Heard RAIDHO C2 Speakers(Danish)

[vneal]

I want to describe a power cord experience I had last night. I am a member of Houston Audio Society and time to time members will invite other members into their homes to experience their systems. Usually this is a two channel stereo experience with high end equipment. Though many have separate theater systems also. In the past I have been of the belief that power cords are power cords and really make little difference in a high end system.

His system consisted of RAIDHO C2 LOUDSPEAKERS,( ribbon tweeter with two 6 ½ “ midrange drivers made from diamonds/carbon and aluminum. (no sub, none was needed), Oppo 105D BluRay, Sota turntable with a Graham tangential tracking arm, McIntosh MC601 500 watt mono blocs, McIntosh C2500 Tube Preamp, some hose size cables. The system sounded VERY OPEN and uses exactly the same hand-made ribbon tweeter found in Raidho’s $240,000 flagship D-1. It had stunning speed, detail, and resolution on the one hand, with a silky smoothness and ease on the other. If you’ve listened exclusively to dome tweeters for any length of time, the Raidho ribbon arrives as some kind of revelation. Bass was as deep as any non sub woofer system I have heard. Now $30,000 speakers being run by $60,000 of electronics should sound good . The designer of the speaker was present and talked about their design. The subject led to cable lengths and he did an experiment with two power cords. One was 3 meters long the other 4 meters. Same brand(unknown) Anyway the 4 meter length from the wall to line conditioner sounded much beter than the 3 meter length. He showed the same thing with a generic cord. Why this was the case I do not know. But there were 20 people who saw the same thing. Any explanation from anyone here? My point is cables, interconnects, power cords do sound different on really hi end systems. Different is not necessarily better. I think we(most of you) rely on room correction too much some time and should maybe simplify systems a bit when it comes to TWO CHANNEL listening. The best test instrument is between our ears.

[lionear]

Thanks for the post.

Life is too short to mess with anything less that "the best" one can afford. For me, that means vinyl only, two channels only, two speakers only. And I buy pre-owned stuff - there are some gems out there.

I think the whole wire thing started in the late 1970's with Linn. They said that "wire is evil", so keep the wires as short as possible. This might make sense for DC, but I don't think it makes sense for music signals, or even AC.

When it comes to music and AC, I look at a wire as a filter and a filter will change the signal. There's no way to avoid this. The best one can do is to find a filter that does the least harm, and/or does some good (e.g. attenuating interference). Some companies, like MIT, have some mathematical models on how wire acts as a filter. They add capacitors/resistors/inductors to their wire to "improve" the filter. Alas, their models are a trade secret. However, it's very possible that the length of the wire is a factor. And I've also found that a short wire may not be as good as a long wire.

(The math is a LOT more complicated than Ohm's Law. When it comes to AC, it includes i (the square root of -1). That's just for a signal that has a fixed frequency. I have no doubt that the math for music signals is very complex indeed. You're dealing with frequencies from 0 Hz to 50 kHz, or, in the case of Goldmund and Spectral, up to 3 MHz.)

[KeithL]

Here's my take on the subject - from an engineering perspective.....

Speakers are a very complex electro-mechanical device, and modern speakers are still far from perfect... as a result, there is a lot of variation between how various speakers sound (and, as you say, one might hope that a $60k pair of speakers would sound good enough to justify their price tag). Therefore, it's not at all surprising that a $60k pair of speakers sounded very good.  

However, in direct contrast, a power cable is a very simple device - with only one well-understood purpose.

I wasn't there, so I didn't see (or hear) the demonstration you're describing, but there are several things about it that I find.... questionable.... and far too many "unspecified's" and "unknowns".

1)
My first question is whether this was done in any way as a "blind test" - or whether everyone was "told what they should expect to hear".
If the latter, then we have to suspect that any "results" were simply the result of expectation bias.
(In which case it might simply be an excellent demonstration of that phenomenon.)

2)
Second, while it is true that it is possible for a line cord to exhibit some sort of "filter effect", and in fact every piece of wire exhibits some sort of signal alteration, this is not the purpose of a line cord. The purpose of a line cord is to extend the wire reaching from the power station to your wall outlet the few remaining feet to your equipment... and it should do so without adding enough resistance to cause enough voltage drop to adversely affect the performance of your equipment. (In other words, as someone said, the best possible wire would be "no wire", and, failing that, the best compromise would be the closest you can get to that goal.) Considering how noisy, distorted, and variable the power coming into your home is to begin with, about the only thing a line cord can do to make it worse is to have such high resistance that it limits current flow and causes an excessive amount of voltage drop - which cords that are too long or too thin can in fact do. And, while I suppose it's possible that a line cord could be designed that would achieve some degree of noise filtering, I'd rather use a purpose-built noise filter if that's the goal.

