Pop on over to the forum at Audio Asylum and check out this heartwarming discussion on receptacles as they weigh the relative sound quality of various receptacles.

Example:
"Any of the P&S receptacles I've experimented with (5242, 5262 and 5262A cryoed) all exhibited the hashy, splashy high frequencies relative to a cryoed Hubbell 8200H. To my ears, as yours, the Hubbell's midrange is more relaxed, but, equally important, it tends to be more open, more detailed and less "congested". I can tend to see why some might prefer the P&S's bass quality, but to me the "tighter" quality of the bass on any of the P&S receptacles will result in a much leaner presentation which I am not really fond of."
http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/t.mpl?f=cables&m=116937

I am going to start a topic of my own-
Best quality wire nuts.
I find that Ideal's wire nuts present a creamy and forward midrange with expansive highs about 10k. The bass is chocolately rich and it embraced me like a French paramour.
I joke. But maybe some of these guys CAN really hear that well. For better or for worse.

I would say that those audiophile-type people are full of hooey, but I actually know a guy at the college where I work who "claims" to have such a sensitive ear. If he is to be believed, vitually all of life must be about as pleasing to him as fingers scratching on a chalkboard.

This is the same guy who will spend as much as $8,000.00 on an amplifier which puts out about 5 watts per channel, or buys custom-made speaker cables to the tune of $300.00 per foot for his home sound system (while his living room is literally void of all furniture other than an equipment cabinet and a single chair. All this while the power to his equipment travels through knob and tube wiring from an FPE (gasp) breaker panel .

Go figger.

Mike (mamills)

They don't call the board "Audio Asylum" for nothing! It is, clearly, a place for audiophiles who need to be kept in an asylum.

Seriously, a number of years ago my wife and I were auditioning some speakers to buy. They happened to be driven at the time by a very expensive Acoustic Research tube amplifier. When we came back to the store to finalize the purchase, I noticed to myself that, while they still sounded very nice, that some of the "magic" was gone. At which point, my wife commented aloud about the same thing. The salesman then told us that he'd connected them to an Adcom amplifier, which was what we were considering getting to drive the speakers with.

So I'll vouch that some of these things do in fact make a difference.


I've watched with amusement discussions about power cords costing hundreds of dollars that are supposed to make things sound vastly better. Sorry, I can't bring myself to believe that six feet of magic power cord will make much difference in series with 75 feet of Romex, the cheapest breaker the contractor could find, and miles and miles of POCO wires.

"cryoed"??!! You mean these guys are cyrogenically treating the receptacle??!! I assume there's a special, high-security wing of the asylum where they keep those guys locked up where they can't hurt the rest of us?

I understand that a nickle plating, such as Hubbell uses on their hospital grade receptacles, is actually rather nonlinear (somewhat diode-like, as I recall) (I'm talking here about actual, measurable properties, not the results of "listening tests"); I would think they would get better results from a receptacle with plain-vanilla brass or bronze contacts. But I guess I'm missing the point--the more expensive it is, the better their ears like it.


[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 06-08-2006).]

If there is an audible difference in the output from a stereo system as a result of nickel contact plating, cryo treating the receptacle, etc., then whoever designed the amplifier's power supply needs to go back to engineering school.

The whole function of the power supply is to convert the incoming AC (warts and all) into stable, filtered DC to operate the electronic circuitry. Any "diode effects" caused by nickel plated contacts would be so far down in the noise floor compared to all the other junk on the typical powerline that it should have no measurable effect on the output of the supply. If tiny pertubations in the incoming powerline ride through to the output rails, then the filtering and regulation of the supply must be essentially non existent, and you would never hear those tiny effects through all the 120 Hz hum from the rectifiers!

The audiophool crowd has a LONG history of falling for all kinds of scams, the more expensive, the better. Green magic markers for the edge of CDs, special magic paint to coat solid state components with to give "tube sound", $1000 wooden volume control knobs, special stones to absorb negative vibrations from your listening room, etc. There was even a "specially treated" digital clock that was claimed to "realign" the electrons coming out of your wall sockets.

