Re: Capacitors in the signal chain

<bjacoby@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1145602150.723120.52920@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm reasonably confident in my hearing but the fact that
I can think
of
no reason why I should be able to hear such a thing
makes me a little less confident.

It's stuff like this that makes science interesting. If
one thought about fairly in a large sense one would
probably conclude that one SHOULD hear a difference!
Why? Well, for a simple one, there is a difference in
inductance between solid and stranded wire.

Nothing significant. Here's a list of the classical electrical properties
of a wide variety of kinds of wire:

http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audioprinciples/interconnects/speakercableresonances.php
(theory)

http://www.audioholics.com/techtips/audioprinciples/interconnects/speakercablereviewsfaceoff.php
(practical examples)

One persistent myth is the idea that stranded wire and solid wire are
different from the standpoint of skin effect. It turns out that skin effect
is dependent on the outside and inside diameters of the conductor or
conductive bundle. Insulating the strands with good or poor insulation (poor
insulation = various kinds of corrosion) has no signficant effects. What
does work is making the conductor larger in diameter and replacing the
portions of it below the relevant skin depth with less-conductive (example
steel) or non-conductive (example foam) substances.

And althugh
stranded wire is usually not strands of insulated wire,
still you have oxide on the strands and there is a chance
of not only sections being insulated from each other but
the copper oxide has the chance of creating
rectification, distributed capacitance etc. etc.

Again not to any signficant degree.

So why should there NOT be some subtle differences?

As this post evolves this turns out to be a rhetorical question, which is
reasonable. But there here is an informed answer:

Because from the study of theory and practice of psychoacoustics we know
that differences have to be far greater to be audible at all. Because
bias-controlled tests show that even cables that are vastly different in
terms of construction don't reliably cause audible differences.

But there are two problems with people here. One is that
psychological effects are real and you have to go out of
your way to eliminate the effects of them. You know, the
old, loud mufflers make my car go faster thing. And
investigators have been bitten so many times by that they
start to get paranoid about it even if it's not there!

Agreed.

And second there is the only thinking with what you know
syndrome. If you are a chemist you look at everything
chemically. If you are a hammer, everything looks like a
nail. So instead of asking a question as I did above,
namely "what POSSIBLE effects might be entering in here,
one rather starts with an obviously false assumption
(namely that electricity goes down stranded and solid
wire the same way) and then start to justify no
difference using arguements that really don't apply like
"It can't be skin effect". Well if it can't be that, then
why even consider it?

Good question. However hope springs eternal. Why stop with an abstract
theory - why not do practical measurements and listening tests. Been there
done that and the results aren't surprising - wll-informed modern Science
rules.


Everytime there is a new discovery, the medical
community goes ape with new "cures" based on the new
science.

Perhaps in the popular press. I don't do medical research but two of my kids
do. They tell me that scientific skepticism is alive and well.

Only it really isn't science at all. So they
discover electricity and all the doctors are zapping
people to "cure" them. Someone discovers radioactivity
and soon they are feeding people Radium to "cure" them.
New chemicals get discovered and almost immediately they
start feeding them to people hoping to find a "cure".
Eventually everyone does come to their senses, but that
takes some time and there is lots of nonsense in-between.

Not to mention all the people who were critically injured and even killed by
radioactivity in the early days. Madame Curie and her bother died of cancer.
Thomas Edison's R&D works invented a practical flouroscope to improve the
utility of X-rays for diagnosis of health problems and injuries. However one
of Edison's technicans was horribly disfigured and eventually died a painful
death due to excess exposure to X-Rays. I have a friend who had to undergo a
number of cancer surgeries that were probably due to the use of X-Rays to
treat a skin condition that was at worst cosmetic.

And one has to not be intimidated by a lack of
understanding. If you hear a difference in cables and are
pretty sure of it, it does not matter that you may not
yet have a reason why that should be so. People love to
pontificate with negative opinons.

IME people love to pontificate for and against with signficiant vigor. I
favor looking at the results of properly-informed theoretical investigations
and practical experiments. Here's a comprhensive analysis that seems to shed
a lot of light:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~jcgl/Scots_Guide/audio/part7/page1.html

Remember the
"everything has been invented" thing or the "No one will
ever make a motor without a commutator" or the "heavier
than air craft can never fly"? Yeah, all of them by high
powered "experts" of the time and all of them dead wrong.
I know Monster cable has poisoned the well, but one can't
be so afraid of that where you won't even consider what
your ears tell you is true!

Trouble is, so many people naively presume that just because they do a
listening tests, what their ears hear is the only relevant influence.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Skin Effect in Solid/Stranded/Litzendraht Wire -Guy Macon
    ... stranded wire *does* help reduce skin effect. ... although the strands are not insulated from each other directly, ... Thus stranded wire ends up somewhere between solid ... The best idea I heard of for speaker cable is heavy extension cables ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Skin Effect in Solid/Stranded/Litzendraht Wire -Guy Macon
    ... stranded wire *does* help reduce skin effect. ... although the strands are not insulated from each other directly, ... Thus stranded wire ends up somewhere between solid ... The best idea I heard of for speaker cable is heavy extension cables - you have thick cables and therefore low resistance, ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Skin Effect in Solid/Stranded/Litzendraht Wire -Guy Macon
    ... stranded wire *does* help reduce skin effect. ... although the strands are not insulated from each other directly, ... Thus stranded wire ends up somewhere between solid ... The best idea I heard of for speaker cable is heavy extension cables - you have thick cables and therefore low resistance, ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Skin Effect in Solid/Stranded/Litzendraht Wire -Guy Macon
    ... stranded wire *does* help reduce skin effect. ... although the strands are not insulated from each other directly, ... Thus stranded wire ends up somewhere between solid ... Many people are under the false impression that simply insulating ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables
    ... speaker wire runs, but 7/20 stranding is good enough. ... I think the idea is that although the strands are not insulated from each other directly, there is still a significant resistance between the strands (due to poor contact, air gaps, corrosion, migration of chemicals from the outer insulation, etc.). ... Thus stranded wire ends up somewhere between solid core and Litz wire regarding skin effect. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)