3)
Comparing "unknown" three meter and four meter wires is meaningless. If we are specifying that both are made of the same type and gauge of wire, then we can infer that the four meter cord has 33% higher resistance than the three meter one. If we are not specifying that, then we can't infer or assume anything useful at all. In technical terms, a line cord with higher resistance is technically inferior, although it might conceivably interact favorably with specific flaws in other equipment. (Length is simply not a meaningful term when considered separately from resistance - unless you're talking the thousands of feet required to constitute a significant fraction of the wavelength of a wave at 60 Hz.)

4)
I must disagree absolutely with one of your later statements/conclusions. The purpose of the power supply in a given piece of equipment is to take whatever power it receives from the wall and convert it into exactly whatever voltages the equipment requires for optimum performance. Therefore, if a "hi end" piece of equipment sounds different with different line cords, which can at most affect the power going into its power supply, then it can only be because the power supply is FAILING to do its job properly. After all, if the power supply was doing its job properly, then it would have filtered out any possible differences caused by that line cord and delivered "perfect power" to run the equipment... right? (I would be more willing to forgive this sort of flaw in a "low end" piece of equipment than in an expensive one. A "high end" piece of equipment should sound exactly as it's supposed to regardless of what line cord you use with it.)

5)
Considering all the unknowns..... I'm sort of struck with the similarity between that demonstration and a magician asking you to "pick a card - any card".
Most any decent magician will get the card right - every time - but I'm still not convinced that any of them can really read my mind or otherwise do "real" magic. 
(I'm also curious about exactly why a presumably technical person would go out of the way to "prove" something that technically makes no sense - and for which he has no explanation.....)

And, incidentally, you didn't specify exactly what you meant by "sounded much better".......
(Did it have flatter frequency response? Lower THD? Better sound stage? Lower noise?)

[vneal]

Keith good points. No it was not a blind test. More of a listen to this--- now listen to this. (he switched power cords we knew that  did changed the cords but did not know they were the same brand or that one was longer than the other) I have since found out the brand of cabling is Ansuz cables . . The person doing the test was the owner of Raidho. He was very opinionated on items like cones(he got rid of the ones under the equipment) and absolutely did not care for any type of processing. These are Danish products and supposedly he has a rich investor that has spent over 1 1/2 million on research with their ribbon tweeters. They make their drivers, crossovers, capacitor all in house but their cabinets are made in China

I have since found out the power cord & cabling each are over ten grand. I will pass even if I could afford it this is crazy

[lionear]

Nov 10, 2015 12:34:50 GMT -5 KeithL said:

Here's my take on the subject - from an engineering perspective.....

Speakers are a very complex electro-mechanical device, and modern speakers are still far from perfect... as a result, there is a lot of variation between how various speakers sound (and, as you say, one might hope that a $60k pair of speakers would sound good enough to justify their price tag). Therefore, it's not at all surprising that a $60k pair of speakers sounded very good.  

However, in direct contrast, a power cable is a very simple device - with only one well-understood purpose.

I wasn't there, so I didn't see (or hear) the demonstration you're describing, but there are several things about it that I find.... questionable.... and far too many "unspecified's" and "unknowns".

1)
My first question is whether this was done in any way as a "blind test" - or whether everyone was "told what they should expect to hear".
If the latter, then we have to suspect that any "results" were simply the result of expectation bias.
(In which case it might simply be an excellent demonstration of that phenomenon.)

2)
Second, while it is true that it is possible for a line cord to exhibit some sort of "filter effect", and in fact every piece of wire exhibits some sort of signal alteration, this is not the purpose of a line cord. The purpose of a line cord is to extend the wire reaching from the power station to your wall outlet the few remaining feet to your equipment... and it should do so without adding enough resistance to cause enough voltage drop to adversely affect the performance of your equipment. (In other words, as someone said, the best possible wire would be "no wire", and, failing that, the best compromise would be the closest you can get to that goal.) Considering how noisy, distorted, and variable the power coming into your home is to begin with, about the only thing a line cord can do to make it worse is to have such high resistance that it limits current flow and causes an excessive amount of voltage drop - which cords that are too long or too thin can in fact do. And, while I suppose it's possible that a line cord could be designed that would achieve some degree of noise filtering, I'd rather use a purpose-built noise filter if that's the goal.

