One wonders about burn-in versus getting used-to

corndog71 wrote:I have been impressed by Shunyata's experiments which show that last few feet can make a difference.  Not impressed by their prices but they gotta get paid somehow.

It makes sense in a certain untwisted sort of way. Think of the high end power cable or outlet as serving the purpose of a passive choke, straightening out the electrical kinks and lining up the electrons while filtering out the big chunks you'd rather not hear before they hit the equipment. Bonus points if they help eliminate any stray RF or interference from the rest of the system, similar to the benefits you might find by twisting pairs. No different concept really than a hum filter if you think on it. With a high end outlet (hospital grade) it's more about the security of the connection than anything else - lot more contact area working in your favor there.

And don't laugh ... there IS such a thing as "audiophile grade" romex ...



And only $16 a foot for 10-2! You also need to figure in the special outlets that can handle that gauge gracefully.

Or, if you're feeling that's a bit over your budget, Diamond Handywire is rumored* to be very quiet compared to most other generic type "romex" wire ...



Bit more reasonable at around $80 for a 100 foot roll of 12-2. That's what I used for my dedicated line to the listening room.

* I say rumored, because I've not been able to do an A/B comparison as to whether the more expensive romex made any difference. I'll go so far as to say it doesn't seem to have hurt any.

Bob -

I think we're talking apples and oranges here - I meant the electrical wavelength - when it's propagating at the speed of light, as the signal would down a speaker wire or interconnect.  I can see the potential confusion - I said free air because I wasn't taking the velocity factor of the cable (which slows the signal) into consideration.  I used to make 1/4 wave cables for 13.56MHz applications at a previous job; when made with Teflon dielectric coax they're about 12.5' long.

I'm guessing you're referring to the spacing of the compressions and rarefactions of the actual sound in air moving at around 1100 FPS having a 17mm wavelength?

-Pat

Another two cents, before I break the bank:
Distinctions should be made when considering spending any sum of $$$ on "peripherals" like DE-LUX power cords. Is the power in your home relatively "clean" to begin with? Do you have regular fluctuations in voltage? Hi-end manufacturers like to prey on our fears, and a bit of knowledge mixed with common sense goes a long way in determining need. For example, I'm lucky to live right next to a recently-installed new power line transformer, which sends a constant 116.5 - 118 VAC all of 50 feet into my home. Therefore, no need to worry about conditioners, variacs, RF interference, etc.
With interconnects, speaker cables and such, a great deal of $$ is sucked up in really fancy plugs and cosmetics. A lot of the time, the very same wire is utilized in mid-level cables as in the hi-end stuff, which has inflated cost due to really expensive plugs. Banana-type speaker plugs have the highest rate of failure, yet they tend to inflate the cost of pre-made wires four-fold. Give me bare wire, a DeoxIT Audio-Visual Survival kit, and a little common sense and I can almost guarantee that I will, with good 10AWG cables, perform like a champ. Not me, but my system.
And remember - science is capable of measuring factors beyond the limits of our ears and brains to comprehend. I'm convinced that the opposite is true - that we sometimes hear things which cannot be measured - more accurate, perhaps, to say that the physicist may simply be measuring the WRONG PARAMETER. Happens all the time in the sciences - we have to ask the right question to get an answer that works.
I read a lot of papers about acoustics and room treatments. A lot of the time, the author is concerned with parameters that do not apply to my situation, but boy, when they start the tech-speak it's easy to believe that I've been "doing it wrong" all along. So I apply a bit of the grey matter which is the most infrequently used - the COMMON SENSE LOBES.
Break-in, break-out, and break-over. Everyone dies in the end. Try to enjoy the ride.

I have replaced all my AC power cables with after-market wires of my own proprietary design.    

OK. OK, you've twisted my arm:

I take some old speaker cable, twist it around a little bit, and terminate with Oyaide connectors Made in Japan. I don't use a ground wire, unless I have hum/noise. Like Kentley, I can see the AC power transformer from my patio window, about 50 ft.

It sounds much better than stock AC cable, esp. for front-end components such as DACs.

Caelin Gabriel from Shunyata argues that the first few feet of AC wire your component's power supply "sees" are more important than the 50 miles back to the power plant. I think Gabriel is on to something; I just wish I could afford his stuff! After all, I'm just:

"A dumb Polish guy from the Southside of Milwaukee"

You may be "dumb" but you are not stupid. Your solution is eminently wise. May the AC/DC Farce be with you.

I went through all this in the 70's when Monster Cables came out. Again I do mainly live audio and the threshold of quality was much lower than quiet listening at home. But I always viewed it as a clever way to separate people from their money as I could not really find a difference in sound quality that would justify the $$. I think as we get older and have the time and $$ to mess with stuff we tend to look deeper and deeper into the weeds for things to do to try and improve sound...or indulge our tinkering tendencies. Think of all those old guys with Harleys. Money and time. And throw some boredom in there, too.

