25 Apr
2012
25 Apr
'12
7:08 p.m.
On Apr 25, 2012, at 2:35 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
I should clarify. When I say "premium", I mean "costing more than
a dollar". I've had lots of easily verifiably nasty results from
using cables the width of shoestring, but it's not because of lack
of "cryogenically-treated, oxygen-free copper", it's just from a
lack of copper; they might as well have threaded a strand of magnet
wire through a rubber tube for all that's in there. No effective
EMI shielding to speak of, either. That does make a difference.
One of my friends, who is a professional recording engineer, always
points out to me that the audiophiles would just die if they saw the
types of cables that were actually used to *record* a lot of their
vaunted classics.
Premium cables
are effective (to a point) on analog systems,
There are certainly some awful cables about, but in my experinece ]1] any
good quality screedn cable is OK. The 'audiophool' cables do not make any
diference. though I think
Monster very much oversells it and charges a lot
more than you can get equivalently good cables for. They also
have complete nonsense like "premium power cables", which are
bogus because if you have noisy power, nicer power cables are
just going to transmit the noise more accurately (though I'm
not convinced they make a difference at all).
Firsly, what do you do about the miles of cable from the substation to
your house, the electricity meter, fusebox, house wiring, etc ;-) Secondly, if the power cable makes a differneec to the
sound or picture
[2], then I would sguggest designign the pwoer supply proeprly (or
fixing the faults in it) would be much more sensible than buying a special
mains cable.
Lots of consumer equipment has crappy power supplies that won't
filter out e.g. conducted emissions from other crappy power supplies
on the mains line. Audiophile equipment is probably no exception,
largely because they don't often know what they're doing and instead
rely on their mythical "non-microphonic capacitors" to clean things
up. Unsurprisingly, that doesn't work.
- Dave