Lets talk AntiCables...;) - Page 9

Oh but he does post lots of engineering stuff on his site. It's haphazard way it's put together (cut and pasted) as well as the lack of relevance to audio signals that gives him away as a fraud.

As long as he keeps a large radius of curvature, the insulation should be ok. LN2 isn't that cold, so I suspect even formvar may survive. Polyimide certainly would be great even through liquid helium, I do that a lot. In fact, polyimid is the only plastic known which remains a little flexible at 4.5K.

If I were to do it however, I'd first inspect the surface for crazing. Copper's TCE is 16ppm/C and all the coatings are in the 60 to 90 range, so a thick enough film may not survive. I've never dunked magnet style wire after twisting however, nor twisted after dunk, so can't say if it's a reasonable thing to do. When I say "dunk", I really mean a slow and gentle cooling process.. If you drop it into LN2, after the initial vaporization which occurs without contact, the liquid will touch the surface of the insulation and that is when the lack of thermal conductivity of the plastic will cause cracking of the outer surface. Between LN2 and LH2 temperatures, the heat capacity of the wire dissapears so this is not a big problem.

It can be done, but you have to really make sure you do not create excessive tensile stress on the outer side of a bend. Hence my statement of keeping the loop very large.

Too harsh and too wide a brushstroke for my taste. Web design and public speaking were not taught during my undergraduate studies, so I personally couldn't lambast anyone for presentation. I'll stick to engineering facts and point out errors.

jn

My favorite quote of the thread

Who's getting lots of snow tonight? We have 3" new and expect 5" or more. From Howell mich.

Links in 246 don't work.

The software can detect a difference between the files, but your ears can't. Why does any of this suggest a flaw with DBT's?

Besides, who knows how this test was actually performed. I suspect he'd get a difference from the initial file if he switched back to the first cable. But, based on josh6113's posts at the blu-ray.com forum, this test was set up, run, uploaded, and posted in an hour or two, hardly time to do any kind of controlled testing. I think you'll find that this poster ignores factors such as expectation bias and brings no scientific rigor to the project.

Because it won't let you hear what is obviously there!

Some will probably never understand what a controlled test is or means.

I believe that you have just established a method for evaluating cables known as sighted evaluation that is well known to be highly flawed due to its generation of a host of false positives, as your gold standard for all other tests.

You have further criticized an alternative method that solves this major problem of sighted evaluations, on the grounds of speculation, not actual testing.

I shouldn't stop you - you are well on your way to discrediting your ideas in the eyes of any reasonable person.

I doubt any person properly informed on audio cables would be. It's not like there is something new to be expected after so much has already been done by experts and wannabes.

Well, I don't think it did show that but it did show that you perceived a change. Now, one needs to find out if that perception is reality or just a brain fooling the person into a false reality, an imagined one.

Boy, that is one hideous file sharing site. At every chance it tries to dump some other programs onto your machine, going out of its way to confuse you on what the real download link is. I believe AVS allows such enclosures. Can you try using that or some other cleaner site? I am interested in listening to your tests but won't try use the sources you provided.

......oh boy....here we go again.....sigh...

The thread had been dead for nearly a week.

It will never die!!!

CLEAR!!!

I'd say controlled test parameters to include ambient temperature, atmospheric pressure (for the drivers), amplifier case temp, etc. are a necessity. Where you stand in the room during the test will make a difference. Microphone placement, quality, mounting, airflow, etc. are paramount for an objective test. These tests must be made in an audio room that is free from room harmonics/feedback. I'd actually venture to say that laser imaging of the speaker drivers would give you the best results as opposed to a microphone.

Wouldn't you have to run the test multiple times with each cable. Alternating the cables between tests to ensure the transistors (or tubes) temps are not affecting the amplification of the signals. This is a very hard test to run and get the same results twice. Even in the most controlled environment. There are far too many variables to consider.

If you buy the cables, do you like them? Be happy. LOL

I do have a question that I have never really been able to nail down. When speaking on the topic of stranded versus copper wire (supposing they are both of adequate gauge for the signal run), do the twists in stranded wire act differently at higher freqs than low freqs? I know high freqs tend to travel along the "skin" or outside of the wire (hence waveguides for microwave freqs) but audio doesn't go that high.

With solid wire, aren't I going to get more or less inductive cancellation at certain freqs, thus changing the audio output? Twisted wires are going to oppose the rapid change in polarity more than solid would, right?

Hi Climber,

This is my understanding:

Solid and stranded cable are almost identical, electrically. The twists in the strands are not electrically relevant, because the electrons do not restrict themselves to any single strand. In fact, stranded copper wire would behave the same as a solid copper wire that had voids within, assuming that the voids are arranged such that they don't affect the gauge, as they are in stranded copper.

Typically, there is no difference in inductance between stranded and solid copper.

Appreciate the reply brother. I was thinking not of the electron flow with stranded, but with EMF and the opposing/aiding lines from strands in the twisted strands.

You know what, now that I think about it, I'm an idiot. Stranded wire would only have EMF cancellation if the individual strands were insulated from one another... Stranded simply has more surface area. I feel kinda dumb.

It turns out that insulating the strands all by itself has almost no effect at all because the voltage drop along identical strands identically tightly wound into the same bundle have the same voltage at all points along them. If they are tightly wound then their magnetic fields couple well, and they tend to act just like a large solid conductor.

If you study the technology of large diameter (high current) interconnects for high frequency signals (mostly radio transmitters, large switchmode power circuits, etc.) the strands are not only insulated but also significantly physically separated from each other.

http://www.osco.uk.com/products/cable/litz-wire

These pictures illustrate both modern and traditional ways to make this kind of cable:









It turns out extensive technical studies have shown that type 4 through 6 is the stuff that really works.

http://thayer.dartmouth.edu/inductor/papers/litzj.pdf

Hey, I found the solution. JPS labs has cables for only about $10,100 per 8 foot cable... They have power cords too. They're much more reasonable at $3,400 per 2m cable.

Its that last 1.5 feet that is so darned expensive, $6700/ Maybe they can cut it off and sell it for the same?