Tell me, are other technical arenas as fraught with bullshit as ours?
a href="http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=NOB_C37_C&Category_Code=VOLUME&Product_Count=2">look</a

Tell me, are other technical arenas as fraught with bullshit as ours?
a
href="http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=NOB_C37_C&Category_Code=VOLUME&Product_Count=2">look</a

Holy crap, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

I guess Beech trees are rare. I'm absoluteluy sure there are not many
of those knobs in existance so I guess they are rare as well.

Reminds me of a post guy, who was riding an EQ til he just got it
"right". Spent a half hour just gettig it "right" Just when he had it
"right" he noticed the EQ was not punched in. We sometimes hear
what we want to hear.

I'd bet Tung oil would sound far better than that lacquer. :-)

Chris Smith wrote:
Tell me, are other technical arenas as fraught with bullshit as ours?
a
href="http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&P
roduct_Code=NOB_C37_C&Category_Code=VOLUME&Product_Count=2">look</a

Tell me, are other technical arenas as fraught with bullshit as ours?
a href="http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=NOB_C37_C&Category_Code=VOLUME&Product_Count=2">look</a

Well, I hate to open myself up to criticism, but I have to chime in here.

snip

I was never a believer in people being able to hear differences in
interconnect cables, much less power cables, but I believe it now.

Well, I hate to open myself up to criticism, but I have to chime in here.



Over the last couple of years I have become a bit of an audiophile in the
headphone realm. There is a group called http://www.head-fi.org/ and this
stuff is addictive as hell. I would recommend that you stay clear of the
site because before you know it you will have dropped $3000.00 on a
headphone rig with a wish list of another $2500.00 and you will no longer be
able to listen to 95% of the crap you used to call music. I have progressed
through several different headphone amplifiers and rolled many different
op-amps and tubes trough all of them hunting for that perfect balance.



My current main rig is a Meridian 588 cd player with a Virtual Dynamics
Power 1 power cable. This feeds a German made Audio Valve RKV MK2 tube
amplifier via Virtual Dynamic Reference interconnects. Finally, the
headphones are Sennheiser HD650s with a ZU Mobius headphone cable. I could
have bought some nice new radio mics for what I have in this system, but it
is absolutely worth every penny to me.



I was never a believer in people being able to hear differences in
interconnect cables, much less power cables, but I believe it now. I was
able to balance the sound of the components in this system by trying
different cables until I found ones that I liked. Fortunately, most all
high-end cable manufactures allow for a trial period, so you can return them
after a couple of weeks if you don't like them.



As far as burning in cables, this does make a difference as well but only if
the cable is burned in and then allowed to stay in the same position without
much movement. Over a period of 100+ hours of use you can really hear some
manufactures cables open up. The cables that we tend to use for production
(Canare and Mogami) have to be rolled up as well as connected and
disconnected many times a day so they are extremely flexible, thin cables
that do not really benefit that much from burn in. The cables that benefit
the most are heavy, solid conductor cables that are not to be moved around.
Yes, solid core. The power cables and interconnects in my system are very
heavy gauge, individually jacketed solid core cable. You bend them into
place, burn them in for a couple hundred hours, and leave them alone.



I know all this seems a bit fanatical, and it is. That's why I'm a sound
mixer.

A friend of mine does speaker design and research (he's behind the
acoustic lens concept on the new B&O DSP-driven speakers), and had a dozen
heavy gauge cables made up with spade lugs for an a/b/x speaker test. Test
was over, he looked at these nearly-new cables and decided to put them in
poly bags and sell them through the local high-end stereo dealer.

Dealer said "we can take them, but you'll have to open all the bags first
and apply some white shrink tubing to one end."

"Why?"

"So you can write an arrow on each cable, to indicate which direction the
signal should flow."


Alternating current. Two-conductor wire, no telescoping shield. But the
dealer's customers were convinced it made a difference which end was
hooked up to the amplifier.