it was fun while it lasted
Hi Amir,
Thanks for your recent comment, very much appreciated.
Despite the heckling by a very small number of forum members, I have posted so many words because I appreciate the intent of the forum. I completely respect and share the goal of working to discover the truth. I believe that everything can be measured, once we know what and how to measure, and use or develop the necessary test gear.
The Japanese metal supplier from whom I first bought 6N copper, sold 8N copper under a retail brand name, and sold this copper to a European cable company as 8N copper -- but when I asked about this material, the company explained that they didn't have, that no one had the ability to measure better than 6N. I appreciated the core company's honesty, and I never claimed more than could actually be measured.
I think my time in this context is now over. I know it's a measurement forum, and so my comments and answers weren't likely to be accepted or thought useful -- I hope that some of the silent majority might have been productively stimulated, not to some religious conversion but to accepting the challenge to learn how to measure what is so easily heard by the naive, those without expectation bias one way or the other.
As I've written, I was a history major who's picked up a few things along the way. I came to accept decades ago that my seeming advantage relative to most of the engineers who design audio cables, is that I never knew enough to then misapply that knowledge. I could only feel my way around in the dark, almost exclusively being provoked by fortunate accidents, by totally blind tests in as much as I was surprised by and forced to acknowledge differences when none were anticipated.
Almost every story I tell behind my discovery of geometry in speaker cables, or the importance of the hardness of the insulation on a stranded speaker wire conductor, or metal quality, or the story I told on this forum of my having to accept directionality, were ideal fully blind tests that happened by accident. I never postulated that something should sound different, much less then sold the result to myself, as is so unfortunately common with many audio engineers. My experience is that it's often the engineers who are the most likely to fall in love with a should-be-true I-figured-it-out bias.
If the test equipment exists to take maybe a 1000ft, or 10K foot long drawn conductor, and measure its impedance at GHz frequencies, we expect that a very small difference in one direction vs. the other will be measurable. A truly minuscule difference, any difference, would still force picked-up energy to follow the rules, to follow the path of least resistance.
As for arguments that such noise is of such low amplitude that it's many orders of magnitude below the assumed noise floor, that's not a pertinent point as humans can't hear at GHz anyway. The postulation is that this energy causes various forms of misbehavior at the moderate frequencies of digital audio, and in analog circuits -- real TIM, not the absurdly limited standardized specifications for measuring TIM in an audio circuit, is the primary presumed distortion mechanism.
If those willing to investigate can prove that this is not the mechanism, then just as with any other theory that proves invalid, the question remains. If our hypothesis proves wrong, it won't have any effect on my need to cope as best I can with evident distortion in the output -- though it will come as a surprise to Garth Powell, AQ's brilliant ex-Furman filter designer, whose insights helped make Gordon Rankin's JitterBug design measurably and audibly more effective. Now there's an AQ product which makes easy to measure differences between input and output, (just takes a couple dozen kilobucks of specialized test gear), whether or not the investigator agrees with the efficacy of using the product.
So I leave, hoping that the gauntlet I tried to throw down will encourage the scientists, the ones who want to learn, to ignore those who only want to protect what they think they know, and to please help learn how to measure, or develop the not yet manufactured test gear, or maybe not yet invented, or which is maybe already a standard part of JPL's tool kit but outsiders don't know. It was JPL that invented the technique for permanently forming dielectric (possible for caps, not for cable) that was crucial to the success of the Apollo missions, and which is a significant contributor to the quality and the performance of AQ's power filters.
Apollo was so long ago that the Mil Spec. parts which are based on that knowledge, are now tested by people who don't understand what they are testing for, and so have developed bogus but easier tests, resulting in parts that don't meet the standards set in the '60's. Much knowledge and perspective is always at risk -- even as an extreme optimist, I often think entropy has the advantage.
Au revoir, more likely, adieu, Bill
Hi Amir,
Thanks for your recent comment, very much appreciated.
Despite the heckling by a very small number of forum members, I have posted so many words because I appreciate the intent of the forum. I completely respect and share the goal of working to discover the truth. I believe that everything can be measured, once we know what and how to measure, and use or develop the necessary test gear.
The Japanese metal supplier from whom I first bought 6N copper, sold 8N copper under a retail brand name, and sold this copper to a European cable company as 8N copper -- but when I asked about this material, the company explained that they didn't have, that no one had the ability to measure better than 6N. I appreciated the core company's honesty, and I never claimed more than could actually be measured.
I think my time in this context is now over. I know it's a measurement forum, and so my comments and answers weren't likely to be accepted or thought useful -- I hope that some of the silent majority might have been productively stimulated, not to some religious conversion but to accepting the challenge to learn how to measure what is so easily heard by the naive, those without expectation bias one way or the other.
As I've written, I was a history major who's picked up a few things along the way. I came to accept decades ago that my seeming advantage relative to most of the engineers who design audio cables, is that I never knew enough to then misapply that knowledge. I could only feel my way around in the dark, almost exclusively being provoked by fortunate accidents, by totally blind tests in as much as I was surprised by and forced to acknowledge differences when none were anticipated.
Almost every story I tell behind my discovery of geometry in speaker cables, or the importance of the hardness of the insulation on a stranded speaker wire conductor, or metal quality, or the story I told on this forum of my having to accept directionality, were ideal fully blind tests that happened by accident. I never postulated that something should sound different, much less then sold the result to myself, as is so unfortunately common with many audio engineers. My experience is that it's often the engineers who are the most likely to fall in love with a should-be-true I-figured-it-out bias.
If the test equipment exists to take maybe a 1000ft, or 10K foot long drawn conductor, and measure its impedance at GHz frequencies, we expect that a very small difference in one direction vs. the other will be measurable. A truly minuscule difference, any difference, would still force picked-up energy to follow the rules, to follow the path of least resistance.
As for arguments that such noise is of such low amplitude that it's many orders of magnitude below the assumed noise floor, that's not a pertinent point as humans can't hear at GHz anyway. The postulation is that this energy causes various forms of misbehavior at the moderate frequencies of digital audio, and in analog circuits -- real TIM, not the absurdly limited standardized specifications for measuring TIM in an audio circuit, is the primary presumed distortion mechanism.
If those willing to investigate can prove that this is not the mechanism, then just as with any other theory that proves invalid, the question remains. If our hypothesis proves wrong, it won't have any effect on my need to cope as best I can with evident distortion in the output -- though it will come as a surprise to Garth Powell, AQ's brilliant ex-Furman filter designer, whose insights helped make Gordon Rankin's JitterBug design measurably and audibly more effective. Now there's an AQ product which makes easy to measure differences between input and output, (just takes a couple dozen kilobucks of specialized test gear), whether or not the investigator agrees with the efficacy of using the product.
So I leave, hoping that the gauntlet I tried to throw down will encourage the scientists, the ones who want to learn, to ignore those who only want to protect what they think they know, and to please help learn how to measure, or develop the not yet manufactured test gear, or maybe not yet invented, or which is maybe already a standard part of JPL's tool kit but outsiders don't know. It was JPL that invented the technique for permanently forming dielectric (possible for caps, not for cable) that was crucial to the success of the Apollo missions, and which is a significant contributor to the quality and the performance of AQ's power filters.
Apollo was so long ago that the Mil Spec. parts which are based on that knowledge, are now tested by people who don't understand what they are testing for, and so have developed bogus but easier tests, resulting in parts that don't meet the standards set in the '60's. Much knowledge and perspective is always at risk -- even as an extreme optimist, I often think entropy has the advantage.
Au revoir, more likely, adieu, Bill
