Cable Conspiracy?

I spent £70 on a Monster Video 3 Scart lead, does it provide better picture than the £25 one i was using ?

Nope

It feels very well made and looks good but doesn't offer better performance, just call me sucker :)
 
Hi all

Could the same be said about mains cables like the Russ Andrews & Olson ones. Do they provide a better sound/video than the cheap kettle cables supplied with the new AV gear.

I am currently setting up a HC system envolving a Plasma, Amp, DVD ....etc. Is it worth spending some £300 on new mains cables and mains purifire or silencer...etc.

Many thanks

Emad
 
It all depends... they can minimise some problems if you have them but they cannot make a system with no problems better. It is all down to your 'situation', everyones will be different. I now have a situation where my RA leads are ineffective as I have addressed the fundamental problem, it doesn't mean that they have not helped in the past. Again it is not difficult to do, it is just the application of engineering.
 
The same principles apply for mains cables, in that a well constructed cable is best (properly terminated with conductors of reasonable CSA).

The mains supply is a different story though. In theory, complete regeneration of the supply to give a 240V, 60Hz sine wave is ideal. In practice this is impossible within normal domestic confines.
 
I understand mains cables will not make an entry Amp sounds like a high end one. But will it bring in the best of the entry amp or the high end one.

Does it really eliminate noise and interference as it says on the tin.

Cheers

Emad
 
Originally posted by The Beekeeper
I find it easy to pick cables a from cable b. What I can't do is this under controlled ABX conditions. All the evidence suggests (tons in AES literature on this) that others can't do it as well. This is why 'posh' cables sell as people don't evaluate them under contolled conditions.

The only controlled conditions I care to test cables are to do it in my system... :p

I did find cheaper cables that sounded much better than others many times more expensive more often than the opposite, but to be honest I try to stay away from very expensive cables, just test a few to confirm the value of mine... :rotfl:
 
Emad

in theory a properly designed power supply should deal with just about all mains problems and I 'expect' properly enginnered PS more likely are in the more expensive kit but as many of us have said here already it is not about cost, just engineering a product fit for purpose.

We all use capacitors to make our power supplies now but chokes are technically far better solutions but outside Border Patrol, Musical Fidelity and the Beekeeper home brews few use them. They are demonstably better but are they always necessary?

I am afraid each situation is different, they may work for you, they might not even be relevant (like me now) or they might not work at all. You need to find out if you have a 'problem' first. Then don't forget many of the current 'affordable' products nowdays are really very well engineered, certainly in comparison with products of 5 years and older. The industry has made great progress here and these devices, though having uses are not applicable to all.
 
Well, best strategy then is

Get some new cables from Russ Andrews under their 60 days home try program
1- test with old cables
2- Change cables
3- test again - getting an unbiased opinion on the difference (like someone who doesn't know that you just replaced the mains cables with higher quality ones).

Make an informed decision.

Emad
 
Seems a good idea, they also 'hire' a noise sniffer which is a wonder ful device I bought. Plug it in and it converts all the nasties to audible sound for you to hear. I travel with mine and the mains around the country is REALLY bad in places but at home it is now totally silent. RA and I even had discussions over whether it was broken or not!

Also worth onsidering is borrowing off a hifi shop other mains toys like boxes that make clean sine waves etc, sometimes they are awesome, other times they make things worse!
 
As far as I understand it, these cables we use if they actually are better (Conductor, shielding etc...) then they will improve the picture/sound but the issue is whether it is noticable or not compared to the money.
There is mains problems in almost all houses but not that many people notice, some wouldn't even notice the difference with "upgrade" products.
After trying many different leads in my time with hi-fi, I notice a difference with most cables. Not all expensive cables are good, I found the rather impressive looking Audioquest X scart at £75 was worse than a QED sqart @ £50. There are many other examples. In general though as you go through one companies range there is an audible/visable difference between every cable. However the difference between a £50 interconnect and a £100 one is much larger than between £100-150 and so on.
You are all welcome to disagree but having used the same dvd player with the same screen from the same distance and noted what problems they displayed and how badly, thats the closest I've been to a controlled test, but it convinced me and i'll continue to sit with the pixies listening to my better sound and better picture due to my better cables.

