Good cables are shielded well. That she makes them expensive. That’s not transmission, that’s shielding. I don’t think they tested that but for digital audio is not surprising
This is about a digital signal right? Cause I’m pretty sure if I add a banana midway into my bass’ pedalboard that I’d be getting a significantly different sound. I’m tempted to try and proof myself wrong tho lmao
Do it, imagine it sounds good, the stage trick you’d gain!
This just shows that bananas and mud are materials for excellent audio equipment. I am looking forward to my gold-plated banana.
That’s why they’re called banana plugs
hmm interesting, if guesses were completely random would expect more like %50 mistakes. does this mean that mud actually transmits audio better than copper (assuming everyone marked the best sound they thought was as copper).
To be fair, the signal is only going through these suboptimal conductors for a very short distance.
Try wiring up your stereo with 50 feet of bananas, and you might start having problems.
There’s always music in the banana chain… or something like that
would analog make a difference instead of digital?
I mean yeah, audiophile cables are 100% a rip-off every time. You can spend thousands on a cable without it having any real benefits.
It makes more sense to just buy decent speakers and a decent amp, along with a good audio source (any CD player).
Yeah, but if they don’t buy the gold and platinum plated cables, washed in the blood of young rams, and studded with diamonds- how can they be sure they are experiencing the music as it was intended to be experienced?
onion title 😭
This is why I like to get mid level stuff. Once you get past the cheap rubbish it’s all the same imo.
So, between a copper wire, a banana, and wet mud, the mid-level stuff is the banana, right?
I’ll go for that, then.
Oddly it’s the copper wire that is mid
Nah, I go with a wet mud, I hate all those banana flies.
Cost does no equal tperformance. Take a look at audiosciencereview.com (ASR). as well as Erin’s audio other (YouTube channell). They both measure performance. I sold my £3k amp and replaced with one for £1k. My partner hated my speakers (too big and ugly), and so were sold to someone who wanted them and replaced by budget options that measure very well. My music sounds better (almost entirely down to the speakers) and we had a great little holiday and it all takes up much less space.
Most high end audio equipment is mostly just rich idiot tax. Though low to mid is a huge jump in audio quality.
The advantage of good wire is isolating the signal from interference. However, if you aren’t in an electrically noisy environment, anything that can conduct electricity will do just as well.
Something in my computer monitor isn’t shielded and will alert me to a incoming cell phone call a second or two before the phone rings.
My old speakers used to do that.
Your monitor is like the blinking stickers we used to put on our phones.
Yes my knees creak, why do you ask
Are you implying that gold isolates better from interference than copper?
He’s talking about the electromagnetic shielding in a cable, not the contact-points. Usually a copper mesh sheath housed underneath the outer-most rubbery layer and runs around and along the entire length of the signal-carrying wires inside the cable. Works like a Faraday cage, helps prevent electromagnetic interference from large power sources, other unshielded cables running parallel, or anything else that can generate an electromagnetic field near the cable.
Very important to protect signal integrity, widely used even outside the audiophile world (although there are of course plenty of audiophile gimmicks related to shielding).
Basically, if you have a bunch of live unshielded cables bundled and zip-tied together along with your speaker wire, you’ll definitely hear it. Run the signal through an oscilloscope, and you’ll even see it
Seems like you know what you’re talking about. If I may ask, how do ferrite beads figure into this? Do those actually help protect signal, or is it less effective?
But the article is about what material is used as a conductor
Yeah, but the comment you replied to was making a point that the conductor doesn’t really matter if there isn’t any noise present. What makes a good cable has much more to do with proper shielding, because electromagnetic interference is what will muck up your signal, not a lack of gold plated connectors
The benefit of gold is that it doesn’t corrode
As I understand it gold is used as it doesn’t tarnish or corrode - it’s not there to benefit the sound in any way.
I thought audio quality was more to do with the source and the destination. If you have a shit needle on a record or a speaker made of wood then its gonna sound like ass.
I never once thought it had anything to do with the cables. Unless they were frayed or damaged in some way.
But i am not an audiophile, i record my own music and mix etc, but never worried about cable quality before.
Once in a while I come across shorts of this audiophile showing of his gear. The cables he uses look like under sea cables, like he’s pulling 40kV out of his wall socket. It’s so ridiculous
I was buying a receiver and speakers in 2020 and when it came time to pick out speaker wire, the salesperson walked over to where the wire was and began the pitch…
Salesperson: so when the frequencies are higher the electrons end up traveling only on the outer layer of the wire instead of in the middle…
Me: yeah, skin effect, I did electrical engineering
Salesperson: ah, so I guess you know you don’t need this then (pointing to gimmicky monster speaker cable that had a single strand of wire in a spiral around the main bundle with a clear jacket so you can see it)
Me: correct (grabs the cheapest 16awg)
Yep cables only matter in terms of preference. Unless we are going so cheap it’s barely holding on
Exactly this, the cables never mattered. They’re the least significant part of an audiophile system and I doubt anyone could tell the difference between a crappy cable and a good quality cable. People get good quality cable for durability rather than sound quality.
Cable quality only matters in long distances, when the dumping of the signal is noticeable.
If the distance is so short that there is not any voltage drop and still out powering the external noise. There is in effect no influence
Oh yeah, for sure. I didn’t include that part because an audiophile setup rarely has a need for long distances.
I think the term audiophile has changed in the last decade or two, because now i keep seeing being used to mean “someone who likes music more than the average person”. Before it was more “had an entire room dedicated to music listening and if you move their chair a millimetre they will literally murder you”
That’s the kind of person who swears that can tell s huge difference based on cable (but, of course, never in a blind test).
