Surely using multiple strands means you have the chance of multi-path distortion? Over the length of a speaker wire it's got to make ... oh... a couple of nanoseconds times a few percent... easily enough to ruin a 20kHz signal :/
Andy
Noo thats on TV cables that is;!...
Well it can make a bit of difference tho as you say not on very short runs. Its a lot easier to use then rigid's for speaker cables if you do have the choice..
Agreed. I went from 72 strand "bell wire" to some 2.5 mm CSA 1024 strand stuff and there was a noticeable improvement to the bass. I think this partly down to getting better energy transfer but also better damping of the speakers.
The eardrum & associated sensor only produces one AF signal per ear, nothin= g else.
I guess I like good sound quality. =A340 per channel on new equipment doesn= 't really cover that.
Are you seriously claiming its more price efficient to get T&E for speaker = use? Or that it has an extra magic property? For speaker use its just insul= ated electrical grade copper.
Feel free to tell us then what other data streams ears produce, and what ad= vantage there is in paying for T&E over bellwire for domestic speaker use.
People that design electronics have *on average* a whole lot more understan= ding of electronics than people that do diy.
NT
And I am convinced that there is some pressure wave detection outwith the ear. I am convinced that we do so in front of the ear, maybe the hairs vibrate? - and that when a sufficiently powerful wave is detected, that turns down the sensitivity of the ear. I suspect that this serves to protect the ear from sudden loud noises.
No - I have no validation of this except my own experiences.
Well if you believe Evelyn Glennie, your whole body is sensitive to vibration to a greater or lesser degree. Your middle ear does indeed have damping mechanisms to protect you inner ear from loud noises, the stapedius muscle and the tensor tympani.
Tim
The AGC is built in to the eardrum. It gets tensioned by the surrounding muscles as the sound level increases, and as well as reducing the gain, this alters the frequency response. This is compensated for in the pre-processing the ear does before it sends a signal to the brain. Even so, the ear will be damaged by prolonged loud sounds, up to the point of complete instantaneous failure for really loud noises.
This is why audiologists are worried about the current fad for loud music on portable music players. They are getting cases of the same sort of deafness now in teenagers that used to take a couple of decades of working in a noisy factory.
The EU H&S bods have responded to this by reducing the maximum volume allowed using the players, so of course, the users turn them all the way up just so they can hear the music...
I have always felt that when I have shaved to have no hair in front of my ears, I am more sensitive to loud noises. As if the hairs are vibrating, that is being detected in their roots, and, as you say, the muscles in the area respond.
I have always found any form of in-ear device deeply unpleasant - ordinary old-fashioned headphones are bearable but even then I hate the lack of, not sure how to put it, "auditory location"?, as if I don't know where I am when I cannot hear the environment.
However the characteristic of that sound channel will vary depending on its location with respect to your head. Even things like the non symmetrical shape of the pinna change the character of the sound depending on the angle of presentation. The acoustics of the room effect the echo and reverb timings based on location. That is why you can still sense the direction of a sound even with one ear obstructed.
Out of curiosity, can you not identify where a sound is coming from with your eyes shut? I can quite easily. So for example, if a movie sound track has a plane fly overhead from rear to front, there is a very clear difference in the experience when this is presented as a sound that pans from the back to the front of the room as it does so, to one that is presented entirely in front of you on one to three channels on their own.
If you watch a film like Jurassic Park for example, the scene where they are stuck in the park at night and its raining heavily. There is a very profound difference between simply being able to hear its raining compared to the surround sound experience of *feeling* that you are clearly outside and it is raining all around you.
I don't recall mentioning £40/channel...
However it is worth comment since I have some experience of these things at different price points.
Firstly, in reference to Dave's OP, he did point out that he was not looking for HiFi necessarily - but an improvement on the stock sound of the TV. I expect that most people who have heard a number of modern flat panel TVs would agree that the built in sound is often rather disappointing. As a result it is not difficult to improve on that performance with relatively little expenditure. The link to the active bookshelf speakers from Maplin that someone posted elsewhere would probably be a substantial improvement over many TVs and would cost less than £40/channel.
Moving to surround systems, first its worth highlighting they are not all created equal. The £100 out of the box systems are a huge world away from something you have put together from individual components each costing that or significantly more. However that is not to say there is no merit to the budget system. The budget system won't give the fidelity, scale or power of a "proper" system, but it can create the immersive experience that the director and foley artists were seeking to create - placing you *in* the action rather than just being an observer of it. For example, I have a nothing special 5.1 set of speakers on one of my computers. The whole setup was probably under £60 and would not meet most people's definition of HiFi. However, for watching films it still creates a much more enjoyable experience than just using stereo alone. In 3D first person games, it makes a clear difference to know that someone is shooting at you from *behind* compared to just knowing you are being shot at!
