I don't think it's a scam when they don't lie about scientific terminology.

But when they start talking about Q factor, resistance, capacitance, inductance, decibels and all that stuff - they are on the edge of being a scam, because they are claiming something that is not true. For example, how is a ferrite ring supposed to boost a signal by 3dB (doesn't that double it?) Where is the energy coming from? Nowhere, because it doesn't boost it.

It's just psychology - and it's disturbing how many people buy this.

Another thing is, have you heard of HDMI cables? No doubt you have. My motto is if the digital link (be it HDMI, optical, etc.) works with no pixel issues, then the cable is perfect. Yet some people seem to believe somehow that a digital signal can be improved upon in the area of colour or detail. That is just plain wrong - it's a digital signal, so you'll get the picture, or it will be broken up and corrupted with pixels speckling, or it won't work at all. That's it - no improvement in sharpness, colour etc.

 

A ferrite core especially in the high frequency range can easily boost the signal to noise ratio, WAY outside the audio spectrum though.

Actually I've seen HDMI feed through cables costing a few hundred dollars which actually do what you're talking about, they're active video filters, and absolutely destroy fidelity.

I can get 12 foot HDMI cables for 30 bucks off a website that would price them 100 dollars or more in a big box store. I currently use the rattiest RCA cable on earth to run digital audio from my PC to my home theater receiver.. It's bit perfect, and doesn't mind in the slightest that it's being run on 'inferior' cables. My ears are pleased =>

 

A ferrite core especially in the high frequency range can easily boost the signal to noise ratio, WAY outside the audio spectrum though.

Ah, I didn't know it was talking about SNR. Still, as you say, it's pointless.

Actually I've seen HDMI feed through cables costing a few hundred dollars which actually do what you're talking about, they're active video filters, and absolutely destroy fidelity.

I'm talking about copper wire. People believe Monster Cable when they say their cables get zero bit error rate. Well, they may (unlikely) - but it's pointless, because HDMI has a lot of error correction. What are they going to do next - sell SATA cables so your audio on your PC sounds better with less distortion? And your files arrive intact? Actually, IIRC, 3 Gbps SATA cables (which most PCs use) is faster than standard 1080p HDMI, right?

I can get 12 foot HDMI cables for 30 bucks off a website that would price them 100 dollars or more in a big box store. I currently use the rattiest RCA cable on earth to run digital audio from my PC to my home theater receiver.. It's bit perfect, and doesn't mind in the slightest that it's being run on 'inferior' cables. My ears are pleased =>

I wish I could. I'm looking out for cheap DVI cables - but Maplin wants to charge me £20 for gold plated DVI nonsense! No thank you. Especially when the graphics card's connector isn't gold plated in the first place - it would probably be worse to have gold to copper contact. With my cheap VGA cables, when I have a black screen, I can just about see noise on the signal; it's very faint and honestly I can't see it when I've got anything else on the display. And that's an analog signal. And on my scope, with a 9V battery attached, noise is less than 2mVp-p, going over cheap copper cabled probes; most of that noise is probably internal.

 

There's nothing that says they were tom, vagary is the key. There are no true technical specifics mentioned in any of those kinds of products, just buzz words.

Actually, HDMI doesn't have any error correction, it uses a two stage 8b9 to minimize transitions and then 9b10 encoding scheme to optimize for DC balance. What's called 'error correction' is pretty much a misnomer, if there is an error in HDMI data transmition it's there on the other end.

Try www.mpja.com they have the best cable prices I've come across. DVI and HDMA and adapter to fit every single mating possibility.

Gold plated contacts are not nonsense, even if one side is copper. Gold will not corrode under almost any circumstances, it's ideal for connector plating, and it has a self bonding effect to other gold connections, as well as generally low contact resistance it's also a good conductor, anyway you look at it, gold is good for connectors, and it shouldn't' raise the price more than about 50 cents per cable end max.

 

Gold plated contacts are not nonsense, even if one side is copper. Gold will not corrode under almost any circumstances, it's ideal for connector plating, and it has a self bonding effect to other gold connections, as well as generally low contact resistance it's also a good conductor, anyway you look at it, gold is good for connectors, and it shouldn't' raise the price more than about 50 cents per cable end max.

