James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables

Doing the same demonstration with pro-audio speakers (Carvin, JBL Pro, and even old Altec-Lansing A7 Voice of The Theater speakers) is even more impressive, because they tend to have higher sensitivity than home hi-fi speakers.

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Guy Macon
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Guy Macon
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There does appear to be a large number of oxy-free morons out there ;-)

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"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
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Reply to
Fred Abse

Let's cut off their oxygen!

John

Reply to
John Larkin

What do you expect? Eeyore is one dimensional.

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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

On Sat, 06 Oct 2007 09:35:06 +0000 in sci.electronics.design, Guy Macon wrote,

Stranded wire does nothing for skin depth. All the strands are touching each other and act about like a single conductor. They aren't insulated like in litz wire.

Reply to
David Harmon

It's probably because it's _SOOOOO_ much easier to work with - can you imagine hooking up your speakers with #14 solid wire?

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

According to:

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stranded wire *does* help reduce skin effect. 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.

Reply to
David Brown

But most systems have equalizers, or at least tone controls, and people set them until they like the way it sounds.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Use single or double strength mag wire and make your own "Litz" configuration, and end up closer to the that "other" end.

Hell, use SPC mag wire and make some "killer strands" to pass your signals over!

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

Wiki claims that stranded is worse!

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Opinions seem about equally divided on this. Anybody know for sure?

*Insulated* stranded wire, with strands connected only on the ends, does seem to have lower skin losses, according to Terman and others. It certainly has lower eddy-current losses, in transformers and inductors.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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Clearly, tone controls or equalizers are going to have a much bigger effect than the tiny influences any speaker cable could have (although high-end audio equipment, as I understand it, seldom has equalizers or tone control - audiophiles normally prefer their music to be as close to the originals as possible). It's the speakers that totally dominate the frequency-dependant effects in a high-end audio setup.

Reply to
David Brown

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Although I find wikipedia a useful resource, in this case the audioholics people actually *measured* their cables, rather than just writing about the effects they thought might happen. The effective resistance of stranded wire (as wikipedia says) will be higher for a given cross-sectional area of the bunch, since there are air gaps - but that won't affect the skin depth (higher resistance per unit length is, of course, worse). If you were to increase the actual area of the bunch so that the resistance is the same as a given single-core cable, then as the cable's area is greater, the skin effect is greater. However, that depends on there being direct negligible resistance connections between the strands - as I wrote (and as suggested from your comments about eddy currents in transformers), that's not the case. At audio frequencies, with sensible cable lengths for home use, any skin effects end up almost immeasurably small, and totally swamped by speaker effects.

Reply to
David Brown

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The old school method was to braid several insulated wires together. That yields a pseudo-litz configuration which yield good use of skin effect conduction. Of course, one uses enough wires per signal line to make the resistance per unit length low. The idea is to have a high per unit length available skin. Yet another reason why SPC would be better in such configurations. It also takes solder much better so end terminations would likely be much more integral.

Reply to
IAmTheSlime

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I was at a party last week and started talking to a guy who works for Digidesign, the mixer panel/audio software people. He has had extensive experience in the audio production/studio business. Turns out that the stuff that goes onto a cd (or vinyl) has been torturously processed, compressed, mixed, distorted, equalized, echoed, DSPd, and generally messed with before the audiophools get their hands on the signal. He says that a cut may be mixed 20 different ways; then people take the mixes home to listen to, try them in their cars, play them on boom boxes, before they decide which one to publish. It's like a frozen pizza, full of artificial ingredients. He says that classical music is the least messed with.

And then the reviewers report "stunning" differences from AC line cords!

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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Well, you could always use those newfangled "crimp" things.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

"We promised that supply to the customers our fine products"

Makes Babelfish proud, it sho' duz.

Reply to
mrdarrett

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I know a little of how the original masters are created - it's impressive how many steps the music passes through before being pressed (you forgot to mention that many of these steps use op-amps, which are considered sacrilege by audiofools, especially by the valve fans).

However, at good recording studios, they don't mess with the quality. In a modern setup, it will be transformed to digital fairly early on, and all the work is done at a significantly higher sampling rate and accuracy than the end product, so that rounding errors don't add up (say, 384 kHz and 32-bit). In digital, it's easy to make your filters as sharp or flat as you want, with no added distortion, interference, impedance mismatches, skin effects, or anything else. And in the analogue domain, they use solid and reliable technology - audiofool cable companies don't sell to professionals.

Well, connecting the AC line cord generally does make a stunning difference to the music :-)

I remember once having a discussion with a "journalist" for an audiofool magazine about fibre optic cables for SPDIF - he was of the opinion that there were audible differences between "low quality" and "high quality" fibre optic cables, and that top end electrical SPDIF cables sound better...

Reply to
David Brown

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I think your brain experienced a gas tight crimp as you exited your mother's womb.

Reply to
IAmTheSlime

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Damn, you *are* really the slime.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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You should look up Frank's lyrics.

Reply to
ChairmanOfTheBored

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