there is a big difference between the sound quality the more expensive cable versus say 1313A which is why iconic last exists but the design necessary to make those improvements is a slower more expensive process but it wasn't done on purpose just to make the cable expensive it was actually done to figure out how to make the cable work at the least most expensive cost.

36:21 Mother nature in the end likes simplicity usually the simplest product to get the job done usually is the best product to get the job done in complexity you know can start to tear things apart especially as interrelated as the characteristics are in a cable you can't look at C and say okay I have a bulk C, but what did that do to the VP linearity across frequency?

36:42 You don't know because you didn't calculate it for instance so C by itself is meaningless and that's what I mean when I say the interaction of R, L and C are a multiplicity of things. Bill alluded to time smear VP differential across frequency that's all impacted by C and R and how those things are arrived and what the loop DCR is what does it cost what does it cost to improve those attributes there's going to be a difference and they are measurable you can make these measurements and we have papers that describe what we did to do so Ralph Well I guess I'm gonna just about repeat my answer but I I I want to uh say I agree very much with Galen on that uh you know we are dealing with the Vieblin

37:25 effect here uh high-end audio is driven by intention not by price sometimes the cables are expensive because it's the intention of the designer to build it a certain way whatever way that might be so uh but that doesn't mean that uh an inexpensive cable can't do the job it uh you know there's plenty of examples Matthew um I wanted to say a couple things firstly I I really wholeheartedly agree with what Ralph just said secondly I think there's uh some degree of greed in the business I don't want to be the person who said it but I said it and I can't I I can't unsay it and uh I'm afraid that drives some of the business you mentioned Ron that there was a $250,000 interconnect yes well I don't care

38:29 how much money they put into it you can't have a retail price of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that's obscene if uh if a uh cable budget in an audio system is 15 or 20 percent are we to assume that somebody's got an audio system that's in the 50 million dollar price category not assuming perhaps that person allocates a greater fraction of the budget to cables than than is typical maybe wrong maybe I passed that's the people in effect uh I I think it's in a sense it's the wrong question uh we have a non-competitive business where cable is maybe the worst category but it's also true of speakers electronics and everything else there are products that cost 210 times as much that aren't as

39:20 good that's a real problem to me but it's not a problem to the person who bought it if they take it home and they love it and they're happy uh Bang and Olison I always used to joke twice the price for half the performance but you know people who buy BO want it that way.

39:35 They're not saying I purposely don't care about sound. They're willing to buy something that complements their lifestyle and it's worth it to them. A two million dollar Brigatti is insane to me but for me to call it insane for somebody else that would be me being insane uh that it's local value is local it's in the eyes in the eye of the beholder.

39:59 What I wish our industry had was more competitiveness but a great frustration for me is that particularly at the high end dealers don't even compare product almost nobody chooses to carry any of my competitors uh at the high end based on which cable sounds better uh it's it's totally about greed and being scared that if you make a change the customer you sold something out something to five years ago is going to come and say oh you sold me garbage you don't sell the same thing anymore that's human it's normal but those are the the financial bugaboos about about value not whether there's diminishing returns as long as you get something better for more money whether it's better looks or it's better

40:41 performance there's a vector of value but our industry doesn't even conform to that because people all live in in small blinkered little worlds uh and very few dealers actually have the guts to curate in real time and carry what they would buy themselves as informed individuals.

41:01 Topic number six without getting lost in competing claims about metallurgy and geometry and shielding and dielectric materials and cryogenic treatment and proprietary technologies how should an audiophile go about selecting cables please try to give us a simple process a simple decision tree as you can Eric so if you get to the point where if you have the luxury of living in an area where you have access to um brick and mortar dealers um that is I think one of the best ways to go about it because you get to hear the whole chain with you at the end of it you know in a dealer demonstration or if you know you have the dealer that will allow you to take things home to be able to do that and take things

41:49 home.

41:50 And and at the end of the day as I you know as I say for myself in a reviewing capacity I am the arbiter of what sounds good in my house. I am the end of the chain. So if you have that opportunity or something like the cable company where they you know you can take your credit card and ship you something to try and then ship it back.

42:11 I think nothing really beats having that type of in-person first person uh opportunity to um to listen to the gear at your leisure in your environment with your your particular music um I think it's really hard for anything to beat that.

42:30 Ralph oh boy okay the first thing I I recommend audio files do is to try to keep the speaker cables as short as possible because none of them are perfectly correct. Especially if you have a tube amp, if you're trying to get impact out of the bottom end, you've got to keep the speaker cable short. The lower the impedance of the speaker the more important uh or more critical the speaker cable becomes therefore keeping it as short as possible is going to help.

43:00 So once you understand that you get the maximum intelligibility and impact out of the um uh between the amp and the speaker by keeping your speaker cable short then it's all about trying to get the interconnect cables to work uh for me it's a little bit the the shortest speaker cable can apply to any cable i'm trying to get I'm trying to help viewers understand how do they they're facing a myriad bewildering amount of explanations and metallurgy what's the process how should give them step by step roadmap for picking cables okay well uh again if they you gotta have a short speaker cable okay it's just that it was overarching more important than almost anything else when it comes to amplifier speaker

43:47 interface okay how do they pick that short speaker cable is it available in a short length can you put the amplifier by the speaker and make it work and and if the answer is no

44:00 Maybe there's another cable that is. Okay. So that's that's that's literally where I would take it because the length of it is is that important, particularly if you have tube equipment. But I have found that with solid state gear, the longer you make the cable, the less intelligible it is, and uh it can be pretty dramatic.

44:19 And if uh if there's any question about that, get 50 feet of speaker cable and see what how that sounds compared to six feet.

44:26 Okay, let's stipulate shorter speaker cable is fine. Um do you feel the same thing about interconnect? That that uh long interconnect is just across the board.

44:35 That's a loaded question for me because uh because we don't we're okay, we'll get to the balanced thing in due course.

44:41 Yeah, okay. Bill, how should somebody select speaker cables?