Sorry about the length, i may have rambled but it's easier to apologise than to read it back!
 
At the end of the day, we all sit down and watch and listen to our films and music. If you are happy that the cables that you have bought are giving you the best picture and you can afford them, then that's fine.

The problem is (and this applies to things like DVD players etc as well) most of us cannot access a wide range of kit to test at our leisure at home. We rely on feedback from magazines and forums for buying advice. It is of course our choice to take this advice but many buyers, especially those upgrading for the first time do not have the experience to tell if the difference between a £15 cable and a £150 cable that are both given 5 stars for picture are tiny or significant. If they are significant, why have both been given 5 stars, it is very misleading.

I am afraid that there is no easy answer to choosing AV kit but I do think that the higher priced cables are a rip off. Like most av kit, once a certain price point is passed the improvement in picture per pound spent becomes rapidly smaller.
 
I've tried as many cables as possible and normally try all new ones, so that I can give honest advice.
I'm always happy to demo cables anyway, and tell people to bring them back if they don't think they're worth it (Except speaker cable for obvious reasons)!
No ones come back yet apart from to upgrade further!
 
I find it quite heartening these days that a few forums (hifi & AV) these days have so many cable sceptics with such varying systems, there has been a trend of late for scpeticism to be accepted on forums, this is in part to some of the ludicrous claims made about cables & what they do in systems, nearly being classified as components in their own right. There was always going to be a backlash against this type of “hype” and its at that point.

Placebo, Pre-Belief & Power of suggestion has much to do with people “perception” of what they hear IME, I read a funny quote one time on a cable sceptics thread over on HFC which is basically as “true” as it gets IMHO :

Once your eyes are invloved in the auditioning process of audio cables, then any logical conclusion goes out of the window. You will hear what you want to, not what actually there.

Eyes & Brain, Ears & Brain should be kept separate, I find it funny to read absolute statement about a cable being so superior to another when this process of blind testing has not been done, FWIW I hear bugger all difference when I hear blind, but when I know whats in place my perception changes beyond belief, Placebo, pre-belief or Power of suggestion, man these things are as real in psyhco-acoustics I tells ya.

Anyone saying they can hear difference between cables or able to identify them in blind tests stands to become quite rich, there are a few prizes available to people who can do this, and note there has never been any documented record of anyone in the scientifc world being able to do such a thing, its funny that so many advcanced human beings are hearing these things in out midst, you guys need to get in touch with Dr.Xavier.
 
Analogue interfaces and cables, a few musing for thoughts…..

Once upon a time there were only valves / tubes. The poor little transistors hadn’t been invented by Bell Labs yet. As valves are good voltage amplifying devices a ‘standard’ evolved where by ‘voltage driven system’ was used to connect pieces of hifi equipment together. Unfortunately this meant that unless the interfaces was designed well it was subject to the vaguaries of the cables parameters like capacitance and inductance (C in particular). An output therefore has a very low output impedance and an input has a very high input impedance. When properly engineered these can work REALLY well in either balanced or unbalanced form.

Now along came some boffins at Bell labs and invented the transistor. These took over the world but for the reason of compatibility the same interface was sensibly kept so we could all mix our old valve equipment with newer transistor equipment (or the other way round for some of us). Unfortunately for us transistors are REALLY good at switching current. [It should be noted that valves and transistors can do both but what they are best at is important].

Now some really bright sparks had another look at the ‘old analogue’ interface to see if they could make it better. They designed a pre out with a high output impedance (an ideal current source) as transistors are good at this. They then design a power amp with a low input impedance. This may sound slightly odd (bare with me on this). This then appears to ‘short circuit’ the connection. This is the oppose of what we currently do with minimal current flowing. They have in effect designed an interface based on current and not voltage. It is incompatible with current kit but does it work and what are the benefits of changing?

