any suggestions for cables? - Page 23

The same "middle" place as in the "debate" between
(1) someone who understands that earth is 4.5bn years old, plus or minus, and
(2) someone who "believes" that the earth is 6k years old, with caveman kids riding dinosaurs for fun and all that.

Which is to say, of course, that the "middle 'truth'" is actually all the way at one "extreme." That extreme being, well, reality.

Thing is, the mere existence of a nonsense and BS position does not move the truth to some middle ground between "truth" and "nonsense." Not everything is a dialectic. Some things can in fact be simply answered "true" or "false."
Edited by DS-21 - 1/15/13 at 6:42pm

Positing a middle ground between science and anti-science makes no sense to me.

I assume you use the term "pro audio expert" with tongue in cheek. One or two might have some peripheral experience in the pro world, but nothing that is very noteworthy. You have one guy that makes blanket statements for the industry as in "we in the pro audio world", yet when he is name dropping about the placed he has worked, the references are terribly outdated (the 80s seems to be the last time he was anywhere). Another is a "consultant" whose only consulting business has been posting opinions on usenet and trying to get a rise out of people. Another is a sales "engineer" for an amp company who has never designed an amplifier in his life. Yet another sells plans for speaker cabinets to fanboys for designs that have been summarily panned by pros that actually work in the industry.
The fact is that opinions vary in the pro world. Some believe that cables make a big difference, some don't. I have noticed that the believers usually wind up having more skill in creating good sound, but that has just been my experience. I would never claim to speak for all professionals, or all scientists, as the experts here do ad nauseum.

And most here would agree with you.

Why? Because (in this context) it is in alignment with our stance.

So the corollary is we would entertain a scientifically sound dbt that found a contrary result??

See next.

Have you data that 'disproves' the findings of harmon on this question? You know, that they found (in dbts...see above how important that is) that at the very least acoustic treatments are not the panacea that is commonly portrayed?

Indeed, have you *any* dbts that actually back up your claims of the effectiveness of room treatment as claimed in your post??? SURELY there would be many such dbts on the websites of the acoustic manufacturers? Just note your descriptors..terrifically better sq etc etc etc.

All he has said is that the currently available dbts that have been done on room treatments do not back up your claim blindly. But to you that is somehow proof of creating strawmen and not replying to points you did not make. Have you the dbts that show otherwise on the question of room treatment? Any?

In other words, that would be YOU responding to points he made. If you do not, then who is the kettle?

 

It's very difficult (almost impossible) to do double blind tests on acoustic treatments. The listeners would need to be blindfolded and you would need to find a way to switch from the treated to the untreated room within the limitations of auditory memory (a few seconds). If you can suggest a relatively straightforward way to conduct a blind AB test on acoustic treatments, I would be very interested. I am a huge fan of blind ABX testing.

 

Of course there are also some conditions which are so obvious that blind testing is not needed. For example, destroy your tweeter in one speaker and then listen - you do not need a blind ABX test to discern the good speaker from the broken speaker. 

 

Treatements alone will not guarantee good sound. But a properly treated listening room will always sound better than a similar untreated room. It's the reason every professional mixing room, editing suite and listening room is treated.

 

Please don't quote the Harmon example of a DBT on treatments. It is one test and Amirm has quoted it, in and out of context, more times than I care to recall.

Another thing to add to what I'd want to have in my envisioned audio themepark. Still a couple of billions short, any sponsors around?

That should be able to go without saying.

obviously not it seems.

for reasons not yet clear we *have* to discount harmons blind tests on room treatment.

yeah, I know.

thanks.

so difficulty for you is a reason to discount those that have been able to overcome what you cannot?

is there any particular reason you discount the harmon tests? They have the resources to do what is too difficult for you to do, and have published the results. Have you found flaws in their procedure? You are a fan of dbt's, but does that only extend to results that confirm your existing views?

in any case, as you have defined the arguments admissable (those contrary to your views seem to be the ones arbitrarily dismissed) there is not too much to talk about is there.