44:45 I agree, sure. Speaker cable is good, and longer interconnect being voltage instead of current is far less far less vulnerable over length. But my answer is it first is don't even try to pretend you're an expert. Find a dealer that you trust is going to make themselves responsible for your happiness and they will work with you.

45:05 And they don't have to be carrying my product, they can be carrying the brand I might hate the most. That's that's irrelevant because you can make music and get high on any hi-fi, and none of them sound real, and none of them are perfect. It's a matter of the overall voice of the system and to what extent it puts up a roadblock preventing you from being emotionally vulnerable and letting the music be allowing yourself to be naked in front of the music.

45:28 So if you have to play expert, then there are dealers. We know one in particular, they carry every brand, so it's not in that sense partial body request, if I mention the cable company, whose very business is on the existence if you borrow four cables at the same time, uh, and no dealer has can can do it with what they can do.

45:49 So if that's what you want to do, there is an avenue uh for doing it. However, the biggest mistake to me that their customers all do, and I used to have hundreds of these conversations in the 90s with cable company customers who would call me, uh, is the customers borrow four cables that cost the same.

46:07 They don't ask the number one question, which is how much is cable worth? It's insane. It's human. They don't borrow cables at different price ranges, they choose a gambling level and then they select but between a cable that costs that much. Although in the conversations that I used to have with those customers, their most common question was, Well, what would I hear in the next model up?

46:31 And I would explain you would hear less difference than you heard between the four cables you compared because they're like different colors. Uh and that if it's if it's a good predictable line of cable, and I'm not the only one who makes a predictable line of cable, then when you go up, it's like uh better focus and better preservation of dynamic contrast.

46:51 It should not be a change in voice. And as you go down, um uh you're damping dynamic contrast and uh articulation, but not changing the voice. But that's the first first step is what is cable worth? It comes before worrying about which cable.

47:08 Galen.

47:10 I'm simpler than these guys. Give yourself time, listen to them in your network, not damn dealers. Sorry, but only your network is going to give you an accurate answer as far as what that cable is gonna do hooked up to your system. When you're at a dealer, it's gonna be a mild indication of what might happen.

47:31 And we've already alluded to the difference between tube amps, damping factor being affected by short cables or long routes, questions are automatically answered when you listen to a cable in your system. Second, stick to your budget. Everybody has a budget, all right, in terms of what they're willing to allocate for these products.

47:50 Don't go out on the limb with this and make yourself miserable. Uh, it's it's just insane. Uh, the fourth thing, if you don't hear a difference, but you know the cable technically measures better, still don't buy it. If you can't hear it, you can't appreciate it. All right. So people tend to automatically want to go to the top of a product line.

48:10 And I tell them, no, listen to the series one, listen to the series two, two different products, two different prices. If you can't hear a difference, don't go there. But do it at home with plenty of time to listen. And uh again, you know, don't try to pick cables at a dealer. There's too much noise and commotion going on emotionally for you to do that accurately.

48:32 You come up with some candidates, but by all means, take them home. Get a decent period of time to listen to them. And like Ralph was alluding to, the differences in a base damping factor and all those types of things will answer themselves. You don't have to be a technician once the car is made. You really don't know how to you really don't need to know how it's working when it goes down the road.

48:52 You just need to know how it feels when you drive it. Cables aren't that much different. We're stuck with the problem of making them better, yes, but the consumer should just be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor in their home with a long enough trial period to hear difference and not go over their budget.

49:07 Matthew. No, I'm gonna pass. Thanks, Ron. Okay. Question seven. Can a cable actually change the perceived spatial characteristics such as sound stage, width, depth, and image size? If yes, what exactly in the design of the cable affects these sonic parameters? Matthew, would you like to start with this?

49:31 Okay. Um what yeah. So can the cable change perceive spatial characteristics such as sound stage, width, depth, and image size? If so, what exactly in the design of the cable affects these sonic parameters? I would say almost everything about a cable design. The conductor, its size, the dielectric or insulation material around the conductor, then the spacing of the conductors.

50:01 Um more than anything, if the kit if the can if the cable is has been reduced in its linearity with frequency, if it doesn't have a good enough frequency response, then spatial characteristics in terms of width, uh depth, but I would say the corners of the sound stage, these things that are perceived as being more open or three-dimensional, these things get compromised.

50:33 Bill.

50:35 Well, it it's again another one of these very complicated multi-multi-layer, because the spatial information, there's the provocation is in the recording, but what we hear is not the recording. Uh, we hear what our brain does in the 50 milliseconds it takes for our microphones to send data, electrical impulses throughout our brain, which is processed by different parts of the brain, and 50 milliseconds later, roughly, we're handed a an oral, a conscious oral image.

51:06 And something like the smearing, not group delay, but the smearing across time of the same frequency is like bandwidth limitation in a fiber optic cable that that has too much time delay because toss link is huge and causes a lot of damage that way. It's a bandwidth limitation. It's not an ampli amplitude, uh, a loss, loss of energy.

51:27 Uh so uh it's context, context, context is the is is the the short the short version. Uh if you had two bears, two tigers in the in the jungle, and the wherever it is you go hunt, you go walking in the woods, uh, and they're two identical bears and they're growling at you identically. They're our speakers, so to speak, uh, and making an identical uh noise, and you get out your bear spray and you aim at the one that we hear in the center, you would be dead wrong.

52:02 We we are uh stereo depends on our making a gigantic mistake with our coping mechanism as we use our imagination and history and algorithms to create a three-dimensional image in our head. Why do audiophiles care so much about this? Because we can. People go to Symphony, they don't talk in that language.

52:23 It's audiophile language, and that doesn't, I don't mean that pejoratively, I'm just saying that is our world, that's an audiophile world, and it is a creation, an affectation that happens within our world. And there are many ingredients that cause us to imagine sound where it's not coming from, and we love it to do that.

52:45 So it's not all about the equipment, it is an interface with an imperfect animal. Uh, there's a professor at UCI that I've enjoyed conversations with who's done the lab research to prove that if we saw the world accurately, if we were evolutionarily the result of a perfect historian was the goal. We're terrible historians.

