Is It Possible for a Manufacturer to Create a Design that Minimizes the Effects of Cables?
Obviously, one way to do it is to reduce the number of boxes and provide proprietary connections as dCS has done with Varese. One of their sales pitches is : upgrade cost is not as high , as you need less cables.
But is there anything that a Manufacturer can do in terms of the design itself?
thanks
Yes.
This statement in context is false. Those of us who have LP or tape recordings from the 1950s will understand when they also understand what cables were like back then. Microphone cables back then had wire and insulation that would be considered crude by today's standards. So why do those recordings sound so good when the mic signal has traveled through 100 feet or more of cable?
The answer is there is a standard, or set of standards for balanced operation. The first is known today as AES48, which defines a balanced signal traveling through a shielded cable, without reference to ground. Another standard is how much power is put through a 600 Ohm load at the output of the cable. +1-dBm is often used as a line level (aux level at the input of a studio mixer) as well as -4dBm. Microphones are often only driving a 150Ohm load (my Neumann U67s do this using an output transformer after a small tube preamp built into the microphones.
There are several reasons for these standards. One is to prevent ground loops; if ground is not referenced then it does not matter if grounds are co-mingled. It the floating signal is applied to an input that is compliant with AES48, you get rejection of noise that is impinged on the signal as the cable makes its way from the source to the input. The use of dBm (IOW a VU meter reading when displaying a signal across a 600 Ohm load) is used to swamp noise that might have been impinged on the cable, and also to swamp any capacitive or inductive effects of the cable. It is this use that made trans- and inter-continental phone calls possible.
You can thus see that in the balanced line system, the equipment on either end of the cable is forcing the cable to do its job; quite literally the equipment is doing the heavy lifting of neutrality and there's nothing the cable can do about it.
In high end audio, the balanced line standards are rarely acknowledged. As a result there's balanced line equipment that references ground and can't drive low impedances. When this happens then you easily hear differences in balanced line cables, which isn't supposed to happen, but here we are.
We were the first in high end audio to embrace the balanced line system with all its standards and to do that we developed tube preamps that employed a direct-coupled output that did the job which we still make. At the time it never occured to us to not support the standards! It was with a bit of dismay that when other manufacturers began to jump on the bandwagon that the standards seemed to be routinely ignored which is still commonplace today.
That is why any debate about balanced line operation, whether its better than single ended or not, or whether the cable character can be heard or not, exist.
My pov was also confirmed by two other people - one of which was the dealer of the cables auditioned.
Clearly their gear supports the standards of balanced line operation.
Balanced cables exhibit the same degree of audible variance as do single ended or RCA cables.
This is true if the associated equipment
does not support the standards of balanced operation.
Perhaps if some of them share their experience here, we might know more
If you don't have an LP made in the late 1950s, see about finding an early press of one of the more lauded recordings and see what you think- you can hear for yourself- its that easy. Many of these recordings were on 'Pearson's List' that was often published in TAS. Balanced lines, and the standards that go with them are literally what made hifi possible, along with the invention of the tape recorder during WW2.
My first exposure to the balanced line system was in 1973 when in high school I was asked to play bass in a local college (Macalester) orchestra. A concert (at Janet Wallace Auditorium) was being recorded and the person doing the recording let me hear the direct microphone feed to the recorder. The signal was traveling through 100 feet of cable yet the feed was spooky good! This was a few years prior to Robert Fulton (founder of FMI) offering the first 'high end' cables to the high end audio market.
I've been running a recording studio of some sort since I was in my early 20s and still do. So I have a lot of experience with this. Anyone in the studio, using pro gear and not semi pro gear will tell you pretty much what I've said here; the reason audio engineers often say cables make no difference when we in high end audio hear cable differnces all the time is not because the gear they use isn't revealing; its because studio gear supports the balanced line standards and most high end audio balanced stuff doesn't.
