any suggestions for cables? - Page 16

To look all pwetty.

If only I had inserted a Monoprice or Blue Jeans link, I would have seen a happy face.

If you personally want to spend the money necessary to buy the ridiculously expensive cable on that site, go for it.

Recommending others do so (unless you can validate what they bring to the table for 100X the cost of MP or BJ cables) is poor advice.

Isn't "Audio Revelation" (in the link) just some guy's condo address?

Nope, just a +1.

The frown was about the association of a great studio with such absurd snake oil.

Yes, which might explain the following from the site:
"We are pleased and proud to have such a wonderful collection of high end gear on active display in a comfortable and homey setting"

Ah yes, I thought that seemed like a familiar name.

All the pics on the website of the various equipment are shown in the condo.

FWIW, the owner, Jay Kaufman, is a PhD Physicist, I think, and Audio Revelation is just a hobby/side job for him.

Not that it matters, but I wonder if that condo is strictly a sales/demo location and not part of an actual home.

Can't say that wouldn't be a fun side job, though the startup cost to get the gear in the pictures would give me pause. I might have to abandon the "high end cables" in my imaginary toy store

Hehe .

Oh, did you know that if you proceed to do as you say, you still would not have Wasabi on your cables? What passes as Wasabi in the west is not Wasabi at all. It is horseradish with food coloring designed to masquerade as one. The real deal is vastly different. It is less hot (so you can enjoy more of it), has a real fresh taste, and aroma that is amazing as it is being grated. Here is a not so great shot I took of them in the greens/fruit market in Tokyo:



You can see that it doesn't look anything like horseradish. Check out the price: $1,000 yen or in today's exchange rate, $11. This is for each one! These are about 2 to 3 ounces each so on a per pound basis, it would cost about $70! With horseradish costing $3 per pound, you can imagine why folks substitute it for the real thing. BTW, the above is actually cheap. The very large ones are prized and each one goes for $70 to $80! Top sushi restaurants would grate one of those per course for a few people.

The reason for the high cost is that they are very difficult to cultivate. A few years back some people in Oregon managed to grow some and took a sample to a sushi restaurant. The story goes that the owner got angry and threw them out of the place! Puzzled, they asked why. They were told that they did not want their customers to taste the real thing as once they did, they would demand it and there would be no way they could afford to serve it! And they were right. Once you have tasted real Wasabi, you don't want to go back to the imitation. It is a bigger difference than between real crab and imitation one.

So as you see, even sarcasm requires some knowledge to stick . If you know better, then your preferences for what is good, changes. And with proper basis per above.

Google map's aerial image shows it to be all residential area which would prohibit a commercial space due to zoning code. It's his home.

^^^^

Typical Amir - always assuming you know something others don't.

I'm well aware that real wasabi isn't generally served at low end sushi restaurants, though some of the better ones now do. Your story about the sushi restaurant is just another of your urban myths -I know the folks in Oregon you refer to and went to a number of sushi restaurants with them and their fresh wasabi and we were universally welcomed. Real wasabi root is still readily available in America if you care to spend 5 minutes attempting to locate it, and I've frequently brought it to sushi restaurants where the chefs and owners know me. The secret is sharing.

BTW, the wasabi root in your picture is low grade (hydroponically farmed) which explains the low cost you quote - no quality sushi restaurant in Japan would be caught serving that to patrons. High quality wasabi from semi wild aquaculture (sawa) sells for many times that in the better Tokyo markets. If I wanted to return your overblown pomposity in kind I would school you on how to grow wasabi at home, something I've done a few times, but I'll leave the foolishness to you.

All of which still has nothing to do with the magical cables you tout.
Edited by bfreedma - 1/2/13 at 1:46pm

This thread has really gotten very,very funny!
Wasabi with that?...just replaced my power cords on my Sony LCD
And on my oppo 103br WOW..was not expecting this
Big of a difference!..even my 6 yrs old son asked if this was a 3=d movie,which it is not
Jps labs power cords!

Can your wife tell the difference from the kitchen with the dishwasher running? How about the dog?

Yes..they sure can..the dog barks every time the doorbell on TV rings..you can tell the difference from the other side of the room..everything's running into a Furman elite conditioner..so don't matter if DW is running or not...dam dog..quiet!... Its just the fed ex truck on the TV...geezzz...for those non believers..you have no idea what your missing out on..my neighbor does sound effects for Pixar productions..even he knows there's a huge difference in cables..just face the truth and go have some wasabi!

Mcnarus says, ” But that's the whole point, Amir. If they had preconceived notions, that would bias the results. If they didn't, there's no bias, and no reason to reject the results of the test.”

I said they did not have preconceived notions about the numerical value of jitter. Taking that way does nothing to change bias. What if there was no audible distortion there? What if there was distortion at all levels? These are the reasons we don’t in blind tests put the user in charge of selecting the parameters being tested.

Imagine this test for a new drug: they give patients 10 bottles of a drug with the active ingredient ranging from 1 to 10 milligrams, in 1 milligram steps. They then ask them to self-medicate and keep increasing the dosage until they felt better. Would you believe any outcome from this trial? I hope not. That is why we use a placebo in some of the trials and perform the test double blind. In absence of that, subjects may very well assume “more is better” and give us false outcomes.

What if I repeated The Dolby test at home and came and told you that I could hear jitter at 0.01 nanoseconds. Would you believe me? What would stop me from imagining it? And what control you have in place to catch that?