53:06 We have terrible memory. Um, if we had better memory and we were perfect historians, we'd be dead because we wouldn't, we'd we'd be eaten and we wouldn't get enough food. Uh so acknowledging the fact that we're animals that don't hear accurately uh is half the answer to to to that question.

53:28 Galen, can you correlate the technical characteristics of your cables with subjective perceptions like spatial characteristics that we hear?

53:38 Yes, absolutely. You look at a cable at DC, it's a capacitor. You start to move above DC, and the capacitance of the cables drops to where the phase of the cable is zero out at RF, but down at low frequencies, the cable is continuously increasing its capacitive phase across frequency, and you can measure that.

53:57 VP is nonlinear, it's also a time-based function. At DC, the VP is zero as you go up in frequency below 20 hertz and even around 20 hertz, it's single digit as you go up towards RF, all right, at 20 kilohertz, it might be 40, 50 percent the VP in a vacuum. As you go up to RF, it's gonna be the limiting velocity of the dielectric that you're using.

54:18 Those are all time-based phenomena, and those will impact how a cable sounds with regard to phase. And every cable, all right, between those extremes in the middle there, they're gonna change measured characteristics depending on how the cable is designed, and that's gonna influence quote the phase characteristics of the cable.

54:36 Uh, Bill alluded to the resistive characteristics as being somewhat subjective and not really an issue. And it and he's right, resistance does not alter phase, but your VP linearity and your reactance does. And cables generally tend to act capacitive, not so much inductive when you actually do the measurements in terms of what you're predominantly working with.

54:55 But that's what changes phase is reactance. And different cables have different phase characteristics because of the VP and the capacitance measurements across frequency. That's it's really that straightforward in terms of the answer, in terms of what you hear and what that measurement shows, that's very difficult to correlate because you can't listen to any one component by itself.

55:16 It's almost like trying to eat a cake one ingredient at a time. You're never going to know what the cake tastes like when you eat the sugar, then the baking soda, so on and so forth. You mix it all together, and all of a sudden, oh boy, this tastes pretty good. Any one ingredient by itself is awful. Um, stereo cables are kind of the same thing.

55:32 It's a it's a superimposed time-based variable that you all right, you can't really unstitch it, so to speak.

55:39 If somebody came to you and said, I want to maximize the perceived sonic depth of my system, are there particular technical characteristics that you would direct that person to prioritize?

55:52 Sure. VP linearity. Your velocity of propagation is so awful through the audio band that you want to do everything you can to try to improve that time differential between the low frequencies and the highs. Your low frequencies are traveling at 10, 15%, even less down in there. And your upper frequencies are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% or more.

56:13 There's a huge differential uh through the analog band, and most people aren't even aware that the velocity of propagation of a typical analog audio cable is that bad because it is. They all are. I can I can measure every single damn one of them and show that it's just how the physics works. We've been given a very difficult frequency range to work in with analog cables, because every single frequency is theoretically a different cable, and every single cable has a different trace and time-based variable as you go up and down the frequency range, which is why all these cables sound different.

56:46 They're not all the same at every single frequency, they're they're constantly changing. Then you look at amplifiers and how they drive reactants, and then you look at speakers that are incredibly bad in terms of reactants, and it's any wonder that these things sound different. But in terms of what to look for, yeah, I'd say cables that have a higher degree of VP uniformity using a multiplicity of smaller gauge wires in aggregate to meet the DCR characteristics of the low frequencies, yet still have a small enough gauge size to properly align the VP and the swept RS for the high frequencies.

57:18 You can do that, but it takes a much more expensive cable. It's something that 10-gauge zip cord is not going to do. It can't. It's impossible. It won't measure that it's doing that. And again, you go out to the economic class website and you can look at the data and see those measurements.

57:33 Ralph.

57:35 Well, the um the ear senses, uh, sound stage through phase relationships. We're not very good at uh uh hearing a single phase like at a particular frequency, but when you're talking about a spectrum of frequencies, uh the ear is pretty good at that because that's uh that's how echolocation works. And echolocation is how come we survive this long?

58:00 You're here because your ancestors had good echolocation abilities. So that's um that's literally what it's about. So the interconnect cable has to uh not be shifting phase because if it messes up the phase, as uh Halen just pointed out, um, you're you're gonna lose your phase relationships that uh help you define the sound stage in your brain.

58:25 Eric, what can you tell us about how you correlate the perceived spatial characteristics of cables with the design of the cable?

58:35 You know, um I have to tell you I don't uh spend a lot of time worrying about the design of the cable.

58:43 Fair enough.

58:44 Um, and and it's interesting listening to this because I'm an English teacher. I am not the engineer in the room, but I am uh very glad that we have uh folks with the qualities that the rest of the panel has that can design stuff so that somebody in my space, um in this case, I'm just talking about me, the audio file that likes listening to my favorite music, has uh you know, has the wherewithal to be able to make these kinds of adjustments.

59:17 Um, you know, I I um I only hear by a couple of our panel members, and uh I enjoy it immensely. And at the end of the day, um when I'm not worrying about getting something into the deadline, it's nice to just put something on, sit back and go, yeah, this is great. So um I have certainly had uh cables where as I'm in, you know, as I I I had a I had a uh USB cable that was a uh computer to DAC cable.

59:49 And I'm installing it, and it was kind of cool because it had a split run. You had uh um you had power lead on one side and you had uh data lead on the other side. First time I played with a cable like this is probably about 15-20 years ago. And as soon as I plugged it in, the the difference was marked.

1:00:12 Now specifically on special characteristics, okay.

1:00:17 Suddenly there was a depth um and uh clearly more 3D in terms of how I was perceiving what I was hearing with this particular cable. Uh at the time I had it, it was also a pretty expensive cable for that era. Um and uh that was actually one of the one of the best demonstrations to me that cables can make a difference regardless of um somebody's uh measurement bias.