Interesting. I was always told it is bad to have copper to gold. Copper still has low resistance, not sure about contact resistance though (is there a difference?)

 

Lately I've been finding it's less expensive to order contacts with more gold plating than less, probably because of popularity.
I'm talking about crimp board connectors and such.

 

Oddly silver has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of the metals, unfortunately it tarnishes easily, like copper. As far as I know gold is the best contact material because it does not normally tarnish and because it is is very soft which increases contact area as it deforms easily.
I've seen solid silver and silver plated copper strand audio interconnects at very high prices - silver is fairly cheap (about £120 per kg).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_conductivity

Looks like silver is now £414 per kilo - maybe I'd better sell mine.

 

If a manufacturer claims that their Ultra Tweeters work at 1 GHz, when they plainly do not, are they falsely advertising their product?

 

If a manufacturer claims that their Ultra Tweeters work at 1 GHz, when they plainly do not, are they falsely advertising their product?

I think it will not be scam if the person behind this. Is self-delued and actually think the product work. Hard to say in this case. It could be that they laugh all the way to bank.

 

Just thought I'd pass this along, as I have had tremendous results with this ground system that I have designed.

I'm using wattgate audiograde receptacles with a 20 amp dedicated audio circuit. I run a single 10 awg wire from circuit breaker directly to the receptacle - ungrounded.

Is he saying he is only using one wire for his AC connection and a copper pipe in wet dirt for his return??

That's not only stupid/dumb it's down right dangerous. Wonder what a lightning surge would do to his Hi dollar HIFI

 

I've always wondered what difference, if any, these fancy plug systems do.

For example in my bedroom/lab, I have an oscilloscope, plugged into a 4-bar, which is plugged into another 4-bar which is connected to the ring circuit for the house.

I'm probably violating every audiophile rule in the book, but yet, my 'scopes readings seem fine, less than 2mV noise in most cases (can you even *hear* 2mV of noise?) I'm willing to bet most of that is internal noise.

Now I'm not sure to what point HP have gone to reducing the noise, but it highly doubt fancy grounding systems and gold plated BNC connectors were on the list.

When it was new, the RRP for the scope was about $3,300, which is actually considerably less than some audiophile budgets.

It's ridiculous, really. There's absolutely no point in buying 6 feet of expensive mains cable, or even upgrading your entire house, when thousands of miles of completely unshielded copper or aluminum wire carries the electricity to your house.

Audiophile fuses. Something interesting here. £20 for a 13A fuse?! You can buy a pack of 5 for £1, which will sound absolutely the same, guaranteed. The fuses are gold plated, and designed to minimise resonance with audio frequencies? What the? Well, I guess, if you have sheep, you can sell it...

"Rent-a-magazines" like Stereophile are, IMO, not sheep, but instead paid by vendors for favorable reviews and to keep the audiophile nonsense going.

 

2mV is actually pretty significant noise.
A 24-bit audio signal has 2^24 quantizations, each being \(2^{-24} = 6\cdot10^{-8}\) of the full scale voltage.

At say, 5V, that means each quantization level is 0.3 uV.
Your 2 mV of noise would then be about 9-bits worth...

 

2mV is actually pretty significant noise.
A 24-bit audio signal has 2^24 quantizations, each being \(2^{-24} = 6\cdot10^{-8}\) of the full scale voltage.

At say, 5V, that means each quantization level is 0.3 uV.
Your 2 mV of noise would then be about 9-bits worth...

Correct. However, I have read a study before (I'll have to google it) that says that almost all people cannot hear detail greater than 14 bits worth.

 

Hifi nuts have trained the hearing. Or at least they are self-deluded into thinking they have. The more expensive HiFi system the better hearing of course

 

tom66, human hearing isn't simply a matter of bit depth whatever study you refered to was misinterpreted.
Sure, 14 bits full scale should be fine, when was the last time you listened to audio that contained nothing but full scale sine waves? The nuances and detail of say a flute or violin musical performance would not exist because the changes are less than 1 bit at the volume levels they occur at. In order to get 14 bits of depth at the signal sizes of a delicate performance you would need a total dynamic range of 16 or 24 bits.