3)
Comparing "unknown" three meter and four meter wires is meaningless. If we are specifying that both are made of the same type and gauge of wire, then we can infer that the four meter cord has 33% higher resistance than the three meter one. If we are not specifying that, then we can't infer or assume anything useful at all. In technical terms, a line cord with higher resistance is technically inferior, although it might conceivably interact favorably with specific flaws in other equipment. (Length is simply not a meaningful term when considered separately from resistance - unless you're talking the thousands of feet required to constitute a significant fraction of the wavelength of a wave at 60 Hz.)

4)
I must disagree absolutely with one of your later statements/conclusions. The purpose of the power supply in a given piece of equipment is to take whatever power it receives from the wall and convert it into exactly whatever voltages the equipment requires for optimum performance. Therefore, if a "hi end" piece of equipment sounds different with different line cords, which can at most affect the power going into its power supply, then it can only be because the power supply is FAILING to do its job properly. After all, if the power supply was doing its job properly, then it would have filtered out any possible differences caused by that line cord and delivered "perfect power" to run the equipment... right? (I would be more willing to forgive this sort of flaw in a "low end" piece of equipment than in an expensive one. A "high end" piece of equipment should sound exactly as it's supposed to regardless of what line cord you use with it.)

5)
Considering all the unknowns..... I'm sort of struck with the similarity between that demonstration and a magician asking you to "pick a card - any card".
Most any decent magician will get the card right - every time - but I'm still not convinced that any of them can really read my mind or otherwise do "real" magic. 
(I'm also curious about exactly why a presumably technical person would go out of the way to "prove" something that technically makes no sense - and for which he has no explanation.....)

And, incidentally, you didn't specify exactly what you meant by "sounded much better".......
(Did it have flatter frequency response? Lower THD? Better sound stage? Lower noise?)

I just remembered that the capacitors/resistors/inductors used in MIT cable are adjusted to the length of the cable.  I think the minimum length for MIT cable is 8 ft.  So yes, if you talk to MIT, I think they'd say that the length does play a role in the "sound" of speaker cable.  And since a power cord is similar to a speaker cable, it is also affected by the length.

And just because you WANT a power cord to be insensitive to length, and a power supply to be insensitive to the mains, doesn't mean that a real world implementation WILL do that.

It's fun to hypothesize about the "why" - but it's not important.  The only thing we really need to pay attention to is.... our direct experience.  There's no point spending 1 cent on something that might be proven by the numbers as "better", but something one doesn't actually hear.  And by the same token, if you hear something even though the numbers may indicate that the effect does not exist, then by all means forget the numbers and trust your ears!

The lack of "numbers" does not invalidate an experience.  And over time, the theory will catch up with our experience.  Once upon a time, we didn't know what TIM was, but we could hear it.  We didn't know the importance of very low jitter but we could hear it.  And the same can be said for dither and oversampling/upsampling.

And the current debate about "high resolution" digital audio is very interesting - a higher sampling rate doesn't seem to make a dramatic difference.  And the same can be said about DSD.... I think we can all agree that it's not a game-changer.  I'm underwhelmed, so I really don't care about any of the numbers for DSD.

If you say that you need to see the numbers before you start to hear something.... well, that's expectation bias.

As for double-blind tests... all I can say is... ketchup!

You don't need double-blind tests for EVERYTHING.  


Trust your ears!

[vneal]

Interesting comments above. The presenter for Raidho is not a fan of HD audio and thinks no system can currently reproduce it. I disagree. Even in my modest system HD tracks sound better than the same CD tracks. I know that in some ways even this comparison is not fair since a High Definition track has also been remixed. I have one measuring instrument(my ears)

[KeithL]

Nov 10, 2015 21:50:47 GMT -5 lionear said:

Nov 10, 2015 12:34:50 GMT -5 KeithL said:

I deleted my (enormous) quote here.... see my comments inline.....

I just remembered that the capacitors/resistors/inductors used in MIT cable are adjusted to the length of the cable.  I think the minimum length for MIT cable is 8 ft.  So yes, if you talk to MIT, I think they'd say that the length does play a role in the "sound" of speaker cable.  And since a power cord is similar to a speaker cable, it is also affected by the length.

>>  You are actually entirely wrong here - in several different ways. First, a power cable is in fact almost the exact OPPOSITE of a speaker cable. The purpose of a speaker cable is to transfer a signal from the amplifier to the speaker - and it's very important that the signal be transferred as perfectly as possible because it's what you're listening to. In direct contrast, the power delivered to the device by the power cable is going to be TOTALLY DESTROYED by the power supply in the device. The 60 Hz sine wave of the power coming in is destined to be rectified, turned into DC, filtered if necessary, and perhaps even regulated. Therefore, since you aren't in any way listening to the power waveform, all that is necessary is that it not be ruined so badly that the power supply can no longer do its job and use it. (If you want an analogy, if the job of the speaker cable is to deliver a lovely marble statue without damaging it in any way, the job of the power cable is to deliver a chunk of marble that you're going to crush into fine gravel to pave your driveway.)