I also happen to be the LAST one on a rural power line that stretches for many miles...so I get everything that happens to the line between the big trannies and me....storms, car crashes into poles, power spikes, lightning...my average power is 125 vac. A great time here in the plains of Iowa.

Perhaps there's something similar to a placebo effect at work regarding some of the more ambiguous effects? We think a new addition will work, pay sometimes quite a bit for it, and through a combination of wishful thinking and effective advertising hype believe it does work regardless of having neither definitive, quantifiable data nor science based knowledge proving it does as we believe. If we invest belief in something, we are not easily convinced we may be wrong.

Just to play the Devils advocate, it seems to me turntables are a good example of inflated audio expectation. I suspect the real cost of manufacturing a high end complete turntable is probably under 10-20% of what many people pay for it. I also suspect much of turntable technology is wasted on most of the records/vinyl that was produced since LP records were introduced. I'm probably wrong about this, but almost always think the devil in the details should be acknowledged.

A bit of drift from my original question, but I've found the discussion, esp. about A.C. cabling, fascinating.
TN Allen, I think you're correct -- that there is a placebo effect at work here. If you expect something new to improve your sound system it probably will, over time, whether it actually does or not. That would include $250,000 turntables which, as Robin Williams once said of cocaine, are God's way of telling you you've got too much money. I'd swap my VPI Traveler for a decent Technics or even an old AR and bet I could hear an "improvement."
That said, there are matters beyond EE and physics at play in the audio game. Why do we prefer tubes over solid-state, when s/s amps and preamps measure better? And why, with identical specs, does one amp sound better than the other? Shouldn't they sound the same? Not sure that's a placebo effect . . .

I too think that it's largely a placebo effect - I spent $2k on this speaker cable, so it had BETTER sound better, otherwise I've been had. So your brain hears better sound, and is happy. Double blind testing (the discussion of which is a big no-no on at least one other forum I read) would be the actual way to determine (1) if there's any difference between two configurations and (2) if it's an improvement.

deepee, as to the difference in similarly spec'd amps, I think that can be attributed to differences deeper in the specs - for instance, two different amps may be spec'd at, say, 0.5% THD. They may sound different because of the actual harmonic content present WITHIN that 0.5% - one may have a greater degree of odd harmonics in its signal, while the other may be more 2nd harmonic. The second harmonic (IIRC) is generally regarded to be more pleasing to the ear, while odd ones are discordant. Same raw THD spec, different actual sound. It's measurable, but something that's generally not broken out for comparison.

-Pat

wildiowa wrote:I went through all this in the 70's when Monster Cables came out. Again I do mainly live audio and the threshold of quality was much lower than quiet listening at home. But I always viewed it as a clever way to separate people from their money as I could not really find a difference in sound quality that would justify the $$. I think as we get older and have the time and $$ to mess with stuff we tend to look deeper and deeper into the weeds for things to do to try and improve sound...or indulge our tinkering tendencies. Think of all those old guys with Harleys. Money and time. And throw some boredom in there, too.

I also happen to be the LAST one on a rural power line that stretches for many miles...so I get everything that happens to the line between the big trannies and me....storms, car crashes into poles, power spikes, lightning...my average power is 125 vac. A great time here in the plains of Iowa.

"a clever way to separate people from their money" What a beauty ! I'll remember this sentence!

Would have never guessed we had so many British Glam Rock fans here ...



If you like Placebo, you'll really like Death Cab For Cutie ...    

PS ... they've gone more towards goth banger since back in the day ... but hey ... listen for a while and you may get to like it! Placebo Effect!


(How's THAT for a derail?)

"When we listen to live music—also at home—we try to understand the performers’ intentions and to connect with the encoded emotions. In the end that’s more important than a lifelike (objective) experience.
The live event is always tied to a particular time and place there is no subjective judgement in a live performance as such it is a singular event.

At home meanwhile we are in charge of the if, when and what. Our motivation and likely also our expectations are different and colored by our own agenda. We look for the ‘magic’. Hence getting closer to that magic is the prime rationale for any playback chain."

When we add ideas like "burning in" produces a difference, we may be creating both a question and an answer. If we look for something subjectively it usually follows we will find it.