There are websites dedicated to selling them things they don’t need. A 1m audio cable can cost several tens of thousands of pounds/dollars. And they’ll buy them and swear that they make a significant difference to the timbre of the hi hats on track 3 of The Joshua Tree
Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a cable, for home use. 8ft. Yours for the low, low price of £98,770
That’s not a pair, btw…
I do mean “person with a huge setup dedicated to music listening”. An audiophile who actually knows what they’re talking about will tell you to get any cable from a reputable brand.
But of course you also have “audiophiles” who have no idea whatsoever.
As long as its not too crappy. Otherwise you’ll wonder why you’re picking up radio.
I’ve literally used lamp wire in a pinch before…sounded great 😆
Even more than the actual contact with the media, the entire system breaks down at the ears. If your ears aren’t well-trained, then you don’t even know what to listen for. You might think loud bass is good, or booming drums, and never notice that you can’t hear any mids.
So in a blind test like this, some people just might prefer a sound that this experiment has little impact on, so they wouldn’t be able to notice any differences.
A well-trained ear might be able to detect differences between them, but still not have a real preference. Besides being able to hear all the different frequencies, you have to know what the instruments sound like in real life to know if those frequencies are reproducing accurately. Again, if you don’t what it’s supposed to sound like, you really don’t know if ANY change in components makes a positive or negative difference in the natural sound, you only know the difference relative to your personal preference.
TL;DR: This “experiment” doesn’t prove anything. It’s just funny.
Yes, so my well-trained ears prefer noisy sound, something like 48kb mp3s I downloaded from the web in my childhood (born 1996). Because that’s less likely to cause migraine through them than a good record with some annoying sounds in it, preserved by a more precise lossy encoding. And things you want to hear are kept well enough even by 48kbit mp3s.
And this surprisingly keeps with analog things, like headphones and speakers. I prefer something cheap and noisy that makes sounds softer to something quality and with crisp sound, but somehow too crisp.
And I do have good ears, I can hear a lot of things, a cat walking on a neighboring plot in countryside during wind, things like that. Hence the migraines.
Interesting, do you know where I can buy a set of trained ears? - Audiophiles, probably.
Some of it is genetic, but a lot of it is years of training in hearing and teasing out all the frequencies.
I spent years in the audiophile record business back in the transition days from analogue LPs to digital CDs, and spent a LOT of time with beyond top-of-the-line audio gear, including high end stuff that wasn’t even on the consumer market.
My ears got trained from many years in bands and orchestras, then recording sessions, then hearing the final recordings on CD, as well as thousands of other recordings, and many live performances by some of the greatest orchestras in the world. I know what it is supposed to sound like at every stage of the process.
Bottom line, cables aren’t going to be a major issue. Guarantee you’ve got at least 10 other variables making a bigger difference, and most of them can’t even be fixed.
Everything you said is wrong.
Only noticing the distortion you care about is fine. If you don’t notice it, it is necessarily irrelevant. You are not a computer, analog audio signals are not a digital transmission of data, where errors make the data unreadable.
An original recording was provided. The re-recordings are supposed to sound like the original. They’re not testing microphones, or whatever processing the audio engineer did, the sound of the original instruments is irrelevant.
Speakers are made of wood, the good ones are at least.
Unless your referring to the actual drivers, then yeah wood wouldn’t really work in that case.
Yeah, i meant the cone, not the case
Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.
Yes you’re 100% right. Solid wood will warp and split, I did mean MDF and should have said as such
Well, paper is a very popular material in speaker cones, including high-end
Cables give resistance… thats all…
I heard one guy talk about the importance of cable shielding and connector material and shit once, but the ones I actually know just talk about the other hardware (speakers, mixing pults, lots of terms I couldn’t recite).
Fun fact: this is where the “banana connector” came from. Before copper was discovered, early humans used bananas for all their audio connections. The name stuck, even though wires are made of metal today.
Additional trivia: The term “banana republic” originates from countries best known for exporting high-end audio equipment back in the day.
Bosenana AudioBananica DolBananAtmos Bananaheiser
“banana split” stems from a failed experiment where scientists tried to split audio frequencies by sticking the connectors into ice cream and running the audio through it
The ensuing explosion took out two thirds of New Jersey
And Bananarama was so named for their high-fidelity recordings which were performed, mixed, and recorded entirely on bananas.
Banana boats were named for the ancient egyptian practice of drying and lashing together bundles of banana skins in what was, at the time, a highpoint in marine engineering. It did, indeed, play a role in the stealth technology used today, due to the naturally radio absorbent nature of the material. Dont believe the people who tell you they sealed the hulls with the pulp - itd just wash off once underway.
Yup. Failed spectacularly, which is why they went for mixing boards as a backup solution instead.
Bravo
This will now be a standard AI response. Well done.
O noes!
TIL! It’s fucking bananas that I never knew this.
They are often also used as a unit of measurement of relative scale, especially amongst practitioners of internet science.
Banana physicist here.
This is actually due to a really interesting phenomenon called banana dilation. Although they may appear different sizes to the eye, bananas distort local spacetime such that they are all physically identical dimensions. This makes them a perfect and consistent measure of size.
well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
I’ve got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti… wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
Hoodoo is 3dB better than voodoo according to my tests.
Hoodoo? You do! Do what? Remind me of the babe!
Voo-doo hoo-doo what-you-don’t-dare-doo…
Silver is the better conductor. Even if it is priced so that peons can afford it.
Sheeeit not recently, shot up to $120/oz recently, and it’s back down to ~$80/oz right now, but that’s still more than ~$35/oz last year. Not that gold didn’t also follow that trajectory or anything, it’s still more, but GODDAMN.
