Intro
Contents
We organised a livestream blind test on Sunday, June 4, at Alpha Audio, testing conductor materials for cables. We made a total of six cables using five types of material. One cable was some sort of hybrid. We dived into this subject because there are a lot of preconceptions about sound and materials AND, frankly, we were curious ourselves to see what we were going to find.
The world of cables is pretty crazy. There are a handful of big brands and a lot of small brands. The small brands are mostly founded by independents who started out of a hobby. Some of those small brands make wonderful stuff. Others make absolute junk or even scam enthusiasts by using standard lamp wire as a core material…. no joke!
The materials
We used the following materials for this test:
- 1mm solid core Pure silver – 5N – coated – about 35 Euro per meter (price fluctuates)
- 1mm solid core Single crystal copper with graphene – 150 Euro per meter (price fluctuates)
- 1mm solid core Tinned copper, coated (wax / cloth) – Unknown
- 0.5mm solid core Gold/Silver (Mundorf) – not coated – 15 Euro per meter
- Standard DIY lamp wire – copper, stranded – 2 Euros per meter
As plugs we use Neutrik Pro plugs. These work like a charm and work great for soldering. Neutrik Pro has a good reputation among connoisseurs. We don’t want any discussion about the plugs used. As solder we use silver solder from WBT. We then finish things off with a sleeve in nice Alpha Orange.
Making the cables
In the video we show you how we made the cables and how we prepared everything. For example, we measured all cables and looked at the influence of twisting. We found that twisting is simply better: less inductance and lower impedance. The capacitance increased slightly in this case, but not so much that it could have a detrimental effect.
Test preparation
After we made the six cables, they all played for at least a few days. The biggest differences were audible with the copper/graphene cables. Call us crazy, but long playback proved to makke a difference. This cable initially showed a lot of harshness and glassiness. The harshness became less every day. The silver cable showed richness in sound from the start. It really differs per cable how big the difference is and how fast burn in does its job.
The music we used is (Qobuz playlist):
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- Rachmaninov: Vespers, OP. 37: No. 5 – ‘Nunc dimittis’ door La Tempête
- Mammal Hands – Labyrinth
- Sinead ‘O Connor – Reason with me
“After we made the six cables, they all played for at least a few days”…
Absolutely not enough. A minimum of 10 days is necessary so that we can confidently talk about the differences. If you had followed that, the test would have been much more valuable.
Uh… Ok…
1. Who says we didn’t play with them for 10 days?
2. We checked te progress in sound quality.
R, L and C make complex or imaginairy numbers for Z.
But dos not matter if jou measure the amplitude and phase response or an impulse response and compare.
Another example, more advanced.
Like all those who believe that everything is reduced to the domain of time, without taking into account another form of analysis such as the revolution brought about by the Fourier Transform.
A transformation that many use but that very few really understand. With this I want to indicate that many engineers lack additional knowledge and try to understand reality from a limited academic training that prevents it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
– The End –
Fourier transform is nothing more than a mathematical transition to the frequency domain. Makes math easier but adds nothing more as signal in time domain.
My comment was not completely correct.
Fourier transform can lose time information:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93frequency_analysis_for_music_signals
Conclusion: time or impulse response is as important as frequency domain analisys.
Spectacular results. Anyone who still doubts that there are big differences is that they are fanatics or are deaf or, probably, have big bottlenecks in their audio systems that prevent them from appreciating the differences. Even so, the difference of the 5N silver cable with respect to the others is so enormous that it must be easily appreciated unless the small speakers of the laptop are used to do the test, I say (surely there will be not a few).
There are differences in the speaker cables too but not as huge as with that pure solid silver cable.
Many engineers just memorized knowledge without really understanding it, especially those who only studied electricity or electronics when more knowledge is necessary to deal well with the audio world (for example, wavesm electromagnetic fields, antennas, signal processing, electroacoustics…).
To understand us, many of them live in the world of mathematics of Real numbers, unable to understand that there are others, such as Imaginary or Complex ones. You know: Z = R + j X(w)
Always is all R, L and C to them, anything more.
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Greetings from Tarragona (Spain). If one day it occurs to you to come, give me a call and I will invite you “The Three Musketeers” to a good seafood platter or similar (if you are vegetarian, better, less onerous for me 😛 ).
Thanks Maty! If we are in Spain, we will let you know 😉