>> As for speaker cables, their job (in engineering terms) is to deliver a relatively high-current signal, of relatively limited bandwidth, over a relatively short distance, without altering it in any way. Anything that they do other than that is simply bad engineering. The sole legitimate purpose of adding small amounts of inductance or capacitance to a cable is to "null out" other imperfections - for example, you might add a tiny amount of capacitance to cancel out a tiny amount of inductance. (Most engineers also agree that, while such concerns are valid for cables leading to radio transmitters or microwave dishes, or for miles-long power cables, they are totally trivial at the frequencies and power levels seen in speaker cables.... which is why only engineers who work for companies who sell expensive speaker cables ever seem to consider them worth thinking about.)

And just because you WANT a power cord to be insensitive to length, and a power supply to be insensitive to the mains, doesn't mean that a real world implementation WILL do that.

>> And, from the opposite point of view, just because some company trying to convince you to give them thousands of dollars for a power cable very much WANTS you to believe it will work better than a $15 one from your local electronic supply house doesn't mean that it WILL do so either. Also, nobody is saying that a power cord is "totally insensitive to length". If a power cord has too much resistance, which can happen if it is too long and too thin, then it may cause a voltage drop, which may well cause problems for the equipment connected to it. Likewise, a shielded power cable may in fact prevent noise from getting into a particular piece of equipment and bothering it, or prevent noise generated by a particular piece of equipment from bothering other equipment; however, this usually only occurs with otherwise badly designed equipment. It's also possible that some particular piece of equipment may benefit in some way from a longer power cable, or one with higher resistance; but that will only happen if the equipment itself is rather badly designed.

>> And it is also true that only a WELL DESIGNED power supply will be insensitive to the mains. However, I would hope that "high-end" equipment would include well-designed power supplies - wouldn't you? (And, if the power coming from your mains is so flawed that even a reasonably well designed piece of equipment cannot run well with it, then it makes sense to use a device specifically designed to eliminate the flaws involved. For example, if you live next to a welding shop which puts lots of excessive noise on the power lines, then you should consider adding a line filter. However, expecting a power cable to do the job of a line filter is unreasonable, and buying a $5k power cord to do the job of a $100 noise filter is just plain silly.)   

It's fun to hypothesize about the "why" - but it's not important.  The only thing we really need to pay attention to is.... our direct experience.  There's no point spending 1 cent on something that might be proven by the numbers as "better", but something one doesn't actually hear.  And by the same token, if you hear something even though the numbers may indicate that the effect does not exist, then by all means forget the numbers and trust your ears!

>> Have you ever seen the optical illusion where the two lines that are really perfectly straight look curved? And how about the one where one line looks a lot longer than the other - even though they're exactly the same length? Well, after seeing those, can you actually claim that you will "always trust whet you see with your own eyes"? The fact is that what we perceive (which is what you're calling "direct experience" is quite often not reliable at all. As much as you may prefer to believe otherwise, while we humans are very good at detecting minute differences in certain things, we are also amazingly susceptible to being tricked, either by our own expectations, or by people trying to sell us something. (You may think you can trust your own eyes - but the fact is that "eyewitness testimony" is one of the LEAST reliable types of evidence in many situations.) So, yes, if you THINK you perceive something, but it seems to contradict what science suggests makes sense, then you really should doubt what you experienced and look for some additional way to determine if it was real or not. (So, yes, if I see two lines that look curved, and someone insists they're straight, and there's money involved, I'm going to reach for a ruler - just to see who's imagining what. And, if I'm paying someone to pour me flat concrete for a new porch, I'm going to trust a level more than my eyes or his.)

The lack of "numbers" does not invalidate an experience.  And over time, the theory will catch up with our experience.  Once upon a time, we didn't know what TIM was, but we could hear it.  We didn't know the importance of very low jitter but we could hear it.  And the same can be said for dither and oversampling/upsampling.

>> Yes - and no. The fact that a particular few measurements fail to "prove" something that seems to be audible certainly doesn't prove that it isn't real. However, if we do find measurements that show that the difference we think we hear is real, then that certainly does validate our experience, and, if NO measurements can be found to support something that we think we hear, then that certainly suggests that we need to consider the possibility that we're simply imagining it. (And, if that difference magically disappears when we can no longer see the item in question, then that does in fact strongly suggest that  the difference we heard was in our mind and not in the device in question.) It's not that complicated to validate actual differences with a few reasonably run double-blind tests. Likewise, I haven't heard any reasonable explanation of how a difference that's really present could ONLY be present when we know what to expect.

