26 Apr
2012
26 Apr
'12
11:46 a.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.
Yes, there are good physcal lreasons to agree with that :-)
One of the similar shops over here (I think it's 'Sam's 99p store' sells
telephoen extension cabels. The cores of the cable are each 3 strands of
some very springy wire, it doesn't feel like copper to me .On the other
hand, you can solder it, and such cables are the cheapest source I've
found for in-line telehpoen sockets (useful for all sorts of applications.
I will admit I've bought that '79 strand' speaker cable. But only because
it's a nice, flexible cable with a decent current rating. Not for any
'magic' reasons.
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. 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.
I do wonder why modern domestic audio equipment doesn't have balanced
inputs nad outputs. Doing so would have added a lot of complexity when
using vavles,, but with op-amps it's trivial. And that would be a serious
way to reduce common-mode effects (like earth loops).
But then I can;t expect Audiophools to understand engineering...
-tony