USDA Grade A prime BS, the lot of it.
http://www.elecdesign.com/Globals/PlanetEE/Content/768.html http://www.ethanwiner.com/audiophoolery.html http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm

Great links!

I'm going to start marketing my own special Audiophile Goo that you rub in your ears for SUPERIOR sound. Price will be $12,000 per 6oz. And it makes you look 10 years younger.

Speaking of which... The female equivalent of this audio hooey would have to be beauty products. There's a lot of ridiculously expensive stuff with MAGICAL powers.

Back to Electical. Have you noticed how many restaurants and shops are putting compact florescents in their recessed cans? Pretty Ugly. Probably good savings tho. (california)

You can think what you want, about the coustomer, but take a look at the companies both selling, and installing these systems, they have large profit margins, and increased revenues.

The average cable run, and wall fish, is 2 to 3 times, what an electrician asks, and they mark-up all their material with a hefty figure, less trainning, then an electrician, less truck inventory, and less operating overhead, is there something wrong, with this picture?

Oh, how I love the audio devices........
They're even going down in price!!

Some oldies from ECN: (I think the links to the fine devices are still valid) https://www.electrical-contractor.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/004279.html
https://www.electrical-contractor.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/002238.html

(I personally love the rewarding, robust low and midrange tones I get from my #6 Aluminum Triplex service drop.)

There's a stereo store I go into (a lot) that has $45 per foot braided power supply cord... I die laughing everytime I see it because it has a $.50 cord cap on it from the 50's. I should get a picture....

Coupling speakers to a different amplifier can certainly make a difference in the sound due to impedance matching, the combined frequency response, source impedance of the amp affecting damping, and so on.

The claims for $300 per foot speaker cables which are somehow directional (with an A.C. signal?!), and sound best if oxygenated, frozen, broiled, or fricaseed are just ridiculous. Yes, if you try to run 300 watts to speakers down 500 feet of 24-gauge telephone wire you'll notice a difference comapared to the same amp and speakers with more suitable cabling, but that's a rather different story.


Don;t forget the little sticky triangles (late 1980s?) which you are supposed to align on all the equipment to improve the sound. I think pointing them in the right direction shows the electrons or the flux lines from the earth's magnetic field the right way to go, or something like that.

Personally, I'm convinced that sound quality is poorer since we adopted the new European cables here. That brown and blue insulation on the conductors adds a certainly fuzziness to the mid-range, and restricts the presence of the highs much more than the old red and black insulation.

Most of the audiophiles who end up wasting money on all this snake oil are mostly people who are not in a technical field, and thus not able to sort the valid improvements from the snake oil scams. Throw in the placebo effect, and that trying to compare subtile changes that might happen since you stopped listening to the stereo while you change out the power cord or such is pretty much impossible (your brain and ears forget too much over ten minutes). Especially if the change had zero effect. Research labs do "ABX" testing, where a listener listens to a system without an improvement (A), then immediately the improvement is switched in (B), and a third selection where A or B is randomly selected, unknown to both listener and the person running the test (but recorded in a computer for later analysis). If the listener ends up picking the improvement 50% of the time, then the improvement has no value.

Paul,

You just found a new business, the flux lines from the earth's magnetic field are in constant movement, so all you need is a map with the field changes, something like a flight map, and you can schedule for a hefty fee, equipment moves, based on field movement, i notice my audio equipment is off a little since the earths lines moved, or is that my ears aging, due to over exposure to hard rock bands.

That reminds me of a discussion at a German board... NYM cable (equivalent to NM) is round, and when adopting the new color codes they changed the order of the wires from black-brown-blue-ye/gn to something else, I think brown-black-blue-ye/gn looking at the end of the cable. And some guys were seriously discussing whether it would be ILLEGAL to use old cable with the different order!
Adn another guy proceeded to ask: "Why??? Does that confuse the electrons? Do they get dizzy if black and brwon are reversed???"