Why is this of interest to me? At least the cable believer who dismisses dbt's as untrustworthy is being true to his beliefs. OTOH those who are huge fans of dbts yet still only want to accept the results of dbts that align with their beliefs and reject the others are the people that truly fascinate me.

The above seems to be very shallow and excessively judgemental. The difficult of doing DBTs of speakers and other things like room treatments are so extreme. that there are only a few or perhaps only one place in the world that is equipped to do them. the worst thing about the work that is done at that one place is that the experiments are dominated by the priorities of its owners, and only a tiny fraction of the work that is done is ever reported. One can logically expect no better.

The Harman experiments are dominated by the priorities and preferences of Harman, and only a tiny fraction of the work that is done is ever reported.

The Harman experiments are dominated by the priorities and preferences of Harman, and only a tiny fraction of the work that is done is ever reported.

There is a certain understandable but oppressive narrowness and lack of transparency in the current situation.

I find this line of attack in support of cable mysticism to be irrational. Doing DBTs relating to cables is painfully simple in comparison to DBTs relating to speakers and acoustical treatments. AFAIK there never have been any cable magic proponents that ever lowered themselves to actually do blind tests, despite their relative ease.

Unlike speakers and acoustical treatments, there is no known scientific reason to believe that DBTs relating to magic cables would ever have a positive outcome. I see the above line of attack to be a smoke screen that covers up the poor faith, technical incompetency and perhaps even malfeasance of the apparently fraudulent proponents of magic cables.

 

Arny has answered more eloquently than I could have and his answer is exactly in line with my own thinking.

 

You are verging on a personal attack on me with your repeated "it's too difficult for you" line. As I, and Arny, have pointed out - it is not that it is difficult for *me* to conduct a sensible blind ABX test of acoustic treatments - it is next to impossible for anyone to do so. 

 

I agree with you that there "is not too much to talk about" with you. If you cannot see the difference between ABX testing cables and ABX testing acoustic treatments, so be it.

 

EDIT: incidentally, none of my position on the subject of 'magic cables' has anything to do with 'belief'. The notion that cables can make the differences to sound quality suggested by the cable evangelists is easily debunked by science. Belief has nothing to do with it.

Edited by kbarnes701 - 1/16/13 at 5:10am

I know you guys are having a lovely conversation and all, but I want to butt in with this: If we use a real time analyzer, we can see, graphically, that the acoustic properties of a space change, sometimes in a very significant way, when room treatments are used. Whether this change is for the better or worse is of course subject to proper, but difficult and expensive testing. Can the same be said about swapping one sufficiently-specced cable for another?

How about recording the room bare with a binaural dummy-head and then sending in some people to put up the acoustic panels and such... and record again (no moving the head inbetween)... and then do ABX listening in headphones? That ought to be able to give a clue to what has happened...

Usually when we are listening to room acoustics, we swivel our heads around at will. Kind of hard to duplicate with a dummy head!

Sure, I never said it would give the whole picture, I said 'a clue'. If one did it this way and couldn't hear a difference between the two, then it would call for a more detailed study. If you do hear a difference (statistically proven etc) than you can at least claim that you did alter the acoustics. The default hypotesis has to be "acoustic treatments make no difference", as that can be disproven.

Having a guy named TerryJ parroting the same failed arguments as a certain well-known poster is old news around here. It all becomes clear if you check out other forums where they both post.

That said your comment is 100% right on - the cliams of strong audible benefits for magic cables are easy to falsify on many grounds, both theoretical and practical. It takes a lot of chutzpah to mention cable magic and audible differences due to room acoustics in the same sentence, but some people don't let little technicalities like science or reason get in their way. ;-)

The differences one can see on the graphs produced by an RTA already prove that the acoustics are altered. The SOTA has moved well past that and we're into "which sound do people prefer".

I am unaware of anybody with any credibility who seriously believes that "Acoustic treatments (of a sufficient size and design) make no difference."