So no, we can’t give control of the test to the user and say the test is blind. The tester is in charge of the parameter being tested and hence by definition, it is a sighted test.

I have done tests like this and know this first hand. We were developing a new version of our audio encoder at Microsoft and I spent days at home optimizing a few of the parameters. I had no idea what the parameters did. I only thought that if I changed them, the sound would get better or worse. So I kept playing with them ‘till I found what I thought were optimal values. I handed them back to my team and they produced a set of blind tests for before/after. You know what? I could not hear any difference! Here I thought I was hearing every incremental change but at the end, it was all for nothing. My team explained that while I was optimizing the values with fractional numbers, the program never used the fractions! So objectively I was wrong too. Darn it .

” Blinding is simply a tool you use to control for certain forms of bias. What uncontrolled bias exists in the test you're talking about, Amir, and how would you go about controlling for it?”

I thought Bigus provided a method for this. But here is more. The first thing to do is take the control of the knob from tester and give it to a proctor hidden from the tester. This is what audiologists do to test your hearing and optometrists use to find out what lenses you need for your eyeglasses. The subject is asked questions that he answers, not knowing what is really going on. He doesn’t know if a number is going up, or down. He simply answers questions.

To reduce the time it takes to run the test, a binary search could be used. The proctor would start with “zero” jitter and ask if it is audible compared to a reference. If the answer is no, then you turn the dial to max, say, 200 nanoseconds and ask again. If the subject still doesn’t hear it then you are done with that tester, or test in general if others can’t hear it. Assuming they did hear the max, then you go down to the middle which in this example would be 100. If they still hear it, you jump to 50 nanoseconds. Then 25, then 12, etc. Once you get a negative response, you reverse direction and split the distance by two again. Eventually you wind up with a number.

But you are not done yet. You should repeat the test again to see if the data is reliable. Assuming it is, then you take that value and run randomized tests against the reference – just like my team did to me. If the subject can’t reliably hear the difference then that invalidates the results for this tester. And if no one can hear it, then you give and declare that such tests are harder than they look .

Never have so many words said so little as in this thread.

I don't like wasabi, or horseradish for that matter.

Lol...horseradish is awesome on smoked ham!...especially if you connect the two with some cardas vahalla interconnects!

As usual, nothing but anecdotal evidence. Since the difference is so big, it should jump off the page when you measure it. Then you can post the measurements and claim victory....

This is the best part, who can argue with that?

Thread over.

Are those the ones with high compression headlights and dual chrome dipsticks?

I'd seen that site before because I was actually day-dreaming not long ago about doing something similar, so I did a little research online and found that that guy beat me to it (I live not far away).

I don't quite have the collection of equipment in my apartment that he does!

Oh, it's definitely a residential area, but I'm not sure that's his primary residence. I think it's a "second home" kind of place.
It's quite possible that it violates zoning codes, but I doubt the people who care about that are aware of it..

Ha!.. No,nice cables..but way way overpriced!
..and for the record..sorry not a HUGE improvement in my power cord upgrade..just a very nice improvement.. Not huge..sorry for getting carried away!
But..still a very,very nice improvement over the stock ones

Even I know there are huge differences.
Some are cheap, some more are reasonable and well made, some are expensive and a few are in the stratosphere.

You still haven't told us what the bias is. Yes, they know they're adding distortion as they turn up the dial. But that's not the question. The question is, when does it become audible? So what is the bias that affects how they answer that question?
No, but I wouldn't believe you if you said the sky was blue.
Nothing stops you from imagining it. That's why a single-subject test would be useless in this case. My control in this case would be a large panel, not dominated by underhanded salesmen who sell overpriced DACs to suckers.
This doesn't surprise me. It's a single-subject test, and the subject is someone with an undeservedly outsized sense of himself. Of course he's going to insist he heard things he really can't hear.
Again, what bias is this addressing, and how does it address it? If the bias you're thinking of is the well-known tendency to overhear differences (to borrow a phrase from a former employee of yours), this method doesn't solve that problem, either.
Just to be clear, I am not claiming that the jitter test in question is the be-all and end-all of listening tests. It most certainly is not. It's a test to develop an estimate of a threshold, that's all. Yes, it should be checked by other tests. And as I argued earlier, I would expect this test to estimate a threshold that is too low. But given how high their estimate was, compared to typical jitter readings we see in audio equipment, a more precise test is unlikely to tell us anything practical that we do not already know—that is, all of us who don't have an economic stake in the matter.

I know but why risk their historic reputation for selling snake oil cables? I mean everything about the studio screams money, especially with the B&W speakers in there. Selling cables with their name is great for them but what were they using before that, just good old Belden wire?

What is amazing to me is that you have kept a straight face through all of this, leading on all these people, 16 pages and almost 500 posts! As a troll sir, you are one of the best!
To add: My dog barks at TV doorbells and delivery trucks too. But since I only have a pair of Energy RC-10's hooked up to a Pioneer VSX-1018 receiver using 14 ga zip cord, I am sure she does not hear them with the same clarity.

Simple, money trumps "historic".

I doubt they have any single ended cables in play in the studio, even for speakers, it's most likely all balanced cables given the miles of spaghetti in there.

Since speakers are floating loads, it is hard to hook them up so that they don't respond to just the difference in the voltage in the two wires in any speaker cable that works at all. They perform a lot like a balanced input, and a very good one at that.

I was thinking of typical connectors you see on the back of powered studio monitors, not many use RCA's.