There are many examples of this especially in audio where ridiculous ideas are sworn to be working.
We have all laughed about this in the forum numerous times in the past.
Seems to me that only by listening to something from the first time up to the point of noting an effect is always limited by subjective opinion.
Are there any scope tests that could illustrate that burning in effects are physically there?.....Baddog

CubDriver et. al, comments about THD are well taken. And yes I've read the flames on A:B testing elsewhere. At some point, all sources, cables, preamps, amps whether tube or sand, and speaks, at some point distort.
So it all boils down to what sort of distortion turns your crank.
Being a piano-player (don't shoot him) when I find a source or a box of parts that sound like a piano, and not a bunch of electronics resembling a piano, I'm happy. And that will happen on the first ride. I can walk right over to my 1904 Remington player piano in the same room and give it a tingle.
Another test is the dog. If he sings to the saxophone, I know I done good.

Unless the $2000 power cord makes my Magnavox SE EL-84 flea watt amp sound like a Marantz 8B, it costs too much and is a bad value (i.e. buy the Marantz, not the wire). Actually, that little Magnavox amp drives my QUAD 2-ways so nicely whether I use garden hose-sized MIT speaker cables or twin runs of AWG32 enameled magnet wire threaded through a series of recycled 7-eleven King slurpee straws. Chris Connor sounds amazing either way. I must be doing something wrong. Please don't fix it.

j beede
I must try the King Slurpee straw regimen. Is it patented or proprietary? Has it been reviewed in The Absolute Sound by Robert Hartley? Maybe it's got the sound I've been looking for all my wretched audio life  . . .
I would offer a modification; perhaps polarised rather than magnetized AWG32 wire might better work. Copper only thinks in one direction. Or not.

Ahhhh Placebo... The best band that Im just certain I heard, though i'm not sure where, nor can I put my finger on why.

Oh, I know... Arent they the band that used to pass themselves off as the Incredible Speaker Cables!?

That's it.

I guess I don't need to bother tube rolling. Clearly they should all sound the same.

Why should electrons sound different?

All joking around aside, it's an interesting phenomenon -- the arguments about what sounds different, what doesn't, and why.

For example, it interests me how many philosophical rationalists there are, relative to empiricists -- I've had friends over to my place who argue that digital audio MUST sound better because of some technical reason; something to do with uptake of the signal being unimpeded with a laser, relative to that sluggish moving coil in my cartridge. Well the technical explanations may or may not be true, they may or may not amount to an audible difference, but what does the evidence say?

They didn't want to believe their ears when hearing an obviously better vinyl recording, relative to the digital version. They knew it was better, til I told them it was the record not the digital. Then they argued.

Many of the on line arguments go much like this. People convince themselves based on reasoning, in the absence of experience many times. And there's the other problem too of convincing ourselves based on experience, but it's unclear what it was we experienced.

Monster Cable famously and notoriously used a comparator box to demonstrate their cables to customers as testing better than an "inferior" alternative -- the comparator box had some component in it that made the volume of the "inferior" cable slightly quieter. Apparently it's well established that a volume increase is reliably mistaken as a fidelity improvement.

Anyway, somethings do sound different -- whether or not technical tests and specifications can capture or justify the obvious differences. Some things don't sound different, even if tests apparently show differences that are packaged as sufficient to make a difference.

From my reading, but not my experience, I'm suspicious about whether any difference can be discerned among cables and speaker wires. I would like to have first hand experience, though. I'd love to take the blind listening test. Better yet, a double blind test -- my girlfriend can change the cables someone else hands her from behind a curtain.

I'm inclined to believe that cryogenic (tube) freezing is a crock. But I haven't heard it for myself.

Further to the previous comment about THD, tube amps are renown for their even-order harmonics, which parallel the natural harmonics of acoustic instruments. Tube amps also have more of their harmonics falling in (more musical sounding) lower orders, while silicon amps apparently continue to generate progressively discordant sounding harmonics at higher orders (5th, 7th order etc).

Several observations:

1. My home-brew AC cables sound much better than the AC wires that came in the box. Something good is going on here.

2. Cryoset.com is offering 10% off on their cryogenically treated tubes; use coupon code Cryoset152.

3. I didn't realize that AC electrification had reached rural Iowa. Floyd of Rosedale must be alerted!!

4. I'm 70 yrs. old, can't hear frequencies above 9.5kHz, and have tinnitus in my left ear. In addition, I'm Polish and having real trouble with these fancy new LED lightbulbs.

Can you describe your home brew AC cables? I'm curious to know what you've done. Might be a fun project to duplicate, if it's not beyond my abilities.

Several years, I saw a cut-away drawing of a specialty power cord; it looked a lot like Kimber Kable 4TC speaker wire with a ground wire and some shielding, terminated with Wattgate plugs. I had some old 4TC from the 1980s. I made up a ungrounded, unshielded cable with connectors from the hardware store. Installing it to a component improved the sound of my system. I had my power cord epiphany!!
Since then I have tried other designs with other wire, but have basically stuck to a two-wire system. The quality of the copper and the insulation affects the overall sound, just as with speaker cable. The geometry is also important: twisting it seems to help. The effect of the power cord is most pronounced on front-end equipment, esp. DACs. I stole some ideas from Mapleshade Audio, and made up some power strips as well. I also use Mapleshade SilClear contact enhancer, as well as Caig products.