1:00:49 You know, if I can't measure it, it doesn't, it's not there. That that argument. You know, my experience is I disagree because I have experience. Um but as far as the uh the geometry, the metallurgy, um, I do find that a lot of times a little bit of silver is not bad, too much silver is a little harsh.

1:01:10 Okay, but this question focused on the spatial characteristics, so okay.

1:01:14 Yeah, so but yeah, in terms of spatial, there's no question the cables can make a difference. But how that geometry affects that, I couldn't tell you.

1:01:23 Okay. Question eight. What do you make of the view that balanced interconnects that connect fully differentially balanced component circuits? A fully differential preamplifier connected to a fully differential amp greatly minimizes the difference in sonic attributes among balanced interconnects. Matthew.

1:01:44 It's my experience that that is the case. Um when a fully differential pre-amplifier is connected to a fully differential power amplifier, there's a great reduction in the sonic differences between the cables. There is to my ears, however, some benefit in having a cable with a lower capacitance. And although the uh twisted pair design is favored in balanced in the professional industry in balanced audio interconnects.

1:02:22 Um it's my experience that taking the conductors and putting them in parallel, spacing them apart, the two signal carrying conductors. It's my experience that that cable still makes a small difference. Bill.

1:02:43 I had one word for that one as compared to my opening, hogwash. Uh balance is primarily necessary when the combination of the of the sending electronics, the source, and the load are uh what do they prefer? Uh many fully differential, proper outbalanced outputs don't like seeing a single-ended load, and therefore they sound lousy.

1:03:07 Uh many balanced inputs are synthesized, many balanced outputs are synthesized. There's actually a minority of gear that has XLRs on it that is balanced electronics, which doesn't mean that it's never efficacious. It might be better to use the balanced input of an amplifier, even though it is technically inferior if it provides a load that the pre-amplifier needs to see in order for its circuitry to be optimized.

1:03:33 But as for whether the balanced path in between is doing anything beneficial, more or less, no. In the world of Hum and PA systems and recording studios in the 50s, absolutely. In a day and age where the primary problem is RF and the wavelengths are smaller than the distance between the conductors, there's no cancellation due to balanced interconnect.

1:03:58 Uh so everything else about the capacitance. My better cables don't have capacitance. They have no characteristic impedance because if you have no C, you can't have a characteristic impedance. So a whole bunch of what we've been in this discussion talking about as being the priorities, not necessarily ignoring what to me is the frontier.

1:04:18 The difference between my better cables is in the drain wire, not in the signal conductors. Uh Eric's comment about the USB cable, that's not ones and zeros. That's that's noise from the power pair being better isolated from the the data pair that's feeding signal into a DAC that's going to misbehave as a result of being fed uh more more garbage.

1:04:43 Uh and how and the character of that garbage from one DAC to another will be different if you could separate it from the analog output stage, which is where most of the character of a DAC is. So that these just all these variables and trying to narrow them down is is what's counterproductive, acknowledging there's a perimeter with a thousand variables and that they're all influencing us, and we're often blaming the wrong one.

1:05:09 Uh so noise is the number one thing that prevents active circuitry from doing its job to preserve the delicate timing information that allows our brain to then synthesize and create a version of three-dimensional space that's not accurate but is highly pleasurable and based on the truth. Like a movie, if it's based on the truth, it's not true.

1:05:29 But I don't care if it's a good story. Ralph.

1:05:34 All right. Uh, I'm gonna bring up uh the standard for balance line operation, which is AES48. Um, what the idea there is, is that the shield of the cable is ignored, and this is for noise purposes, as uh Bill is just pointing out. Uh so the signal on pin two is generated with respect to pin three, it's not generated with respect to ground.

1:05:59 There are many. High-end audio products that don't do it that way. They ignore AES 48. And I think it's because they want to have plug compatibility with single-ended equipment, because single-ended equipment, the shield is part of the audio connection. And uh if you generate your balanced outputs just being merely two uh single-ended outputs that are out of phase with each other, then if you want to run single-ended, you just connect to one of them and there's no phone call to the manufacturer about why am I getting this buzz problem.

1:06:35 Balanced line and single-ended are mutually incompatible because if you're going to drive balance lines correctly, the shield is ignored by the audio signal. It is just for shielding. And the reason they do this is twofold. One is to prevent the interconnect cable from having colorations, but the second one is to prevent ground loops.

1:06:55 If you have a ground loop because a signal is referencing ground and you've got 20 pieces of equipment in the recording studio, you might take months trying to figure out where that's coming from, where that buzz is showing up. And it can be in all the equipment and it can be just caused by one piece.

1:07:13 So ground is ignored in balance line equipment if it's hooked up correctly. Now, as you may know, we've been building balance line products in the US longer for high-end audio longer than anyone else. Period. We started making our uh balance line power amps in 1987 and our balance line preamps came out in 1989.

1:07:35 As far as I know, the only um manufacturer anywhere worldwide that beat us to it was uh FM Acoustics. Uh they had a balance line solid C preamp for a while back in the early 80s, if I understand correctly. But the point of this is if you're going to do balance line, you have to drive it correctly. There are only three ways to do it.

1:07:55 Either to use an output transformer. And if you think of the transformer has a very simple um secondary winding that's just a single piece of wire wound around the core. One side of the transformer is tied to pin two, the other side is tied to pin three, and the transformer otherwise has no connection to pin one.

1:08:13 You just simply tie that to ground. So uh that's an excellent example. A phonograph cartridge is also an excellent example. It's the same idea.

1:08:22 Okay, so we're getting a little off track. But so your answer very unequivocally is fully differential to fully differential, uh, the sound of the balance interpreting.

1:08:32 I gotta stop you there. I gotta stop you there because it the fact of the matter is in the old days before uh back when tubes were king, they didn't have the the differential technology was was difficult to execute. It required lots of power supplies, extra complexity, so they just used transformers.

1:08:50 Internally, the equipment was all single-ended. The uh the the AMPEX 351 tape machine, uh the electronics in there that recorded, you know, I'm gonna say 90% of all the classical and jazz stuff made in this country, that was a single-ended circuit.

