One thing I'm discovering is that you will?, likely hear a bigger difference in cables when using mid tier gear or less. I'm hearing quite a definitive difference in interconnects through an Nad amplifier. I guess it has nowhere to go but up. As long as you have a decent image. It gets harder to discern with really resolving, transparent gear.
I do not agree with the derisive term ‘snake oil’ and would never use it as an epithet to anyone’s choice or actions towards their hobby. I see this use of ‘snake oil’ as a misguided emphasis on achieving positive results in striving towards improvement in sound quality. Incorrect in my view as results are but a byproduct; the hobby is about the interest and the active pursuit, the experience in ourselves and with things, in the strive for “better”. To do otherwise is to miss the forest for the trees. Under that precept, ‘snake oil’ and its negative connotation is a meaningless insult to me. I am a responsible adult and can partake in a hobby to a degree and manner that is within my means. I care not a wit if Furutech ac outlets might be deemed by some as ‘snake oil’ - I like them and they are a specialty item associated with my hobby, so I bought ‘em. They caused no financial hardship. In a hobby, one might purchase many items such as this - everything contributed to a greater or lesser degree in results but all held equal importance to my interest & participation in the audiophile hobby. There is no ultimate quality to be had in this hobby, it is fleeting and changes in our hearing and our mind’s conception to be forever out of grasp. That’s the frailty and imperfections we seek to overcome as human. The journey is the reward - so what that I bought a few questionable gadgets along the way.
Unless someone is listening outside in a field or at low levels in an extremely large ballroom sized space where reflections aren't an issue, room treatments can help. Don't need a lot of them to notice that at the very least they help with clarity when placed at the first reflection points.
What "noise floor"? How was it measured? Ambient RFI on the power lines, common or normal/differential mode Or on hifi equipment outputs ??? I don't know much about electrical power engineering but 80 dB is a lot.
In acoustic terms, according to this chart it's the difference between a ticking watch and a chainsaw. Jeff
If you're considering a mains conditioner, I can say I had great success with Puritan Audio Laboratories. Dead black background to the music without squeezing the natural bloom of the instruments. Love their A/C cables as well. Another very cheap idea is to polish the pins on your A/C plugs. Try a metal polish like Flitz. Amazing improvement in the sound.
I have a number of CDs with green painted edges. They sound so much better than one with nude edges. Or is that an innocent memory of marking them up in 80’s?
The green edges are actually effective on older cd players/transports. On newer ones less so. My guess is the jitter and or error correction is better in newer players.
The worst part of this thread is that I can't tell which posts are sarcastic and which honestly believe some of these things are worthwhile.
If someone is looking for a power conditioner this type is something to consider. Also has massive inherent surge suppression, typically 6 kV wave down to a few volts. I have one similar, my amp and a power strip are plugged into it. from that data sheet These products can reduce a 6,000 volt spike to an insignificant 0.0030 volt. These high-voltage transients described in IEEE 587 A and B, contain enough energy to completely destroy electronic circuit components. Topaz 91092-12 Line Noise Suppressing Ultra-Isolator .005pF - 2 Outlets - 250 VA | eBay
I see many parallels between audiophile accessorizing and the world of fine wine (a prior obsession of mine that was hundreds of times more expensive than being an audiophile). In that arena many of the world’s top producers employ a wide range of arcane and some seemingly voodoo-like practices, and the analytically observable characteristics provide only categorical baselines (including basic flavor profile, how “hot” or alcoholic the wine is, whether it will overwhelm or complement food, and whether the wine is drinkable and will keep). But other than broad flavor and aroma profiles, wine lovers for the most part accept that science doesn’t have all the answers for an aesthetic endeavor. Wine lovers then spend time tasting different producers, vineyards, vintages and figuring out what qualities appeal most to the individual taster, finding words to describe those things, and then seeking out those characteristics in other wines. But they are mostly focused on the wine, and spend limited mental bandwidth and budget on peripherals such as the perfect glassware, decanting, storage, etc. (To take an example of the worlds’ finest red burgundy / pinot noir producers, some of them practice organic farming, some are fully biodynamic and use methods supposedly learned from druids, many of them use egg whites to “fine” the larger particles out of the wine, others use “gentle” filtering, at least one uses fully gravity-based techniques (no pumping), most of them harvest and sort the grapes by hand, a surprising number of them use oak barrels harvested from old trees in a particular forest in France. Most wine lovers might note these details with interest but just enjoy the wine.) Interestingly, audiophiles are much more focused on seemingly peripheral subjects like cabling, isolation, power conditioning, and the like. There’s a lot more attention to “scientific analysis” in this realm, predicated (in my opinion) on the erroneous view that we are able to scientifically measure and explain everything we sense aesthetically. I don’t believe we can at present, and even if we could (or someday can with better science and modeling of how our brains work), there is still no good reason why something measurable or the lack thereof should override subjective preferences. This forum contains many examples of people praising the dramatic way in which a different isolation technique opened up a cornucopia of wonder in the listener’s $25,000 system (which helped to persuade me that I didn’t need such a system). I believe almost anything can make an audible difference and am not questioning others’ hearing, rather I believe that each listener’s aesthetic sense should control their experience. For myself, I try to focus more on things that I believe make a lot more difference in what I hear — recording quality/mastering, speakers, room.