Just as an example, pretend there was a tremolo in a flutists note that at 14 bits only caused a single bit shift in the volume. The listener would hear effectively a square wave modulation at the frequency of the tremelo, it would be horrible. If you use 24 bits to record at you'd have 10 bits of depth left in that previous 14 bit range to capture volume differences at, you would if you were listening on headphones or a good audio system in a properly prepared room actually hear the volume increasing and decreasing finely at a perfect sine wave reproduction of the actual tremolo.


Many people will use the same argument with sampling rate thinking that 96 or 192khz sampling rates are stupid cause the human ear can only mainly pick up sounds to about 15khz and have an upper limit near 22khz, what you're missing is that this is only true for monaural sounds, this is completely wrong for positional audio where because the phase between two signals needs to be precisely controlled a FAR greater sampling rate than the limit of human hearing is needed, otherwise high frequency positional audio would be limited to a few discrete left/right channel states only with no graduation between. Considering that this aliasing effect decreases with the audio's frequency a complex sound played over a surround system is going to bother the listener.

I think the current accepted definition of 'high definition' audio is 192khz sampling rate with a dynamic range of 24 bits. Even then the bit depth should ideally be stored as a logarithmic value not a linear one which will DRAMATICALLY increase the dynamic range to the human ear because increases in perceived volume are logarithmic.

There is a very good reason why suckers buy stupid stuff in the name of high fidelity audio and that's because it is SO little understood by the masses.

The only way you can ever TRULY understand what high fidelity audio really means is to experience it, and there's not a lot of places you can do that. A really good PC sound card with a headphone amplifier and a high quality set of headphones is really a must, the typical headphone driver of a PC is insufficient. Room acoustics are even more complex than that.

 

According to your reference (not listed) the effective bit depth of human hearing only lets us determine 16,384 discrete states of volume (pressure)

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/sound/earsens.html

We obviously can't determine each individual state discretely (we don't think digitally) but the effective bit depth in the digital domain to produce the equivalent analog sensitivity would be a pinch more than 43bits. The human ear should not be under estimated.

 

Correct. However, I have read a study before (I'll have to google it) that says that almost all people cannot hear detail greater than 14 bits worth.

Ok, so with 14-bits we have 61 uV quantization per full scale volt.

At 5V each level is 0.3 mV. It's obvious that 2mV is still very significant...

Anyway, if you do have a 24-bit system having 2 mV of noise is completely unacceptable performance, it doesn't matter how many bits you think you need.

One of the basic concepts in selecting number of bits and sampling frequency is SNR. You need to increase both to increase SNR.

 

I'm going to bed now, but I just wanted to raise a point about the 43 bits figure. That's full scale range - like saying your multimeter can measure from 0V to 1000V with the same resolution as 0V to 10V. The human eye is similar, in that it has a huge full scale range, but normally it can only see in a small range band.

 

Yes Tom you just showed the point I was tying to make exactly. 14 bit fullscale audio for a 1bit window is only... 1 bit. The audio you're listening to doesn't automagically take advantage of all the bits, only the human ear does that in the real world with real dynamic audio, or an equivalent bit depth which is 43 bits.

We can hear in the whole band at the same time, but the strongest signal is the only one that's going to be noticed. In a delicate ensemble, only the effective dynamic range is important. Most people are deaf to such nuance because the dynamic range of typical modern music is so incredibly high it can't take advantage of the nuance of human hearing. You have to have eclectic tastes in music to notice.

Fidelity is all about the precision of the reproduction at EVERY range that is acoustically noticeable at a given moment. For the audio range of human perception 24 bits is perfectly reasonable.

 

Spend some time near some big sound emitters (military jets, 5" guns, 400 Hz axial flow fans, late 1960 rock concerts) and fewer bits are perfectly adequate.

I might put forth that the sound reproduction at the speakers/headphones is enormously influential in what you can hear from the recorded source.