>> And, yes, at one point transient distortion was unrecognized, but today we know exactly what it is and what causes it, and it is relatively easy to measure. In fact, we usually don't even bother to test for it nowadays, because the sorts of design flaws that cause it actually do have other telltale signs that show up in other more standard types of tests. (And, yes, without a background in science and engineering, it can be difficult to tell the difference between "new science that hasn't been quite worked out yet" and "junk science that was made up to get us to buy expensive snake oil" - and sometimes even people with the right background get it wrong.)

And the current debate about "high resolution" digital audio is very interesting - a higher sampling rate doesn't seem to make a dramatic difference.  And the same can be said about DSD.... I think we can all agree that it's not a game-changer.  I'm underwhelmed, so I really don't care about any of the numbers for DSD.

>> I'm inclined to agree with you there.... I find the differences to be minimal, and I'm not entirely convinced that they can't all be attributed to other factors. But, contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, the "numbers" don't actually suggest that we should expect to hear a dramatic difference with either. (The literature that claims that we should is mostly a combination of exaggeration, a deliberate misstatement of some of the facts, and a failure on the part of many audiophiles to understand the actual information when it is presented accurately.)

If you say that you need to see the numbers before you start to hear something.... well, that's expectation bias.

>> But that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm simply saying that, if someone claims that something is true, but it contradicts known science, then I'm going to look for better confirmation than thinking I hear what I've been told I should expect to hear.

As for double-blind tests... all I can say is... ketchup!

You don't need double-blind tests for EVERYTHING.  


Trust your ears!

[vneal]

The sound with the longer cord was more open sounding, livelier better bass, better treble. It sounded better. I don't listen to measurements

[lionear]

@KeithL

When a company demonstrates something, in many cases, they want you to buy something.   There's nothing wrong with this - all companies, including Emotiva, want you to buy their stuff.  That's why they exist.  But it doesn't affect your ability to hear (or not hear) something.

In this case, its interesting that a speaker manufacturer is demonstrating the effect of length on an unidentified power cable.   He didn't set up a stand afterwards to sell long power cables.  But even if he did, that's ok.

One can wonder about the motives of the demonstrator - but that's the "Argumentum Ad Hominem" fallacy and so should be rejected.   Someone could just as easily dismiss your comments about power cables because Emotiva doesn't make any money off power cables, and they don't want you to spend your money on power cables because they want you to spend all your money on the gear that Emotiva makes".   But that would be grossly wrong.  It's best to stay clear of "why" someone is saying something because it's beside the point.  The key is to focus on "what" someone is saying.

Ultimately, it's up to us to be convinced (by ourselves) whether a particular component improves our experience of music that we listen to, in our own system. If it does, and our personal situation allows us to buy the component, then we should, by all means get it.  This is a no-brainer.  One doesn't need permission from any external authority or theory.  If we can't tell the difference, then by all means return the item.

I'm glad you acknowledge that TIM was not recognized for a while.   That's entirely the point - one might be living through a period of time where something is not recognized.  In those days, there were two worlds - on the one hand, there were solid state amps with very low THD but huge amounts of (unrecognized) TIM and on the other, there were tube amps with higher THD but much less (unrecognized) TIM.  If we slavishly followed the numbers, we'd have to conclude that solid state amps were better, even if they didn't sound better and we'd have to force ourselves to listen to them!

There's no way of knowing whether we're living through a period where something is not recognized.  In fact, given that all science and physics is done "in a box" and involves some level of simplification of reality, we'll never live in a period where ALL things are recognized.  (Theoretical physics has yet to arrive at a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, so engineering, which is derived from physics, definitely hasn't arrived at a point where ALL things are recognized.)

I'm sure there must have been a few people who did force themselves to listen to those solid state amps - and then gave up on hi-fi.  That's the cost.

Power supplies are a lot more complicated than implied by engineering theory.   In the 1970's, Enid Lumley reported hearing the sound of an audio system changing depending on whether a normal reading lamp was plugged into an outlet in the room.   She was not an engineer or a scientist and did not offer any reasons for this.  She ridiculed for that.  It defied the laws of physics and so could be rejected.  Ms Lumley gave up reviewing audio gear.  (That's another cost.)

And then Nelson Pass reported about 10 years later that, yes, an incandescent light bulb acts as a voltage regulator.  (May be he said power regulator - I forget.)  He published an amp design that featured four 100W incandescent light bulbs in the power supply.   I think his idea was for anyone to build it, and then try it out with light bulbs of different wattages.  (It was a very bright amp.)  Could that be connected to what Ms Lumley reported?