One thing to keep in mind when 'poo-poo'ing all of the strange audio gear: the human ear is very sensitive to distortion and correlated noise, the human brain is very adaptable and can be trained to either notice or ignore small stimuli, and audio equipment has extremely high gain, and can amplify very small perturbations.

Add to this the fact that people tend to develop mythology when there is something that the cannot understand, that most people don't understand physics very well, and that the engineering is subtle and complex, and you get a situation where there may be _real_ effects, but the theory and marketing is simply full of ignorant hooey. The net result is that you have _real_ effects, which people can notice through hearing, yet without a solid basis in physical understanding, you end up with no good fixes, simply bad marketing.

As NJwirenut noted: if the power supply of an amplifier is so sensitive to external noise that changing the receptacle or supply wiring changes the sound, then there is a design flaw in the power supply. However it would not surprise me in the least that many power supplies _are_ poorly designed by that metric. In the discussion on shared neutrals, someone who works with professional audio equipment describes his _experience_ with problems on shared neutral circuits. These problems go away when the neutral is not shared...IMHO a problem with the power supply design, not with the shared neutral circuits.

It would not surprise me if the 'audiophile' receptacles made some difference in rectification or microphonic effects, which _could_ be measured with the appropriate instruments. The _actual_ effects, if they exist, will certainly be different from those 'predicted' by the mythology, and any 'fixes' at the level of the receptacle would merely be 'work-arounds' for the real problems in the power supply. If the power supply is so sensitive to these changes that such effects can be heard, then something is broken someplace else.

The 'green pen on the CDs' line reminds me of the following:

Just before he died, Gabe Wiener was doing proper research on the 'sound' of CDs. He (among others) found that in well controlled double blind studies, listeners could tell the difference between two CDs of exactly the same music, both of which, when read by a computer, resulted in _exactly_ the same digital data. People could even hear the difference between a source CD and a CDR burned from that source. This is totally at odds with the digital marketing of 'perfect sound forever'. Lots of people heard these effects, and came up with different mythologies, and thus you had 'green pens', little adhesive disks and rings to 'damp' the CDs, very expensive transports with separate DACs, etc.

Rather than coming up with mythology to explain these results, Gabe was part of a group that looked for physically plausible and _measureable_ explanations. I do not remember all of the physically plausible distortion and noise paths that they found, but the list included power supply noise from the laser tracking servos leaking into the analog output stages and clock noise caused by changes in the rate data was read off the CD. Apparently many of the high end external DAC systems didn't bother to generate a high quality internal DAC clock, and simply used the incoming data as the clock source; this would make the external DAC sensitive to _analog_ noise on the CD transport and _digital_ signal lines. The list went on, with many examples of systems which were engineered to _function_, but which did not properly account for subtle but well understood physical principals. These systems were sensitive to noise sources that they _should_ have been immune to.

Did green pens make a difference? Probably not. But the 'damping rings' probably did make a difference, isolating transports from microphonic effects probably did make a difference, and thus there was truth at the core of the mythology.

One could probably have fun _and_ retain some self respect by marketing to this crowd, possibly by making it explicit that you are selling fixes for things that shouldn't be a problem, and then grounding these fixes in solid physics.

-Jon

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Back to Electical. Have you noticed how many restaurants and shops are putting compact florescents in their recessed cans? Pretty Ugly. Probably good savings tho. (california)
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My two cents? I spec'ed this for a friend's shop I designed with his help (he was the carp, but had a HO's license). I needed more light than the cans could provide (since they were IC), so I used PAR38's with CFL sources, lit the place up right nicely. Personally, I wouldn't do it for comm, but it's all in how it looks. (Sorry about the mini-threadjack)