And your response clearly shows why the term HiFi is lost on 99% of the population. If you cannot hear the difference between solid conductor and multistranded conductors, you'd best stick with your El Cheapo sound system from Comet as you'd be wasting your money buying anything else!
The effect is on the low frequencies, not the high!
People with "real" ears "can" hear the difference and will strive to get the very best reproduction of the original recording. It's a bit like the different sound of a direct drive turntable compared with a belt driven turntable. Some people, like me, can hear the difference and wont touch a direct drive.
So, keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you're talking about and leave we purists to our enjoyment as it's lost on the likes of you!
I've always regarded it as one of the benefits of old age - I spent a fortune on hifi in my youth, now I perceive the same quality of sound from a transistor radio - quids in.
Yes and the effect of multi strand is on the high frequency not the low!
Like hell they can, it has been proven numerous times that most of the "benefits" are not real.
There are reasons why a direct drive turntable may sound different to a belt drive turntable. As a HiFi nut you should have known that. Note: I said different not better.
Next you will be telling me that a digital feed is better if you use expensive cables. Or that £10 DVD players are worse at delivering a digital 5.1 signal to a HiFi DA.
You can enjoy what you like, don't come here and tell people to waste time and cash on your imagination.
The only way to find out if you can tell the cable apart is for someone else to set the system up with the cable where you cannot tell which cable is in use - even by monitoring their reactions. Typically a "double blind" test in science is done so that the person recording the reactions doesn't know which whatever-it-is is being tested.
I'm fairly sure I can't tell the two types apart. Have you ever done a double-blind test?
I'm DAMN sure I can't tell a 300 quid car stereo from a 3000 quid one when doing 70 down the motorway. Others seem happy to pay the money.
The only reason to pay that sort of money would be to up the maximum level. And pretty near anyone could tell that difference...
I did pay rather more than 300 quid for the system in one of my cars - it's got DAB, and the aerial alone cost 100 quid. But the actual reception round London is miles better than FM. I'm not starting a war about DAB sound quality, though. ;-)
"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." -- Bertrand Russell.
Wrong! The "effect" not the technicalities, are most evident in the lower register giving a cleaner low frequency sound. High frequency attenuation is not the primary reason for multistrand cables for speakers.
The ears and brain are the only instruments capable of measuring the finite differences between one component and another. You, nor anyone else, is able to hear what I hear. I can tell the difference and detect the subtle changes that something as simple as changing the speaker cables can make.
As another poster intimated, the only way to assess HiFi is to "listen" to the equipment and in your own home!
But a belt driven turntable does sound better. Direct Drive turntables sound rather flat and lack brilliance.
Valve final amps sound much better than solid state because they give a warmer, more pleasing richness to the sound.
Direct cut vinyl sounds far superior to CD any day, Even good quality standard vinyl is far more pleasant to listen to.
Reel to reel tape at 15 ips sounds so much better than CD.
Tests many years ago showed that groups of listeners preferred up to 5% harmonic distortion because it made the sound warmer and easier on the ears.
The fact is that it is the ears that determine what sounds good. Everyone has a different opinion but you need to have ears and a brain that can "hear".
Listen to "real" music not battery farmed crap and you might start to hear the subtleties.
You'd have to be an idiot to believe that, were you?
If the only reason you buy equipment is because it's cheap and the specification says it's as good as or better than something else, you have proved my point that HiFi is wasted on you.
People with "real ears" could best hear any differences at 19, when they can't afford esoteric hifi. By the time they can afford it their hearing has deteriorated (as happens to all humans). Ah, the irony of it.
Ooo tetchy. If you're so happy with your enjoyment, why get upset? Methinks he doth protest too much :o). I have no problem if you wish to waste your money on such things and am happy you enjoy it.
(Other signs of the esoteric hifi enthusiast - they always discuss the equipment and sound rendition, not the music and get really humpy if others don't take it seriously - what they might make of a d-i-y set up, gettong back on topic, God knows!)
Oh I dunno. Most who make their own Hi-Fi believe it far superior to anything commercially available. There used to be one such on uk.rec.audio who started on Hi-Fi rather late in life and tried to re-invent the wheel. Liked single ended valve amps which of course have a low power output so made horn loaded single unit speakers for maximum efficiency. And (of course ;-)) only like vinyl. Each design he made was described with the most flowery superlatives. Then he'd move on to another which was better, flogging the old on Ebay. And constantly mentioned that anyone who visited and heard his systems was immediately 'converted'. Even although he admitted his listening room had poor acoustics.
No! the main reason is so they bend when you chuck them on the floor. There is no difference between the sound on stranded and non stranded wire of the same cross section, end! Don't try and baffle me with cr@p either.
Yes and if you do without knowledge of which cables are which *you* will not be able to tell the difference.
In your opinion. BTW have you tried them all?
If *you* like warm valve sounds that is.
Try some double blind tests on the cables and then you will realise you are talking cr@p.
See you don't have any understanding of how the systems work and so can't judge which "improvements" can actually work.
Typical bloody audiophile who is trying to justify his expenditure by telling others that they need to spend cash to hear stuff better. Go away and let other people decide for themselves without all the unsubstantiated cr@p.
They are all the same, spend a bloody fortune on kit and then complain if you don't like it. "You must like it, it cost a fortune","if you can't hear the difference its you"."why do you bother with anything more than an AM radio". I know one fool that has a nice HiFi DA converter and a nice amp and speakers. He has changed his CD player about four times now even though all it does is read a digital stream off the CD and send it to the same DA converter and speakers, each time it sounds better. Somehow the digital output on my notebook sounds dreadful when feeding the same system, did you know computer CD drives aren't HiFi!? They may be 100% accurate but they aren't HiFi.
Every now and then I go into a Hi Fi shop and listen to some different systems to see if I can still hear the difference between a low priced and a mid priced system. I can still hear the difference, but I still can't afford one :-(
(I'm commenting on Gordon's post via yours as I have gmail blocked because of spam)
If you copy vinyl or reel to reel to CD properly and do a comparison, no one will reliably tell the difference. Copy a CD to reel to reel - or vinyl - and it has been done - and the copy is obvious.
Basically this means both vinyl and reel to reel add or remove things from the signal - which CD simply doesn't, at least by all accepted parameters that have any bearing on what one hears.
The whole principle of decent recording is to capture the original as accurately as possible. Good digital does a fair fist of this - vinyl certainly doesn't, and nor does analogue tape, but for different reasons. Of course you are perfectly entitled to like the distortions these analogue mediums introduce. But saying they sound better is nonsense.
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