The lesson is: trust your ears.  If there's no scientific explanation for it, it only means there's no scientific explanation for it.  It doesn't mean you are somehow proscribed from hearing it.  If you don't hear something that someone claims to hear - then don't worry about it. It doesn't apply to your experience/enjoyment of hi-fi.  If what you hear goes against a scientific theory, you can't suddenly stop yourself from hearing it.  You have to accept that you hear it - and you're allowed to wonder whether the scientific theory applies correctly to that case.  In time, the theory may catch up with the observation.

What about "double-blind" testing?  Unfortunately, doesn't help with our direct experience.   Even if a double-blind test shows, for example, that I should hear "hi rez" recordings as being superior to CD's, if I don't actually hear the "hi rez" recordings as better, in my system, then I don't have to buy "hi rez" material.  It's my system, and my ears, and my brain - and I can do whatever I want with my system.   By the same token, if I find that some item changes the sound of my system in a way that I like, I am free to add that to my system.  It's my system, and my ears, and my brain - and I can do whatever I want with my system.

(One has to be careful about double-blind tests. A double-blind test on an Ebola vaccine must measure things like viral load in the blood, rather than ask the test subjects whether they feel "better" or "worse".   We don't have a way of measuring "audio pleasure" like we can measure viral load and without something like that, there's no point messing with double-blind tests.)

We may come across very persuasive info in the form of marketing materials, sales people, magazines, demo's, slick websites with enthusiastic members, etc.   But we need to be aware of it and spend extra effort in listening tests to get past the expectations created.  As long as we're aware that there can be expectation bias, we can work through it.

(It's much better if someone hands you an unknown component and says, "Take this home, and see if you like it".   That's how dealers operated in the old days.)

[garbulky]

Sigh. This is all old hat. People questioning why someone's perfectly good ears heard something that convinced them. I don't know hwo I feel about power chords. It does strike me as odd. But I haven't heard those extremely good ones with really good speaker systems. So my question is...you heard Radho speakers? PLEASE tell us more about the sound? Can you compare it to anything?

[KeithL]

Where we seem to disagree here is about what I might refer to as "matters of perspective and scale".

First off, there are no such things as "natural laws" - and that term is itself a simplification.

"The laws of physics" are simply the codifications of a bunch of observations and theories, made by many scientists, over a long period of time, and under a variety of circumstances, and found to (at least so far) be true. (We call them laws simply because the are so consistently correct that we find it reasonable to assume that they will be true next time - unless we see proof to the contrary.)

If I hold a bowling ball out in front of my chest, then let go, we all expect it to drop to the floor. (And we've already all assumed that we're standing on the Earth; after all, if I do that standing on the space station, or in a plane in a free-fall dive, the ball will just sit there - neither of which "proves that the law of gravity is wrong".) However, if we were standing in my living room, and I were to hold up the ball and let go, we would both expect it to fall. And, if the ball were to simply hover there, I'm pretty sure you would assume there was some sort of trick involved - and not that "the laws of physics had mysteriously become negated".

Transient Intermodulation Distortion did not in fact "violate the laws of physics". The actual situation is that, in the audio industry, which is a very small part of the world, and at one particular time in history, by tacit agreement, both audiophiles and audio manufacturers had decided that it was reasonable to characterize the performance of amplifiers by taking a few simple measurements. (We humans love simple answers, which sometimes gets us into trouble.) And again, by agreement, everyone involved agreed to ignore all of the other thousands of measurements that could have been performed. And, in the final analysis, this agreement turned out to be an error - and one of those other measurements turned out to in fact be significant after all.

The actual fact is that, even back when transient distortion was "being denied", it wasn't impossible to measure, and any competent electrical engineer could have measured it. What happened was that, because it was  somewhat difficult to measure, and it never occurred to anyone that it might matter, nobody bothered to measure it (just as, when you buy a hot dog, the "ingredients list" contains a list of the major ingredients, but omits to list the thousands of trace chemicals a reasonably detailed analysis would show - because, somewhere, some human has decided that "they aren't important").

(I'm also pretty sure that, since we're talking about something that is in fact real, Transient Intermodulation Distortion would have been easily confirmed using a proper double-blind test. However, as you failed to mention, double-blind testing was largely unknown back then, and so wasn't performed to confirm or fail to confirm what people claimed to be hearing. )

Now, when we're discussing speakers, speakers are a very complex device - and how they interact with a room is even more complex. And, at some level of detail, the subject isn't totally "understood" (I could show you a 3D graph showing the pressure density at ten thousand points throughout the room when a particular note is played through a certain speaker, but neither of us could correlate those measurements with what our brains would interpret that information to mean with absolute certainty, and any attempt we made to do so would be an approximation - and so subject to error). And, because of this uncertainty, it would be quite reasonable to say that "with speakers, measurements don't tell the whole story" and "with speakers, sometimes we can hear things that the measurements can;t show us".

