Hyperbole

[DougMac]

Several of us enjoy reading reviews of products that display the heights of idiocy that abound in high end audio. These "Golden Ears" have been debunked by simple A-B comparisons, yet they continue to pontificate.

Here's an example I recently stumbled upon. Enjoy.

http://www.iar-80.com/page75.html

What caught my attention is that they stopped a review of a cable after hearing JUST ONE NOTE from a CD. They turned to the design engineer after hearing this one guitar note and asked him if he used Teflon in the dielectrics of the cable. They claimed it introduced a "foreign coloration" to the note. Amazing!

Doug

[Walter]

one note?

And all this time I thought my plastic covered clothes line wire sounded great.

[cromag]

Geez, and I was proud of all the money I was saving by soldering RCA plugs onto old lamp wires.

Note: If they can halt a test after just one note, I can stop reading after just one paragraph.

[Craig Maier]

Many a year ago, a nutcase high end audiophile named Gary Gallo was asked to review an audio preamplifier that I had designed for a company. I did not ask for this abuse, but the company that I did the work for wanted to do that. Gary Gallo, a pontificating ignoramous, just looked at the power transformer in the unit and decided that it was too small. He declared the preamplifier to be of very poor quality. When I called him on the phone about it, I asked if he bothered to measure it or listen to it. He said no, he did not believe in measurements and he did not need to listen to it. He could tell that the design sucked because of the power transformer size. I pointed out that it was a preamp and not a power amp, so what difference does it make. He just said that preamp power transformers need to be bigger. So, I asked him to state his credentials. He said that he was an audio expert with 30 years of experience. I asked what his chosen career was. He stated that he was a high school teacher. I asked what his educational background was. It was something like History or English literature. I then asked him what bestowed the knowledge upon him to think that he was such an expert that he could tell what a piece of audio equipment would sound like without even listening? He said that he had a complete and thorough knowledge of the audio field and was in a great position to make such proclaimations.

So, I said, ok ~

Then came the defining moment. I asked him to state "Ohms Law" (V = I x R)*. He could not do it and told me that it was irrelevant.

What more can I say?

*Note: Ohms Law is the fundamental basis of the Electrical Engineering field and it was taught in my High School Physics class.

[Craig Maier]

Having read the cable review, I noted the following statement:

"Cable engineering involves many design tradeoffs, and so a designer must be knowledgeable about and take into account all these tradeoffs among various factors."

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Question: What are the factors and tradeoffs in numerical terms? Did they measure the AC resistance at 20 KHz, the % skin depth of the conductor at high frequency, the impedance, distributed or lumped capacitance or inductance? Did they at least measure the basic DC resistance per foot? How about DA (Dielectric Absorption?) Did they measure the characteristic impedance of the cable?

Well, the answer is no for two reasons:

1. Those things make little difference at audio frequencies and short distances.
2. You need to understand some engineering and math in order to make those measurements and evaluate their impact on a system.

Lastly, as a Switch Mode Power Converter (SMPS) design engineer (which operate anywhere from 20 KHz to 1 MHz), I can assure everyone that the parasitic paramaters of short runs of audio cable make little difference in the audio spectrum unless you are transmitting the signal for distances measured in thousands of feet.

ps - our loudspeakers are connected to our power amplifiers with 16 AWG Zip cord purchased from Home Depot. Our Coaxial cables used elsewhere in the signal pathway, were purchased from Radio Shack. We do use Radio Shack gold plated RCA's because they have a subtle benefit in that corrosion is less likely to occur at the connection point if compared to other plating forumuations like tin or nickel.

[cromag]

My Dad taught me Ohm's law when I was in 5th or 6th grade. I was rebuilding old cathedral-style radios that I scavenged from a local dump and needed to find "near enough" replacement parts for rheostats, etc.

Sadly, my Mom decided we didn't need a bunch of "old radios" cluttering up the basement and threw them out when we moved a few years later. In the 60's they still qualified as "old radios," but I wish I had 'em today -- it would sure help put gas in the old van's tank!

