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Old 19th Oct 2017, 6:46 am   #301
mole42uk
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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like Coronation Street, it's not real
You’re joking, of course?

My aunt has been on Corrie, it must be real.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 7:48 am   #302
Craig Sawyers
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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There was one woman in my tutor group, Southampton Uni Electronics, intake of 1977 - a charming lady from Venezuela, if memory serves - but what a novelty it was thought then! We have moved on...
Yup - that was the one. Miss (unforgettable name) Nubile. Earlier than I remember - maybe it was the year she graduated I remembered.

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Old 19th Oct 2017, 7:59 am   #303
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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I noted this on one of my posts that basically this totally deceptive and frankly dishonest marketing of audio products should be illegal.

I think the existing legislation covers this, but for some reason it is not being applied to the Audiophile industry, perhaps because its not getting reported.
The only remedy to dishonest marketing, or making claims that cannot be verified is via the Advertising Standards Authority.

If you look at the Russ Andrews site, everything is worded "In our opinion", and similar terms, as a result of a tussle over many years with the ASA. In fact I provided measurement evidence from careful testing at 3C Test http://www.3ctest.co.uk/ that overturned that ASA ruling, but Russ Andrews are very very careful about how they word their site and promotional literature since.

The other thing with the ASA is that it takes only one person to write in with evidence of dishonest marketing for them to start an investigation. So if you have a bee in your bonnet about this - go to the ASA website https://www.asa.org.uk/ and make a complaint.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 9:03 am   #304
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

Rumbling along in the background, almost out of sight, is the intended purpose of this forum. It exists to provide help to people repairing and restoring vintage electronics - the name makes that clear. At the same time it is creating an archive of knowledge to help those doing the same in the future when no-one is left with experience of the equipment in its native era. The steering actions of the moderators (apart from matters of contention and legal issues) can be seen to work towards the creation of a better archive.

This thread doesn't contain any actual information to aid a future restorer, though it may explain the context of some very silly hardware to a befuddled archeologist in AD2217. With our help, he'll write a definitive treatise comparing little wooden stands for speaker cables with powdered rhino horn.

No, this thread is a bit of fun and stress relief for the denizens of the forum. It keeps some of the frippery out of the archive-grade threads so it has an indirect benefit. If storage space ever gets tight, it's a candidate for the first bit of ballast to get heaved overboard.

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Old 19th Oct 2017, 9:34 am   #305
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

As Craig says, the lawyers and technical people have done a good deal of work on behalf of the ASA and Russ Andrews. But that issue is, to an extent, secondary as far as audiophiles are concerned. When it comes to resolving the measurement vs listening argument there are (at least) two problems:

1. We have two phenomena with only one word to describe them - sound. This causes confusion and, sometimes, arguments at cross-purposes. A scientist might well be using 'sound' to describe the movement of air at the listening position as this is the last thing in the audio chain that she can objectively measure. An audiophile uses the word to describe the experience inside his head. Not unreasonably he will argue that this is the only thing that matters - certainly the only thing that matters to him (and it's his money, after all). He might concede that the goings on inside people's heads in general can be influenced by expectation bias. But he will argue surprisingly often that in his particular case that doesn't apply. He is a fastidious listener with an exquisite sensitivity developed over decades of experience. And anyway the improvement that Cable X brings is 'night and day'. The only surprising thing is that anyone can claim not to be able to hear it.

2. From an audiophile's point of view science is not a done deal. It is evolving the whole time and (they think) things which were once believed as hard fact have, time and again, been shown to be simply wrong - classical mechanics vs relativity, fixed lithosphere vs plate tectonics, stomach ulcers caused by acid vs helicobacter pylorii, steady-state universe vs big bang, the existence of the ether and phlogiston and canals on Mars, the non-existence of dark matter and dark energy and quantum fluctuations and split atoms. All wrong. The job of scientists is to challenge received wisdom and make new discoveries. Insisting that electronics and hearing are completely understood and there's nothing new to learn proves just one thing - what a poor scientist you are.