However, the effect line cords have on power supplies simply isn't that complex. Both wire and power supplies are pretty well understood - at least by electrical engineers. And, in fact, competent engineers go out of the way to avoid any such unexpected "interactions".  Therefore, to put it bluntly, if we were to define a "continuum of probability".....

... and, at one end, place the likelihood that we can't tell exactly what a speaker will sound like by measuring it (pretty likely)
... and, at the other end, place the possibility that the magician on TV really did make the elephant hanging from the crane disappear (pretty unlikely)

Let's just say that the likelihood that two reasonably well designed power cables will sound different when connected to a reasonably well designed power supply is a lot closer to the end of the continuum where the disappearing elephant lives.

And, no, you can't "work through expectation bias" - even if you're expecting it.... 
At best, you can compensate for it, and part of doing so is being willing to say things like: "Even though I saw that elephant disappear with my own eyes, I know I can be fooled, and I also know that elephants usually don't disappear, so I'm not going to believe what I saw without a lot more proof".

For anyone who doubts exactly how powerful expectation bias can be, and how susceptible we ALL are to being influenced, I would very much suggest a book titled "Influence" by Robert Cialdini (which is widely recognized as the definitive book on the subject of getting people to think, and do, what you want them to).

And, as for double blind tests, of course you need to be sure and test the correct thing....
(And, to use your example, the "demonstration" of power cable differences you described seems to me to be roughly equivalent to giving some unknown injections to various of your Ebola suffers, then asking them something like "You all feel better after that last shot, right?" - which you seem to agree with me would be pretty meaningless.)

Since the bulk of accumulated knowledge in electrical engineering suggests that power cables "shouldn't" affect the way a device sounds "under normal circumstances", that strongly suggests that there was either expectation bias, or some form of actual trick, involved - or, perhaps, simply that the equipment and power cables used for the demonstration were far from "typical" or "normal" . Therefore, if you want to prove reliably (to me or to yourself) that power cables really do sound different, then you FIRST need to repeat that same test under double blind conditions. Then, assuming it passes that preliminary test, you need to have a competent electrical engineer examine both the equipment and the power cables used to confirm that both are in fact "normal, well designed equipment". (Since I, or any competent electrical engineer, could deliberately design badly flawed power cables that would affect how normal equipment sounds, or design a piece of equipment deliberately flawed in such as way as to be unusually sensitive to differences in power cables, we need to confirm that the difference exists with "normal equipment", or at least with more than that single combination.)

Once you reach that stage, then the idea will indeed be worthy of serious consideration - and further testing.

And, until then, it still seems like "one more disappearing elephant" to me...

JUST TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR HERE, I am not in any way suggesting that anyone should ignore what they hear, or that, just because something hasn't been proven yet, that it may not turn out to be valid - and even important. (I also assume that, if double-blind testing had been in common use when people started claiming to hear Transient Distortion, then it's existence would have been confirmed more quickly, and the discussion would have moved more quickly to how to eliminate it. After all, the whole point of double-blind testing is that it tends to prove the existence of things that really exist, and to fail to prove the existence of things that don't. This is why I can't understand it when people quote that as an argument against double-blind testing.)

In my previous career, part of what I did was to design tests to compare the performance of various pieces of computer and other electronic equipment, and, as someone who has designed lots of tests, I can say from personal experience that it should be possible to devise a test to demonstrate any difference that actually exists; and, if a presumed difference cannot be proven by any test you can devise, then you really have to consider the possibility that it simply isn't there. (Of course, sometimes it requires a little ingenuity to figure out what to test, and how to test it effectively.)

Nov 12, 2015 19:16:08 GMT -5 lionear said:

@KeithL

When a company demonstrates something, in many cases, they want you to buy something.   There's nothing wrong with this - all companies, including Emotiva, want you to buy their stuff.  That's why they exist.  But it doesn't affect your ability to hear (or not hear) something.

In this case, its interesting that a speaker manufacturer is demonstrating the effect of length on an unidentified power cable.   He didn't set up a stand afterwards to sell long power cables.  But even if he did, that's ok.

One can wonder about the motives of the demonstrator - but that's the "Argumentum Ad Hominem" fallacy and so should be rejected.   Someone could just as easily dismiss your comments about power cables because Emotiva doesn't make any money off power cables, and they don't want you to spend your money on power cables because they want you to spend all your money on the gear that Emotiva makes".   But that would be grossly wrong.  It's best to stay clear of "why" someone is saying something because it's beside the point.  The key is to focus on "what" someone is saying.