I cannot prove to theorists that it makes any difference; you have to try it, and simply listen. If it sounds better, it is better. Your own hearing is the result of millions of years of evolution, honed primarily for survival but certainly capable of discerning minute deviations. This is what actual musicians do for a living!

Why do almost all humans love Music? It is the most abstract of the Arts. Anything that makes it more enjoyable is to be treasured.

Gregg R.

One additional complicating idea is that our minds make music from the sounds we hear. The cultural process of turning sensation into a meaningful individual experience provides plenty of opportunity for many diverse factors to influence us, and what we make of what we "hear". Quite a lot of what we call a musical experience involves factors peculiar to our own hearing, sensing, cultural experience & etc., as well as the complex relationship we may have to the devices from which we hear the "music".

Perhaps some of what we think improves listening is what is left in or out of the experience. Clarity is important, but perhaps pure tones are less pleasing or meaningful than some overtones. Removing a few ambiguous tones by compressing sound may make some music seem to sound better to some people, less interesting to others.

Our ability to make sense, or understand the intention of the composer or musicians, of a given piece of music, probably depends upon how clearly we "hear" the intentions.

The complex, diverse psycho - acoustics of the vast, diverse population of "acoustic psychos" probably make it unlikely anyone will sort out the burn - in question soon, if ever.

There have been so many insightful comments made in the past few days that it would be redundant to rehash them. I think we're on a valuable path which can help us understand The Big Picture of Perception as it pertains to music reproduction -- even the humorous side of the coin. For humor is a means, too, of organizing reality.
Just two examples from my experience will suffice.

There is a renowned symphonic and solo percussionist who has become known for her skills and communicative abillity on everything from snare drum to tympani to marimba, etc. She also lectures extensively and cogently at schools and symposia. Her name is Evelyn Glennie. Here's the astounding part -- she is totally deaf from birth. She uses the other senses to "hear" music, not only from a strictly technical viewpoint, but from an emotional and, yes, spiritual one. Her insight into what "listening" really is can be illuminating. Check her out on YouTube; you'll be glad you did.

Second, I recently read a tech paper entitled "Speaker placement and room treatment" that gave me a vague feeling of discomfort as I slogged through pages of semi-comprehensible data. Then it suddenly occurred to me why. The author had made an assumption at the outset which I believe to be fundamentally incorrect - that the ideal listening space must resemble a concert hall in acoustic. O.K. - that sounds cool. But doesn't the recording process (at least since the beginning of the stereo era) do this for us? Our job is to create a neutral space in which to allow the 'beauty" (hopefully) of the original performance to unfold. If we add our OWN acoustic on top of the supposedly ideal one already in the recording, we can never hear the music properly. Shouldn't we be aiming towards a space that resembles a studio mastering setup?
  It is the sort of impressive-sounding tech-speak in a well-intentioned but wrong-headed paper which can lead us further from our goal of experiencing Music.

OK I'm done  -  for now. Thanks for the insights, everyone. Tubular Ecstasy for All.

FWIW, hearing differences in cables is what got me into this hobby. In my car the differences were hard to miss. Initially it started with Kimber KC-1 which was essentially their PBJ with a semi-static reducing shield wrapped around it. Then out of boredom I stripped off the shielding and boom! Soundstage in my car! I installed Kimber 4PR which sounded better than regular zip cord but was missing the clarity of the 4VS and 4TC I heard at the audio shop that sold them.

Later I replaced all of the 4PR with 4VS. This was another small but noticeable improvement but by now I was addicted. I probably would've been ok there but I was really curious about the difference between 4VS and 4TC.

Eventually I got the 4TC and again a new level of clarity was achieved. Granted, I couldn't A/B them but I was confident with my observations as they matched what I heard at the shop over dozens of systems ranging from budget to WTF!

Over the years I've tried other cables on the lower end of the spectrum but always come back to the 4VS or 4TC speaker cables. The 8VS and 8TC are good too but due to increased cost I only use them in certain applications where I only need a few feet. I'd love to try the 12TC but I have more pressing matters for my wallet.

Oh yeah, I also use Kimber's older power cords which are essentially 4TC but with a regular ground wire mixed in. I've made a few of my own over the years. To be fair, power cord differences were much harder to detect.

My addiction to upgrades has diminished with age, thankfully. Now I just need to replace my 15 year old phono cartridge.