Changes of voltage are minimal in this new method as the input impedance is so low, therefore no negative feedback is needed (good thing). [Remember this is what valves makers often toute as a forte of their ‘technology’]. As voltage differences are in effect ‘zero’, cables ceases to have any effect. There is no voltage across the input and therefore C has NO EFFECT. Any residual voltage that is developed owing to cable inductance is tiny and also has NO noticeable effect on the now current source. Therefore the cables, no matter how silly in C figures, have NO effect on the sound of cables. I.E. Completely independence from the various factors that make cables different (C, L and R). Granted you will still want well screen cables etc but this solution has ‘significant’ technical benefits re sound quality. So is this myth?

Krell call this CAST. Tag would have used it in their F1 equipment if they were still going………………… ‘strong’. I suspect many others have had a ‘play’ with this system as well in the past.

Unfortunately cables and interfaces are all to often intimately mixed and the interface ‘standard’ often comes much before the desire / knowledge to make the best connection method. Equipment and knowledge both being noticeably better in the future. Hopefully when we all go ‘properly’ digital with well designed interfaces (HDMI / IEEE1394) hopefully we can lead behind these ‘limited’ methods behind us as an anachronism from the past. Cables will cease to become an issue for all of us and costs will come down.

It is all about how it is engineered, we can make really good ‘voltage’ interfaces in analogue now but perhaps we can make even better current one but the future is digital. For now I am happy with 'my' bargain cables and good old voltage based interfaces :)
 
Dudes I thought this would would be a good place to copy a post I have done over at HFC that concerns a Quad demonstration at the recent Heathrow Hifi Show, its copied from HFN Feb 2004. Make of it what you will, but scepticims about cable claims is now finding its way into the hifi press (well half decent hifi press) :

>>>

Does QUAD or Tony Faulkner count as "anyone" HM, they were the company using the Black + Decker "lawnmower" extension cable at a recent Heathrow Hifi Show.

From the Barry Fox's column in Hifi News 2004 :

Hats off to realsim to Quad, marking fifty years with KK lovely book amd Tony Faulkners demos through Quads latest loudspeakers. the speakers were connected by some orange wires that looked strangely familair.

"Yes, they would look familiar if you have a garden", explained Faulkner. "Before the show opened we went over the road to the DIY superstore and bought one of those £20 extention leads that Black & Decker sell for electric hedge-cutters. They are made from good thick copper wire, look nice and sound nice to me."

"The shows being running for 3 days and no-one in the audience has noticed"


Now it may just be me, but I reckon no-one noticed because they could not see these cables. Oh & IMHO Tony Faulkner is one recording engineer who knows his onions.

<<<

BTW should this thread not be in the “Cables & Cabling” Forum ? handier for long term reference IMHO.
 
Originally posted by Daneel
Video cables and audio cables are very different. The cable I use to connect my PC to my monitor cost £22, not a hell of a lot of money but more than the £8 cable I tried at first which resulted in terrible ghosting, streaking and smearing. The difference a good cable can make is massive.

I've had the same experience, i'm a computer engineer, one of the calls I got was because of a blurry picture on a monitor, turns out that the video cable was to blame (it was a really bad cable, about 5mm thick, couldn't have had any shielding). When I changed it for a half decent one the ghosting dissapeared and suddenly the picture was in focus. I'm a firm believer in video cables making a difference, they just have to be well engineered, fancy coloured plastic and encrusted with jewels etc are not nessesary. Poor cables can distort the analogue signal, the higher the frequency (and resolution) the more important that becomes. Scart cables don't carry such high freqencies as computer monitors so the difference won't be quite as much, but there will still be a difference. Analogue audio interconnects on the other hand don't carry such high frequencies so it's not so important but there's still going to be a tiny difference but I don't know if it would be audible, I don't think I can tell the difference in all honesty.

Beekeeper, have you tried your mains noise sniffer on a Belkin gold surgemaster ? They are quite cheap, have torroidal cores and film capacitors in them (there's a photo on the back of the box), and claim upto 75db reduction of mains noise.
 
I haven't but was looking at a similar demo with an Enetech? noise sniffer in Comet in glasgow on tuesday. I think I might try this, unfortunately this has to be done away from home nowdays as it is where I can get hold of 'noise'!
 

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