The boxed system above however is not comparable to my real surround system[1] which creates a decent HiFi reproduction of any music etc but also has the dynamic range and power to create an experience that you sense with far more than just your ears.
[1] Currently comprised of a front stereo pair of TDL RTL3 floor standers, driven via Arcam Alpha 7R, two centre speakers (a Yamaha NS-C110, and a Paradigm CC-350), driven by the Yamaha DSP-E482. Rear effects channels handled by a pair of Kef Codea 8 on stands, and a REL Q50 active sub. Source material typically from a DVD player with six discrete analogue outputs comprising the 5.1 soundstage.
As someone else highlighted, its something that many of us would have to hand, rather than needing to go and buy specially. Also if using it for a hard wired install (say to wall mounted sockets etc) has the advantage of staying put when you bend it into wall chases etc.
However, the big problem with "bell wire" is that its a woolly term that has little meaning. Perhaps what you think of as bell wire is different from what I think of. Too me it suggests the small thin figure of 8 laying pair, with a stripe down the outside of one conductor. Usually shipped with budget midi systems as short lengths of speaker wire. Typical cross section of around 0.2mm^2.
e.g.:
At least mains flexes / cables have commonly recognised and easily specified CSAs. For a link to rear effects channels they are usually fine.
For most people the obvious advantage would be firstly having it, and secondly it having far more copper in it in than your average bell wire.
(perhaps if you were to clarify what cable you actually meant when you say bell wire it would help)
(the "speaking crap" comment was directed at the suggestion that the readership in this group is unskilled in electronics, when you know full well that a number of people here have had or are currently fully employed in the electronics design, service, or repair industries on a daily basis)
Can you substantiate that? I would observe that many people who design electronics are the very same practically skilled people who also DIY.
(and I am sure that I am not the only one here with no formal qualifications in DIY whatsoever, but a string of them different electronic disciplines).
For those that are skilled I can understand the point of more copper giving you a better signal and sound but the claim regarding insulation ...???????
*Silicone rubber insulation brings a mellow, musical fluidity and more accurate portrayal of the leading edges and decays in your music"can;'t even beging to imagine this.
Oh and if we want a game of who can find the most expensive cable... I think I might win, having been talking about this for one of our instruments.
But the onboard human post processing can determine much more.
If you ever came across some of the phones in the 1980's with a tone sounder you'd appreciate that certain frequencies drop into a band where the onboard human post processing goes completely to pot and in a room with a number of phones you won't have the foggiest idea which one is ringing. Change the tone sounder to a bell or to a sounder of significantly lower or higher frequency and normality returns.
The shaping of the pinna (i.e. the visible bit of the ear) has much to do with our ability to differentiate sounds from in front of us to those behind (or above or below for that matter). It alters the sound heard from in front of the head such that it is perceived differently from that same sound heard from behind (a capability much stronger in other mammals like cats, dogs, some birds etc since they can often direct their outer ear to focus in a particular direction).
The screening effect of the head and the body also have a significant effect (especially on the treble range of sounds with shorter wavelengths - say 1kHz up). So what we hear is far more complex than just a single event, we hear the original sound plus all the reflections, and diffractions of that sound arriving at out ears in a time dispersed jumble.
While it is clear the brain then does some very effective real time processing to identify the direction of the sound by a combination of phase processing (i.e. time difference between arrival at the ears), and also learned neural net processing to infer significant further information based on the character of the sound itself and how it is shaped by the environment (i.e. how loud it is compared with how loud we expect it to be, how clear or muffled, and which frequencies are attenuated etc). I don't believe it is fully understood how it actually does it.
(as an experiment, close your eyes and snap you fingers (or better still get someone else to do the finger snapping to eliminate any a priori knowledge of the location) in front of you, above you, below you - but all equidistant between the ears. Even though the sound must arrive at the same time at both ears in each case, we have no difficulty identifying if the sound is above or below or in front of us)
There are also other effects at play since we don't hear just with our ears - vibrations in the air also have effects on other parts of our bodies that influence how we "hear" something. The chest cavity will resonate and sense low frequency vibrations, and we feel other frequencies in other parts of the body. (note how the almost profoundly deaf musician Everlyn Glennie always play bearfoot so she can "hear" what she is playing).