Cheers,

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Old 19th Oct 2017, 9:44 am   #306
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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Insisting that electronics and hearing are completely understood and there's nothing new to learn proves just one thing - what a poor scientist you are.
That is a relief since nobody on this thread so far and in fact nobody I know would make such an absurd and ill informed assertion. But it's good that the scientists among us can all spot a watch with a bamboo spring
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 9:57 am   #307
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

Yes. I've pointed out many times on audio fora that MRI scanners and phased-array radars and mobile telephony all seem to work and we can not only land a space probe on one of the moons of Saturn but we can get it to send back pictures and environmental data too. For every audiophile who thinks that we don't understand wire there are thousands (at least) of professional electronics engineers who understand it so well that they can propagate gigahertz signals down it.

But when you've suddenly had angels singing in your head all this can roll off like water off a duck's back .

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Old 19th Oct 2017, 10:02 am   #308
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

Scientists were just getting smugly complacent and thought that everything was close to being known when they got hit in short succession by a pair of whammies: Relativity (two flavours) and Quantum Mechanics. Then fundamental particles weren't found to be quite as fundamental as previously thought and the ordure is still hitting the fan.

So it's easy for people to think that science isn't trustworthy, it keeps changing and replacing its basic ideas, so it must be wrong.

However, there is a flaw in this deduction. A sense of scale is needed. Newtonian mechanics isn't actually wrong, it is a simplification of relativistic mechanics and the difference is vanishingly small for everyday activities. The difference was verified usinf solar-system sized mechanics and very painstaking measurement. Protons, photons, neutrons and electrons are enough until you get up to the energy densities needed to beak them apart.

Do physicists know everything? Of course not
Do physicists keep changing their ideas? Constantly
Is physics good enough to design a really good hifi setup? opinions differ.

Extreme audiophilia has crossed the border into becoming a religion. If they only admitted it, they could get valuable tax-breaks.

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Old 19th Oct 2017, 11:03 am   #309
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

The entire topic of un-knowability extends fundamentally to mathematics. Kurt Godel showed that any mathematical system is either incomplete and consistent, or complete and inconsistent. Which essentially means that if you think you have all mathematical systems sorted out, there is always one more theorem.

For anyone remotely interested

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B...eness_theorems
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 11:10 am   #310
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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Extreme audiophilia has crossed the border into becoming a religion. If they only admitted it, they could get valuable tax-breaks.
As the bloke said in Hot Fuzz, "'e's got a point there I reckon..."

The basis of scientific method is repeatable experimental results, and the outer edges of audiophilia are notoriously poor at this. So proof is hard to come by, and where proof is absent, faith rushes in to fill the vacuum. On the general scale of faiths, this would at least be relatively harmless...
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 12:38 pm   #311
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

Possibly a bit off topic but try googling Safe Space, radiant room. for more super snake oil!
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 1:01 pm   #312
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

Um - this is a CD sandwiched between two plastic discs, right?

Ha ha ha!
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 1:17 pm   #313
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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Kurt Godel showed that any mathematical system is either incomplete and consistent, or complete and inconsistent. Which essentially means that if you think you have all mathematical systems sorted out, there is always one more theorem.
Well, I think Kurt is correct.

The one simple example I'm aware of here is the most common thing we see in nature or man(people) made physical or electrical systems which contain mass , a restoring force(typically a spring) and friction, or inductance capacitance and resistance; The common damped simple harmonic motion or damped oscillations in electrical circuits.

We all know when the damping is too high the oscillations stop. But the system damping in the real world can be continuously variable. Yet if we use a mathematical system for analysis we end up with three possible equation solutions; over damped, critically damped and under damped (oscillatory) which by necessity contains a sine or cosine (periodic function) while the first two solutions do not and only contain the exponential functions.

So we don't have a single solution (equation) to handle the three scenarios, we have to pick the correct equation to apply after checking the conditions first.