1:09:05 Okay, so let me let me look at this. So if uh if even if it's not a fully differential circuit, if it's a single-ended design which uses unbalancing and then unbalancing transformer at the front and unbalanced uh balancing transformer at the back, you're saying you you're still in that scenario, still minimizing the sonic differences between balanced cables.

1:09:27 Yes. And the proof of that is in your recordings, like I've got back here. All done with balance line, and sometimes the microphone cables were 200 feet long. Okay. They were able to deliver the signal in time.

1:09:43 Okay, let's get Galen. What's your take on this?

1:09:46 I agree with Bill on this one. If you have an unbalanced circuit, you want to use that topology. And if you have balance, you want to use that topology. You definitely don't want to take a pin to hop right to ground and create a terrible RCA cable out of it, which is basically what it ends up being. Now, as far as voltage transfer function goes, you can't be better than an RCA because it's from a conductor directly to a gram.

1:10:11 There's no one balance in that circuit at all. Balance lines are called balance because you kind of have a differential voltage between the two conductors, but they have what's called cap imbalance. Each conductor is not identical. So, in theory, all right, they aren't as good a voltage transfer function.

1:10:27 But as Ralph alluded to, they cure a problem that's hugely more of a problem than the unbalance in the cable, and that is picking up extra noise. And that's where you want pin one to be grounded at both ends, totally isolated from pin two and three. It has to be grounded at both ends. If you have a hum and you lift one end and the hum goes away, what that tells you is you have a voltage or you have a ground differential in your house that needs to be fixed because you're getting current flow.

1:10:54 You didn't fix the problem, you hit it. Now you're creating a resonance antenna around that cable that makes the shield worse than if it wasn't there at all. An RCA cable has both ends grounded or it wouldn't work. So you automatically get good RF shielding all right in a in a uh single-ended situation.

1:11:11 You can measure the effectiveness of these RF shields by using either C shield effectiveness evaluation device where you impact the shield with a signal, measure what comes out of the other side, or you can use what's called transfer impedance in milli ohms per meter that actually measures the resistance of the shield relative to RF as it's trying to go down the cable and how quickly it's attenuated.

1:11:33 But as far as what circuits are good or bad, it really depends on the quality of the outbans that's driving the balanced circuit, how good the Kappa balance is on that particular circuit. But again, yeah, I'm highly suspect of balanced equipment that you dig into it and you find out it's just pinned to the ground.

1:11:52 And as Ralph suggested, people do that so that customers don't have problems when they want to use a cheater plug and use RCA cables and have them have lying around. They want to plug it in and hear music. Um, but that's really the wrong way to go about it. So which one's better? It depends. If you're going two, three hundred feet, you know, even 100 feet, balance is the way to go.

1:12:12 You build up a lot of noise and a ground point differential. Balance circuits have a ground between pin uh two and three, but it's a virtual ground. It floats, it automatically finds the center point between whatever those voltages on those two conductors happen to be, but it's not influenced by the shield ground.

1:12:29 That's basically an RF true shield ground. That's all that's on that shield. That's not true with an RCA. So the shield on an RCA is doing double duty. Uh so you need a nice heavy shield to make sure you're not creating a ground differential between your two pieces of equipment, which eventually will make a ground loop if it's hideously high.

1:12:48 A good RCA cable should not do that.

1:12:50 Eric, when you review components, how sensitive are you to the native nature of the circuit and whether you're using balanced interconnects and or single-ended?

1:13:00 You know, um, most of the time it's gonna be a function of um you get a little more gain of, you know, you double the gain out of the balance in terms of you know uh you know that voltage output is typically how the manufacturers have set it up. So if I'm using one or the other, I might get a little more a little more gain out of the balance circuit.

1:13:22 Um I'll go back and forth. Um I mean I've I've got a lot of identical cables that are uh terminated XLR and terminated uh single-ended. And so it's kind of interesting to go back and forth on that, but um you know for the most part, um you know I I'm relatively ambivalent once again if it if me at the end of the chain is happy with what I'm hearing, then you know I'm gonna be I'm gonna be pretty much in that space.

1:13:51 Topic nine. Manufacturers and dealers often recommend using the same cable throughout an entire system, the so-called full loom concept. Is there a genuine engineering or sonic reason to use the same cable everywhere, or is that just a marketing strategy to sell an entire set of cables?

1:14:08 Matthew. Um I think that if you've got a set of cables, I'm talking about subjective listening now, and trying to put together a system that is uh delivering a sound that is compelling, three-dimensional, almost holographic, trying to put together a system that sounds lifelike, natural, real, with images that are clearly outlined within the sound stage.

1:14:39 If you can do that, and it's compelling and it sounds lifelike, I really don't care which mix of cables you've got going on. Galen.

1:14:51 I just take Matthew and say ditto. Depends on superposition, you know, you're just superimposing distortions that end up being pleasant for you. And if you mix and match and arrive at that, hey, go for it.

1:15:04 Eric, do you typically review when you review cables? Do you typically do a whole loom or just uh one or two connections?

1:15:10 Yeah, I play with this many different ways. And I I agree with uh you know Matthew and Galen on that. I mean it the the for me the end result is what it's about. You know, and uh, you know, kind of Galen's previous point, you know, I like the cake, not the ingredients, kind of how that goes.

1:15:31 Ralph, we've already established you feel that the uh output impedance and input impedance of the components can affect the sound of the cable. Doesn't that weigh against the Loom concept?

1:15:43 Well, I imagine it does. Um my feeling is uh, you know, depending upon what speaker and app you have, the the speaker cable that you're going to, you're gonna you're just gonna have to figure out which speaker speaker cable works for that. That says nothing about what interconnect cable is going to be used.

1:16:00 Uh so you know uh the the chances that you're actually gonna have a full Loom concept to me is just uh that would be uh it's possible. I would strike me as being more coincidence than anything else.

1:16:17 Bill, how do you feel about the Loom concept?