It is true that room treatments such as the Totem Beak would fit your bill:



The Beak is a bullet-shaped device, about 2" high by 1.5" in diameter,

$100 a pair!

http://www.stereophile.com/content/totem-acoustic-beak

"The difference was subtle yet significant. With a Beak atop each speaker, the highs seemed to have more clarity and extension, the percussion instruments greater presence, and Ana Caram's voice was more tightly focused in the soundstage. Without the Beaks, although everything was still there, the imaging was less sharply defined, the highs a bit subdued. I repeated the comparison many times with various CDs, with similar results. The degree of improvement varied with the recording, but I always preferred the sound with the Beaks in place."

That's uninteresting to me. I think it ought to be "how to get as close as possible to replicating the soundfield encoded on the media" rather.

At this point, that appears to be a very lofty goal.

We do seem to be charging pretty rapidly towards obtaining a very similar timbre as that heard during monitoring of the recording during production.

I think the closest you can get is "how to get as close as possible to replicating the soundfield that was present in the recording studio". In any case, to my mind that's the preference you've expressed, and I cannot gainsay that as a worthy goal... But it's still a preference.

Actually, that might be the easiest preference to prove. It should be very possible (albeit it's damned unlikely) for studios to provide RTA results for one or more tracks as a target towards which to shoot. When your graphs overlayed on their graphs show no difference, you've gone a long way towards matching things.

Doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted. Just because we can't today, we shouldn't give up.

That's seldom interesting. That only applied to something that's gone straight from mics to media without getting any particular mixing/mastering - and that close to seldom happens. There are lots of music that never even had an original event as it's been composed entirely synthetic. There's still something encoded that should be played, even if it's just a virtual environment.

My error, I should have said "mixing room", not "recording studio".

While I agree with the thrust of your comments (the order of priority is recording/speaker/room in some order, with everything else way down the list), mpre often than not, the "room treatments" are simply band-aids for speakers poorly chosen for the room. The "room treatment" industry benefits IMO tremendously from the fact that most loudspeakers sold are poorly designed devices that billow midrange energy into the room due to the lack of directivity control at the bottom of the tweeter's passband. (Easy rule of thumb: if the tweeter is flush on the baffle or in a little bullet above the baffle, and the midrange is not very small, it's crap.) With more thoughtfully-designed speakers, "room treatments" usually in my experience do more harm than good. Spaciousness is reduced and image focus is not really improved.

Though in any case they do in fact do something, which cannot in general be said about wires or other cons such as the Totem bauble Arny posted, etc.

A better idea, and one that solves the problem Arny presented albeit at a cost that would require a patron such as a telco, Harman or a good university, is what Andrew Jones et al. set up during the Eureka project. Instead of paraphrasing, here are Mr. Jones' words about the project.

"Starting with one of the University’s largest anechoic chambers, we put in an array of 32 loudspeakers surrounding the listener (front, back, and sides, both below and above) on a 5m arc (an imaginary sphere). Curtains were placed around the listener so they couldn’t see the speakers. If you went into the chamber and sat in the listening seat, and if only a stereo pair of speakers (left and right) were programmed to play, it would sound simply awful. (Never listen to music in an anechoic chamber, by the way. This is actually quite interesting when we come to talk about important room characteristics and the significant difference between how you set up for home theater vs. music reproduction.)

"We designed our own modeling program, such that we could model a simplified room (a rectangular room) and calculate the appropriate image. Imagine every surface is a mirror, so every reflection from the walls produces an image of the speaker (i.e., on the other side of the wall, at the appropriate angle, at the appropriate distance). We could calculate exactly where all of these images would appear, how far away (i.e., how attenuated), what angle the sound traveled from the original speaker to the listener. If you know the directional characteristics of your “simulated” speaker, you can calculate the frequency response, delay, and strength of every single image, and feed that into a DSP program. We built (this is early 1980s) a 32-channel DSP engine, which simply didn’t exist in those days. Our program simulation could calculate every image -- hundreds of images, if you calculate through the third reflection. We then created an algorithm to group the images from a particular direction (the ear has only a limited acuity to directional cues -- everything within a certain solid angle is fused into one image). We would look for groups to bring it back to 32 images, which we felt sufficient. For the decay of the sound from the farthest images, room reverberation, the calculations became impractical. Even with all that DSP, there was a limit. So our algorithm included reverberation calculations, the low-level end of the tail for a room of particular dimensions and approximate absorption characteristics. Without adding reverberation, it just never sounded right."
Source.