Ultimately, it's up to us to be convinced (by ourselves) whether a particular component improves our experience of music that we listen to, in our own system. If it does, and our personal situation allows us to buy the component, then we should, by all means get it.  This is a no-brainer.  One doesn't need permission from any external authority or theory.  If we can't tell the difference, then by all means return the item.

I'm glad you acknowledge that TIM was not recognized for a while.   That's entirely the point - one might be living through a period of time where something is not recognized.  In those days, there were two worlds - on the one hand, there were solid state amps with very low THD but huge amounts of (unrecognized) TIM and on the other, there were tube amps with higher THD but much less (unrecognized) TIM.  If we slavishly followed the numbers, we'd have to conclude that solid state amps were better, even if they didn't sound better and we'd have to force ourselves to listen to them!

There's no way of knowing whether we're living through a period where something is not recognized.  In fact, given that all science and physics is done "in a box" and involves some level of simplification of reality, we'll never live in a period where ALL things are recognized.  (Theoretical physics has yet to arrive at a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, so engineering, which is derived from physics, definitely hasn't arrived at a point where ALL things are recognized.)

I'm sure there must have been a few people who did force themselves to listen to those solid state amps - and then gave up on hi-fi.  That's the cost.

Power supplies are a lot more complicated than implied by engineering theory.   In the 1970's, Enid Lumley reported hearing the sound of an audio system changing depending on whether a normal reading lamp was plugged into an outlet in the room.   She was not an engineer or a scientist and did not offer any reasons for this.  She ridiculed for that.  It defied the laws of physics and so could be rejected.  Ms Lumley gave up reviewing audio gear.  (That's another cost.)

And then Nelson Pass reported about 10 years later that, yes, an incandescent light bulb acts as a voltage regulator.  (May be he said power regulator - I forget.)  He published an amp design that featured four 100W incandescent light bulbs in the power supply.   I think his idea was for anyone to build it, and then try it out with light bulbs of different wattages.  (It was a very bright amp.)  Could that be connected to what Ms Lumley reported?

The lesson is: trust your ears.  If there's no scientific explanation for it, it only means there's no scientific explanation for it.  It doesn't mean you are somehow proscribed from hearing it.  If you don't hear something that someone claims to hear - then don't worry about it. It doesn't apply to your experience/enjoyment of hi-fi.  If what you hear goes against a scientific theory, you can't suddenly stop yourself from hearing it.  You have to accept that you hear it - and you're allowed to wonder whether the scientific theory applies correctly to that case.  In time, the theory may catch up with the observation.

What about "double-blind" testing?  Unfortunately, doesn't help with our direct experience.   Even if a double-blind test shows, for example, that I should hear "hi rez" recordings as being superior to CD's, if I don't actually hear the "hi rez" recordings as better, in my system, then I don't have to buy "hi rez" material.  It's my system, and my ears, and my brain - and I can do whatever I want with my system.   By the same token, if I find that some item changes the sound of my system in a way that I like, I am free to add that to my system.  It's my system, and my ears, and my brain - and I can do whatever I want with my system.

(One has to be careful about double-blind tests. A double-blind test on an Ebola vaccine must measure things like viral load in the blood, rather than ask the test subjects whether they feel "better" or "worse".   We don't have a way of measuring "audio pleasure" like we can measure viral load and without something like that, there's no point messing with double-blind tests.)

We may come across very persuasive info in the form of marketing materials, sales people, magazines, demo's, slick websites with enthusiastic members, etc.   But we need to be aware of it and spend extra effort in listening tests to get past the expectations created.  As long as we're aware that there can be expectation bias, we can work through it.

(It's much better if someone hands you an unknown component and says, "Take this home, and see if you like it".   That's how dealers operated in the old days.)

[vneal]

FROM KEITH
The lesson is: trust your ears. If there's no scientific explanation for it, it only means there's no scientific explanation for it. It doesn't mean you are somehow proscribed from hearing it. If you don't hear something that someone claims to hear - then don't worry about it. It doesn't apply to your experience/enjoyment of hi-fi. If what you hear goes against a scientific theory, you can't suddenly stop yourself from hearing it. You have to accept that you hear it - and you're allowed to wonder whether the scientific theory applies correctly to that case. In time, the theory may catch up with the observation.


FROM ME
As to if I had to summarize the sound of Raidho speakers in one word it would be SMOOTH. Still my lottery speakers would probably be some version of the latest Wilson Audio which to me are out front and IN YOUR FACE

The main reason I like Emotiva products and will continue to purchase more is they offer a very high audio bang for your buck at each price point

This is why I say I have one test instrument (my ears)