Of course, I'm sure my substitutions introduced more than a little "foreign coloration" to the music!

[Craig Maier]

My dad, who was also an Electrical Engineer, insisted that I learn Ohms law at around the same age that you did. He noticed that I had a proclivity for electronics in that I constructed amplifiers, tuners, transmitters, etc at a very young age. He told me that if I really wanted to understand what I was doing (instead of just monkeying around and tinkering) that I needed to understand the math.

And so, there were those dreaded nights at the kitchen table at the age of around 9 to 10 wherein we spent hours solving equations including Ohms and Kirkoffs laws. I had no choice but to get it, 'cause he would not let me do anything else until I could solve the problems presented.

At any rate, I remember at the very young age of 7 building amplifiers (a three stage one was a particular pride and joy of mine). I used trash television parts that I found in the garbage. I used pine boards to mount everything. To make a tube socket, I would drill a hole out for the positioning pin of an octal, and then push the tube into the pine to create the indentations where the pins were. Then, I would drill out the 8 hole for the pins, keeping them small compared to the tube pin. I would drop a little 22 AWG solid bare telephone wire down into each hole and then wrap each pins wire around a nail next to it. I would then solder the wire to the nail and then all of the wiring would go from point to point between nails. Yes, I had to use acid core flux to get a good solder joint to the steel nail, but it worked.

Those breadboards are all long gone now, but that is how I got my start with all of this stuff. Those were the days - - -

[Doug]

IAR is based on professional science, not amateur gossip.
IAR correlates observations with scientific analysis so you can believe IAR's reviews

plus a whole load of other reasons why they cannot and should not be believed...I think this is right down Galos path - where is the spectral analysis, control vs test groups and comprison graphs. If they could do it in the 70-80s with accuracy on paper they could do it better now and publish on the same webpage. I wonder how old these "golden" judgemental ears were if observations are based on listening tests alone. What is the hearing gold standard?

A good scientific judge would not ask if the cable contained teflon after one note...that would be tainting the analysis!

Cheers to giving science a bad name...

Ps...Craig, just for me - see if Garry knows that a good preamp draws mA and not Amps - or if he even knows what the prefix "m" infront of the "A" stands for!

[Craig Maier]

Wanna Send 'em to the Funny Farm?

Forget about the prefix; I doubt that he knows what the "A" part stands for.

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I would love to run the following test, which would definitely send these guys back to their "funny farm."

Get 50 of them together in a room. Set up a series of tests based on the scientific method, using these guys as the test subjects. Then, using double blind testing techniques, collect the data pertaining to the perceived performance of various cables ranging from telephone wire to $1,000.00 per foot audiophile cable.

At the end of the test, we will send 'em screaming. Just pass out the results of the testing and then lift the curtain to show what was what during the test!

[Lord Theo]

A Marriage Made In Heaven

Gary "size counts" Gallo should apply his vast knowledge of English towards fixing the fractured syntax of "cable review"....hmmmm, don't know if I'm using proper English.

[DougMac]

Similar Test

Get 50 of them together in a room. Set up a series of tests based on the scientific method, using these guys as the test subjects. Then, using double blind testing techniques, collect the data pertaining to the perceived performance of various cables ranging from telephone wire to $1,000.00 per foot audiophile cable.

At the end of the test, we will send 'em screaming.

John Cleese of Monty Python fame loves wine. I recently saw a show about enjoying wine where he invited a group of friends who are also wine lovers to a wine tasting party. They were served wine that ran from $8 to over $200 a bottle and were asked to guess the price of each. The results were completely random with many participants guessing the $200 wine was the $8 wine.

He suggested that the average wine lover could do perfectly well spending $18 or less for a bottle of good wine.

I have another test I would suggest be performed on the high end audio twits. Let's send them to an audiologist and map their frequency response. Dollars to donuts most are old white guys with the incumbent hearing loss.

Doug

[cromag]

Some day one of these guys is going to get so good at testing new gear he'll just have to hold the unopened box up to the light of the full moon in order to judge its aura.