Lab grade **** is honestly the way to go. Performance is truly critical in those applications. It should work perfectly fine for audio stuff!
It does I think it came from a power supply for part of an MRI machine. A shop I do side work for was going to scrap it. He cleaned, baked it and meggered it for me.
I'm concerned with the 'naturalness' of what I hear - the measure of whether it gets a tick or not is whether I'm constantly reminded of the 'fakeness' of what I'm hearing - if the latter thought never enters my mind then I'm pleased with what I listening to. IME "clarity" is a function of whether everything that your listening self picks up makes sense, fits in - if there is a clash, then the system is below par. Consider a live female opera singer belting out a big aria, first in a large ballroom sized space, and then in a tiny, ordinary living room, sung at the same volume. Yes, big difference in how one would experience the moment, but in both cases one would not say there is anything wrong with the sound, . People who are very sensitive to live acoustic sounds having too much echo, say, would benefit from room treatments, but I get pleasure with the sense of immersion, scale and intensity that good quality replay delivers, in any sort of space.
Maybe that’s why newer players leave gaps? So stray photons have time to leak away to the edge before they get in the way of the next track…obviously the main reason CDs play from the inside out.
Greeting @J-Flo, yes I agree that there are parallels. As you described, when we taste wine for pleasure and flavour, we are however tasting different wines from different vineyards, results of various vintages and techniques with all the variables over time, and yes, cultivation conditions. That is, the "thing" that's being experienced is different. Unless we're arguing over different pressings of LPs, or different remixes, or the age-old LP vs. digital vs. hi-res, we in the audio world are debating over the same music. In the case of fancy cables, tweaks, we're literally discussing a person's claim that the same digital file or LP sounds significantly different because of that change. I don't think wine connoisseurs insist that their expensive Italian crystal glassware makes the same wine taste very different compared to the cheap glassware from Ikea do they? Maybe the processes like filtering do change taste greatly, maybe they don't, but whatever process used will in some way change the physical product itself I would imagine. Again, in the world of audio tweaks, we're often listening to the exact bit-perfect digital stream but the only thing that changed was the speaker cable, or power cord, or fuse... Important point and correct, we're debating over the peripheral things, not the music/recording itself. I believe that measurements of audio content which for us is encoded in digital data, physical grooves, in modern systems converted to electrical signals and then ultimately transduced to physical compressions and rarefactions of sound waves can all be measured to levels beyond human perceptual ability. μV, dBs, Hz, nano/pico/femtoseconds are all measurable with good accuracy to define the nature of those signals. If "snake oil" products and tweaks are able to affect sound greatly (again, remembering that the original album itself is the same so we're only detecting for changes as the signal goes through the hardware chain), then there should be no difficulty to detect the change objectively. I have not seen well-conducted, controlled, blind testing results suggest audibility of tweaks beyond what is predicted by objective testing. Subjective enjoyment of the artist's work (ie. the music itself) is not what objective-leaning folks have any issue with. Just like the bottle of wine, you're free to enjoy subjectively anything you like! But if someone claims that their fuse [glassware] is going to make a difference with the same music [same bottle of wine] just by this little change that might cost $$$ just because the manufacturer said so and some others supposedly agreed, then we've got a little debate on our hands! Yes, in general I can agree... Live and let live. But if we're here to try to openly understand each other and understand how the world works, or indeed trying to build great-sounding high-fidelity sound systems, then we also need to be able to stand up to highly questionable claims. I don't see a problem questioning other people's hearing if there's likelihood of nonsense being claimed - like recent discussions around Herb Reichert and expensive cables. If everything is totally subjective, then there's no point discussing anything since there's nothing really to learn from each other. Might as well just buy every tweak out there and "listen for yourself". I'm sure guys like Synergistic would love that we spend money in turn trying their colored fuses! I think all that would do is reduce the audiophile's bank account, and enlarge Ted Denney's - which is how he wants this to work of course...
BTW, if not mentioned here already: Audiophile Snake Oil - by Benchmark Audio, John Siau Don't be that guy.