In other words while reality is a continuous spectrum of possibility, even in this simple case, the mathematical solutions are discontinuous.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 1:28 pm   #314
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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over damped, critically damped and under damped (oscillatory) which by necessity contains a sine or cosine (periodic function) while the first two solutions do not and only contain the exponential functions.
They are but one equation, some have more of one bit, some have more of the other. There is no step change twixt.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 1:35 pm   #315
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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There is no step change twixt.
Well yes there is, because across a certain boundary there is no real solution because you can't take the root of a negative number, so you can't for example use the equation solution to the oscillatory scenario to solve an over damped one.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 2:14 pm   #316
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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you can't take the root of a negative number
Yes you can, it's is called X times i (or j) commonly and frequently used in mathematics. Used also to good (perfect) effect in engineering too.

You simply ignore that the intermediate result "doesn't make sense", such as 'the square root of minus three* squared is minus three'. At the point of the star (*) the number is incomprehensible (darn useful for AC calculations), this does not mean the result is not.

It all comes out in the wash as they say.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 3:06 pm   #317
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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Well yes there is [a step change], because across a certain boundary there is no real solution because you can't take the root of a negative number
Yes you can!

If you define a number j such that j * j = -1, then a whole new area of maths opens up. You end up with complex numbers of the form (a + j * b) because there is no further simplification possible; they act like 2-dimensional vectors, and the best bit is all the maths you've already learned so far still works with complex numbers! Real numbers are just a subset of the complex numbers, in the same way that the positive integers are a subset of the real numbers.

Just because you can't count out j of something, absolutely doesn't mean it doesn't exist. 10 ** 0.301 exists -- look in your table of antilogs -- even although you can't write a number down a fractional number of times to insert multiplication signs between them.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 3:10 pm   #318
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

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you can't take the root of a negative number
Yes you can, it's is called X times i (or j) commonly and frequently used in mathematics. Used also to good (perfect) effect in engineering too.
No, this is not the situation I'm describing, no i or j operators to consider.

Consider the equation solution for the angular frequency of a resonant circuit involving L,C and R:

w = 2.pi.f = square root of ( 1/LC - R^2/4L^2 )

(In most electronic circuits R is small, we use the abbreviated formula).

But as you can see from the formula above if R is greater than 2 times the square root of L/C or over damping, the term in the bracket above is negative, and you cannot take the square root of a negative number (try it on your calculator). So the equation solution cannot provide any utility as a result of the increased damping exceeding a boundary value.

The three equation solutions for damped simple harmonic motion systems are presented elegantly in Erwin Kreyszig's book, Advanced Engineering Mathematics 7th Edn page 84 & 85. Wiley.

Basically for the three scenarios :

Overdamping, has two distinct real roots, critical damping has a real double root and underdamping has complex conjugate roots.

So the the damping conditions have to be tested to select the correct equation format to provide a solution. In other words the form of the mathematical solution is dependent on the damping.

So for one example, if you have a series circuit with L,C and R, and you want to know for arguments sake what the voltage is across the capacitor as a function of time after you apply a fixed voltage across the circuit, you have to select the correct equation solution first, depending on the damping, or the equation will fail to solve it. The same applies to damped resonant mechanical systems, say if you wanted to know the displacement or velocity of the mass with time.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 4:15 pm   #319
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Default Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!

I could add to the post above that if the square root of the value in the brackets is negative, there is no utility expressing that with the i operator either, because the the angular frequency remains zero for values of R that result in critical damping or values of R higher than that. The circuit becomes aperiodic. And I'll clarify by saying I'm not suggesting that you can't express the root of a negative number with the i operator, but it doesn't help the problem here, where attempting to take a root of a negative number results in a mathematical error.
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Old 19th Oct 2017, 4:27 pm   #320
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where attempting to take a root of a negative number results in a mathematical error.
When I try root -1 on my calculator I get 0+ i1
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