1:16:21 A complicated question on multiple levels. So I'm against it because the nature of component audio is you can change one thing at a time uh and curate a system over time. So the loom concept makes it potentially much more expensive to buy in and then freezes, freezes you. Uh so for a variety of reasons, I'm against advocating a loom.

1:16:42 However, one might arrive at a loom, and an example I use for that is uh this is backed into Minnesota, and and Mark Balkowicz uh helping me come up with the uh analogy that a cable parts of a system are like panes of glass that are dirty. I used to say that parts of a system were like stair steps. Every single piece of equipment you and every single single cable you have puts it out and has an output that's inferior to the input.

1:17:10 Uh, and anytime you have a stair step that doesn't go down as far, the whole staircase didn't go down as far. Mark, who's blind, turned me on to the visual analogy of having multiple panes of glass, and you can take any one of them, clean it, put it back in, and you have a clearer view. It doesn't match one matter which one you took out.

1:17:28 But if they weren't just neutrally gray foggy, but say it was a red coloration, uh, and you take out that pane of glass and you put one back in that doesn't have the red coloration, well, you have less red, but you still you're still red, you're still pink. Uh and you you take out another pane of glass and you put it back, you replace it with one that doesn't have the color, you still have the color, but you have less of it.

1:17:53 And then very often, somebody doing that process, the last time pin of glass, the last component, the last cable that has that red coloration, the difference between any red coloration and no red coloration is more profound than the difference between some red and 10 times as much. We're not amplitude sensitive.

1:18:14 Think about decibels. Think of it, it's we're we're we're logarithmic, we're not linear. Uh, so if you don't like the fine-grained irritation of a particular cable brand I'm thinking of, then you're not going to get rid of that until you have gotten rid of every cable from that manufacturer. Uh, so there that is an argument for a loom of somebody else's cable.

1:18:38 Uh, but it's not a universal recommendation that it's necessary to have a loom. It might be what you arrive at as a result of having changed cables one at a time to be a cable that was better than what you had before.

1:18:52 Question 10. An audiophile has up to $10,000 to spend to upgrade the cables of an existing high-end system. It's a basic system of DAC to preamp to amplifier to speakers, which is three power cords, two pairs of interconnects, one pair of speaker cables. How would you allocate the budget among those power cords, interconnect and speaker cables?

1:19:13 And importantly, what is the philosophy behind that allocation? Eric.

1:19:19 So, in my view, the most important component of anybody's system is your speakers. So I'd take half of it and put it in the speaker cables that I believe are going to be most effective relative to that thing. Um, and then they'd have um you know the rest of it roughly 50-50 between power cables and then they're connected.

1:19:40 Ralph, how would you allocate?

1:19:45 Well, I I think the speaker cables are arguably the they're the one thing that you you can't, you know, they're they're not going to be predictable. You have to have what's right for your amps and speakers. So that's where I would start. Um for power cables, I would say the equipment that draws the most power should have the heaviest cables because power cables sound the way they do due to voltage drop, which is very measurable.

1:20:14 Uh, in terms of interconnect cables, uh, the question uh has some problems with it, in my opinion, because um, you know, how long are the interconnect cables going to be? My speakers in my room here are a certain distance apart. I could probably run single-ended and make that work. Um but uh, you know, if when it when you're talking about single-ended cables, I like to keep them as short as possible because I don't like the errors that they create.

1:20:43 Uh so it's tricky answering that question for me.

1:20:47 Bill. Uh well, I think if we just come up with some standardized lengths, because Ralph touched very pertinently on uh somebody I I prefer monoamps and and preferably one foot long speaker cables, which then means you can buy really expensive cables because you only need one foot. So the efficacy of the money is greater the shorter the cable.

1:21:11 There are too many people who think that oh, it's a short cable, it doesn't matter. Actually, I you purposely use short cables in the evaluation process because long cables have, and and Ralph also referred to this, he didn't use the word smoothing, but there's a general loss of information. It's like a lens going farther and farther out of focus.

1:21:29 The individual sins are less visible in a longer cable. They're cumulatively they damp the dynamics and the and the articulation of the relationship, but the actual character flaws of the cable are most visible, orally visible, the shorter the cable is. But assuming that it's an eight-foot pair of speaker cable, which is the most common length, that they're one-meter interconnects, which is the most common length, that they're two-meter power cords, which is the most common length, then to me, uh it's a third of the budget in the speaker cable is a third of the budget in the two interconnects, because generally two to one is about right between the one-meter cable and the eight-foot pair of speaker

1:22:07 cables. And power cords, um, if it's if it's a source component and it's constant current, you don't need a big cable. Uh so it's not an absolute. Ralph's comments were about a power amp, but not about a pre-amp or a DAC, which does not have uh the current demands of a uh that a power amp has. Uh, and current compression is not a problem when on the when it's constant current.

1:22:33 Uh so there are these other variables, but uh going back to I divide it in thirds, with uh the power cords being the least expensive individual and the speaker cable being the most expensive, and they interconnect in between.

1:22:49 Matthew. I agree with the guys there. Uh generally, what we've got is the uh what we've heard is that the loudspeaker cables are the most important, most most uh that I would spend on on out of the ten thousand dollars, I'd spend most of or half of that on speaker cables. Uh the loudspeaker room interface is essentially the greatest thing, the biggest thing that makes the most difference in the sound of the system.

1:23:17 So I would want the amplifier, loudspeaker cables, and loudspeakers to be attended to first, with about half that budget. Uh, and then the interconnects. Um I would be spending oh, somewhere about 20% of the budget on each of those interconnects, and about 15, 20, 25 of the budget on you've got three power cords.

1:23:44 So my numbers may not add up correctly, but I hope you've got the gist of things. I'd start with the speaker cables, putting about 40-50% of my budget there, and about 30 or so percent of my budget towards the interconnects, and about the last 20% or so to power cords, three of them. Galen, how would you make the allocation?

1:24:05 I'm pretty close to what the guys are saying. Our standard links are five feet and ten feet, ten on the speaker cable, five on the interconnects. We're not talking about the majority of the market that don't have monoamps. So generally 10-foot speaker cables are typical, but speaker cables have a tough time because they're going into a highly reactive load driven by an amplifier that doesn't like to drive reactants.