While to my knowledge little on the studies was formally published - on this point I'll be delighted if someone proves me wrong - some interesting developments emerged from them. The most obvious one is the KEF Uni-Q concentric driver.

Regardless, isn't this stuff much more interesting than mere wires?

 

I found the exact opposite. My speakers are well-regarded and quite a long way from 'crap' (M&K S150s for the mains and M&K SS150 Tripoles for the surrounds) but when I treated my room I found that spaciousness was considerably increased and imaging likewise. Of course, it is necessary to measure the room to determine what treatments one needs and where to put them and it is important to position the speakers and subs for optimum results. 

 

I agree, of course, that treatments are not a panacea and that one cannot slap them on the walls willy-nilly, and that it is important to use good speakers in the first place. But taking account of those caveats, one of the most significant improvements I made to my room and SQ was adding treatments/bass traps. And it all cost me way less than just one 'magic interconnect' ;)

You're referring to this speaker, right?



If I used google properly, I'm not surprised by your findings. That kind of horizontal mid-tweeter array will not result in an even horizontal pattern. Stereophile's measurement comments (actual measurements not available) for those speakers make note of a notch forming off-axis at 900Hz. So the reflections will not match the design-axis response in the midrange, and therefore it's probably better to reduce them as much as possible.

By contrast, a speaker with mids and tweeters arranged concentrically, such as the this "high end" Pioneer speaker;

or this relatively inexpensive KEF speaker:


or a speaker with separate mid(s) and a tweeter in a waveguide that matches the midrange(s)'s directivity at the top of the midrange(s)'s passband, such as the this Snell center channel (pic chosen because it's a good shot of the midrange-treble array):

or this Revel speaker:


can result in an even horizontal pattern, if done right. (There are plenty of examples of speakers that look like they might be well-designed, but measurements unfortunately show otherwise.)

It is likely that room treatments will improve the in-room performance of speakers not designed for an even horizontal pattern. While that's perhaps useful to most, it interests me little. I prefer to start with a basically well-designed speaker, with a pattern width appropriate to the room in which it will be used.

When one starts with basically well-designed speakers, i.e. speakers properly designed for an even horizontal pattern in the midrange, "room treatments" are more likely to be deleterious than beneficial. (I left out "bass traps," simply because most of the products sold as such...aren't.)

It's like a tinfoil hat for your speakers! Of course your speakers will sound better when they're no longer under the influence of CIA brainwaves. That's just common sense.

 

Yes - I'm referring to that speaker - the same one used by so many movie mixing and editing rooms all over the world ;) 

 

Thanks for your input but I won't be changing my speakers any time soon...

 

Neither, I guess, will:  

 

 

 

 

 

LOL! Don't forget the two largest post and mastering conglomerates who do 80% of all TV and movie work - Technicolor and Deluxe!

Alas that model is no longer available but fiercely sought after in the used market. And I don't mean Ebay either. Used equipment of this caliber rarely makes it down to Ebay.

Today the popular choices are powered speakers from Genelec and JBL. Lower end consumer speakers (best Buy stuff) is often used in non critical areas. But audiophile grade speakers are rarely found because when they want a high end speaker, they buy high end speakers. Not something that says it's high end with no specs to back it up.

 

Not to forget some memorable and/or award-winning (for Sound) movies mixed on M&K speakers:

 

 

Edited by kbarnes701 - 1/16/13 at 12:23pm