1:24:27 So again, most of your money in your speaker cable. Uh your interconnects would be second in line because they're driving a fixed time pedance load. So you're basically looking at a pure voltage transfer function. So the cable's got a lot easier target to hit. Nothing's moving, it just sits there. Uh so then I would put, you know, the next lump would be in your uh interconnect cables and last would be your power cables.

1:24:49 All right, simply because modern equipment has such good power power supplies and the like compared to the old days, too. I think we tend to not highlight that enough, how good a power supply actually is and how they're isolated compared to the old days. So definitely your power supply cables would not allocate percentage of the budget.

1:25:10 Now, that said, you wouldn't have to spend 10 grand at iconoclass to do all that either.

1:25:15 Okay. Question 11. What is the biggest misconception audiophiles have about cables? Bill Ah.

1:25:25 Um, as in the most counterproductive, uh, is failing to recognize that while not honoring the need for oral aesthetic compatibility between components in the system is near fatal. Uh, that power that I mentioned this before, cable should be chosen for its neutrality. It's the only part of the system along with power products, and maybe switches, but not certainly not to accent streamers.

1:25:50 Uh that neutrality is is is the highest value. Uh and being less articulate or less dynamic does not prevent you from enjoying music, but character flaws do. So the fact that the every other part of the system needs to be chosen with acknowledgement, not being blind to the fact that there is a character in the speaker, there is a character in the amp, there is a character in the DAC, and that they need to come together to form an acceptable non-character to the individual listener.

1:26:20 Uh, but cable uh should never be chosen for its compatibility with anything, it should only be chosen on an as close to an absolute basis as possible. Eric.

1:26:32 I think just uh you know, based on what I've heard, uh the biggest misconception is anybody that thinks that if you can't measure it, you can't hear it. You can't um we just haven't figured out how to measure it yet. So uh just make sure that when you're building your chain that you get a chance to listen to it in your environment at home.

1:26:56 And uh know that you know the cables are you know they're moving the signal. So you want something that's gonna move the signal cleanly within the gear that you spent good money on.

1:27:07 Matthew. Well, I think the biggest thing that somebody should be looking for uh in getting cables is to seek neutrality, clarity, transparency, the kinds of things that will give them a more revealing sound, a more uh more lifelike sound, something that sounds closer to the live performance. That would be the thing that I would be saying that audiophiles need to be looking toward and listening for.

1:27:46 Ralph.

1:27:48 Uh well you you asked about the biggest misconception. So to me that's a misunderstanding. Um and uh you know, I see one of the bigger Debates in uh uh cables being you know is balanced better than single-ended or vice versa. And uh that seems to um come up to a draw because a lot of people hear balance line setups that aren't set up properly, and they have colorations that uh shouldn't actually be there.

1:28:21 Um so um my feeling is there's a misconception about how balance lines work. I think that's the biggest misconception I've run into.

1:28:30 Galen, what do you think is the biggest misconception most AudioFLs make?

1:28:35 Easy one. The measurements we can make on cable, and I do it every day that show there are absolutely measurable differences between any cable you give me that are going to show differences. The people that claim cable are all the same, curiously, they don't want to make those exact same measurements that I do to show they're clearly different.

1:28:55 They only make the measurements that don't look different because that's their argument, and that just kind of really PO's me. All right. So once you get that ground rule set, you got to look at them and say, hey, this is analog, it's based on superposition. If you know anything about analog, it's a death by a thousand cuts.

1:29:11 Everything adds, every link to the chain adds something. How can you look at these differences that are truly measurable and claim cable's all the same? You can't do it. So that's the biggest misconception people have. And we have a whole kind of papers on the iconoclass website that show all these measurements between even our cables showing how they're definitely different.

1:29:31 Uh, so some people will make a cable and listen to it, but they don't want to reverse engineer to feel, you know, determine why does it sound like it sounds? Iconoclass, we chose to do it backwards because we're building, we're we're a measurement-based company. I decided to design cable with the measurements that are accurate and reliable and repeatable and correct, designed a cable going forward and seeing what the end product sounds like.

1:29:57 Turned out it sounds really damn good. So iconoclass exists today. Uh, so we're kind of the odd man out to ask that question because our cables are designed specifically around that question. What can we measure? And those tertiary elements that we don't know how to measure correctly yet, if they don't have a proper analog foundation, how can they possibly leverage themselves to give you the best benefit, whether it be a new plastic, new conductor, what have you?

1:30:22 But the foundation has to exist and it has to be correct. We can measure that, we can make that. Uh, so that's my biggest beef about audio files is that they are they're being taught that cable's all the same. Uh no, we can measurably show that they're different.

1:30:40 On to the music segment. Who has a music recommendation for us tonight?

1:30:45 Cool Waters online chat question. Oh, I'm sorry. Can I just answer Bob Coolwaters the last the end of the chat? Why is my favorite interconnect uh sure an unshielded cable? Uh, because that I think actually gets uh in some ways to the heart of what we're talking about.

1:31:03 Sure, yeah.

1:31:04 Shielded cable absolutely sounds worse, uh, just like you're you feel a whole lot worse with the bandage when you don't have a cut underneath it to protect. A shield is a band is a bandage that causes damage. A shield picks up much more RF than what it's shielding, and depending on on uh on how well that is drained, it could that RF capacitely couples into the conductor and can be worse than having no shield.

1:31:28 Uh uh actually, let me interject. That's not true. All right, 35 years at Beldon guarantees you that's not true. If you design a shield right, you're getting over 110 dB of isolation. If you make it wrong, you can end up interjecting more noise into the center of the cable. What a shield does, however, isn't a problem with shielding RF, which it does really, really well.

1:31:49 What happens is it generates cap unbalance between the inside surface of the shield and the inside surface of the conductors and logarithmically mucks that all up. That's why a UTP Ethernet cable can have much better measured internal electricals than a shielded one. Why would you use a shield? Because if you're in an environment where the noise coming in is so much worse than the signal, it just won't work well without it.

1:32:11 You use it as a necessary evil for that reason. But it still is a it's still getting rid of RF better than not having a shield. He doesn't have a problem with RF though. So he can take advantage of getting rid of that because our benefit to him is higher.

1:32:26 We're basically agreeing because I said it was conditional. Uh it's local circumstance. Audio research used when they sold Interconnect, sold balanced, sold shielded and unshielded because the unshielded sounded better much of the time. I never did that uh because telling a customer to judge uh for themselves is not uh what the what the customer wants, they want predictability.

1:32:50 Uh and audio research eventually got out of the cable business, but it's it's it's a very pertinent question. PS Audio, Paul McGowan years ago, it said, you know, take a piece of tape and lay two bare wires against it, uh masking tape, uh, and you can make an interconnect that's better than most of what's on the market at almost any price.

1:33:07 And he's right. If I can if I can point out something here, I would say that the um the guy asking the question is dealing with a uh a logical fallacy of um limited sample size. It is probably true that what he has experienced is correct, but it does not mean that Air V shielded cable sounds worse than what he's got.

1:33:30 100%. It's local, local, local. We're talking about context. Uh 100%.

1:33:35 Yeah, shielded cable is going to be more expensive because you have to compensate for what the shield is doing, which makes the cable bigger, stiffer, bulkier. But you can do it, it's more expensive. But you might be solving a problem you don't have if you bought the similar product with no shield on it all, and you go, well, gee, it sounds just as good, and it costs me 30% less because I'm not paying for all this shielding that I don't need.

1:33:54 So, like what Bill was saying, it depends. All right, but but no, a good shield properly terminated will give you over well over 100 plus dB RF isolation in a good coax or balance circuit.

1:34:06 Well, depending on the frequency, because it's your, I don't know, is it was Steve Lamping your former boss? I don't know what your interaction would have been.

1:34:12 It depends on the transfer impedance, it's going to vary across frequency because you're right, it's measured in million per meter, and it's going to vary based on the frequency. Absolutely, Bill. Onto the music as well.

1:34:25 Eric, you first music recommendation.

1:34:28 So um I've found a you know, one of the things I I love about uh rune, and I'm a rune user, is that uh it cues up music that I've never heard before. And as a 70s guy, it's nice to get out of my rut once in a while and hear something new. And something popped up uh here today by um a band called Fontaine's DC.

1:34:53 They're an Irish band, and they've got a brand new album that comes that officially gets released tomorrow, um, called Dopamine Chamber. And uh they've got a single called Marianne that I just really liked. It was uh cool and modern and spatial, and um you know it was one of those where you're you're listening and suddenly you look up and go, What's that?

1:35:19 So I enjoyed it. It was new, and and it officially comes out, uh like I said, on the on the 16th. So I guess uh day after tomorrow is the official release date, but it's already out uh floating around uh in the ether, and um I would recommend it.

1:35:35 Any other recommendations?

1:35:38 Uh and have your friends come over. We had a hi-fi night the other couple of days, and three or four of the guys came over, and I have quo buzz now, which I resisted getting. Now that I have it, I'm not sure why, but I have it so they could all pop their music on there evaluating my new speakers. And some of the music these guys came up with I like that I didn't even know existed.

1:36:02 So it's always fun to have other people come into your life and play different things for you. So uh highly recommended and also put it on what did they call it, radio where you just kind of let it go.

1:36:14 Do you have a specific title for us to recommend?

1:36:17 Are you kidding me? They had like four or five different things. I kept stealing their music by hitting the little heart thing, which throws it onto my tracks list. Then you can go back to that song and find the album that it came off of and listen to the whole album and see if it was a one-hit wonder or if you like that particular group.

1:36:33 Okay, anybody have specific recommendations for us?

1:36:36 The the cut that comes that people most often ask me what that is when I use it like an exponent to try to hear what's going on in somebody's room. Um, is a Vancouver-based group. Actually, the woman, women behind it have been in multiple groups, but when the name of the group was The Be Good Tanyas, the album called Chinatown has a cover of Townsband's dance song, one of my favorite composers and poets, uh, Waiting Around to Die.

1:37:05 And it is symphonic. It's it's it's singer-songwriter folk, but it is symphonic in its musical presentation. Uh, and I especially love when playing that for somebody, and they say, I can't even tell where the speakers are, if it's a good enough system. Uh, so that's just one piece of music that uh I happen to personally love very very much, that uh is also extremely useful for very demanding.

1:37:30 You can enjoy it on the Bose, hundred dollar Bose that I use in the hotel room while I'm here. Uh and I can enjoy it even more on uh my my rock boards.

1:37:39 Um Matthew Ralph, any recommendation?

1:37:42 Well, I would uh recommend if you haven't heard uh Steve Tibbets. Um you know, uh every time I play that it shows, people always ask me what it is. Um, you know, I usually play his earlier stuff, like uh Safe Journey is uh arguably my favorite. Um so anyway, Steve is a local musician here in the Twin Cities, but uh you never see him play in here.

1:38:05 Uh his stuff is nicely recorded, and uh he's an excellent guitarist. Uh I would put him uh sort of not really jazz, not really rock, not really progressive, but uh some kind of mixture of all those, plus uh some folk ethnicities as well. He's uh uh uh traveled around the world quite a lot and collected a lot of different uh influences.

1:38:32 Anybody else? Okay. I have not a new piece of music, but a reissue. Uh the Annette Askvik track Liberty, which has been out for a few years. Uh Annette, I think, for the Vienna show, released a limited run of Liberty on 45 single, and I got it, and it's quieter vinyl than the regular full album at 33 and a third.

1:38:58 And I think it sounds absolutely great. And so I recommend Annette Askvik's Liberty reissue if you happen to like that. This has been great, gentlemen. Thank you so much.

1:39:06 Thank you. Thank you, Ron.

1:39:08 Thanks, Ron.

1:39:09 Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye bye.