The resolution of direction in two dimensions is apparently reasonably well understood, but exactly how it works in three is still unclear. If you search for some of the work done by people like Masakazu Konishi on barn owls. He has made some very interesting discoveries (like how they have a specific area of the brain where a mass of neurons actually map a three dimensional analogue of the direction of a sound heard).
Indeed, there is a huge amount of crap spouted about the mystical properties of cables...
As with many of these things, they are quite often in the "grain of truth, stuffed with a lie" category. To take your example of insulation
- yes there is a scientific basis for the nature of the material to have an effect on the technical performance of the cable - in that it can affect its capacitance and characteristic impedance etc. However the verbage quietly ignores the point that the effects of these parameters at audio frequencies are going to be very marginal.
You think 26.5GHz is going to be enough for HiFi audio? ;-)
If you look at the UK website, its on special offer, only 600 quid
Flat response up to 26.5Ghz, and with phase stability, its almost good enough for listening to folk music
Could be an accommodation address, the kind of thing the taxman sees, while your offshore colombian marching powder trading corporation owns a portfolio of mansions worth a few million in numerous desireable locations worldwide.
Trotters Independent Traders New York Paris Peckham
But all that doesnt change the reality that each eardrum in the end only re= ceives one audio stream and produces one af datastream, which can be fully = captured by stereo recording.
Adding a central speaker can improve relative channel levels somewhat for p= eople sitting to one edge of the stereo soundstage. Spacing the speakers fu= rther out than the audience does too.
Budget was mentioned further upthread. Most diyers are only going to spend = a limited amount that will inevitably produce more compromised sound if one= goes from 2 or 3 to 5 channel.
There are several options of course. One can usually get a good enough resu= lt for nothing with free used bookshelf speakers, with or without a free us= ed hifi amp. Such items are normally very reliable, and if of repectable qu= ality, as many are, its hard to see the point of paying for new lower quali= ty kit.
When all's said and done, its providing sound streams to 2 ears, not 5.
The change in hf response can be dealt with in stereo when recording or in = studio time, and routinely is. Or it can be done the lazy way by just feedi= ng the sound to a 2nd pair of 5.1 speakers.
snip
I think the most common wires already to hand in British homes are mains fl= ex and speaker wire. In truth any insulated wire will do if csa is sufficie= nt, we don't need to limit it. If buying there's no need to pay extra for m= ains rated tested BS double insulation.
All unstranded wires do, including bell
I mentioned 2mm^2 per 2 conductors.=20
0.2mm^2 bell would give 0.4mm^2 when 2 are used, only be good for short run= s and low power. When using 2, mark one with a black pen at each end.snip
Retailed mains/speaker/bell wire normally has a specified csa, I'd shy away= from buying wire without it
ie none
2mm^2 per 2 conductors was mentioned
a handful are, most arent.
I don't know why you'd think people with an electronics career are the same= ones that diy. I'd expect in most cases the 2 groups don't coincide.
Indeed, several of us do. You, me, TNP, Dave, Bill Wright, and I'm sure the= re are others not springing to mind at the moment. What percentage of the c= ontributors here do you think that is? Compare that with sci.electronics.de= sign where most do.
NT
Yes... all the direction information is generated in the brain from nothing more than 2 audio feeds. To recreate the experience one only need provide the ears with those 2 audio feeds.
I always understood that was due to resonance. A high q resonant sound has no harmonics, making direction finding by changes in hf content impossible.
NT
You appear to be equating 2 audio feeds with 2 neurological feeds. A simple counter-factual is that even dummy head recordings do not achieve the result you suggest. IIRC there are many reasons for that, including differences in the anatomy of different ears and the way the sound field moves with head movements; the differences are less important for left-right discrimination than for front-to-back and up-or-down. Search for head-related transfer functions.
simple counter-factual is that even dummy head recordings do not achieve=20 the result you suggest. =20
It's not perfect but a dummy head recording is extremely life-life. =20
My father told me about a conference he had attended where every seat in th= e auditorium had headphones which were all connected to a dummy head on the= stage. The chairman walked up to the dummy head and whispered "excuse me"= just behind it. Everyone in the room turned round.=20
Robert
Alas not really. Two fundamental show stoppers; the first as highlighted was that the brain in conjunction with the characteristics of the ear it capable identifying the direction of a sound in 3D space. A pair of stereo mics can't do that. They can just collect the composite signal present at their location. That will capture the room effects, but not the effects of the ear shaping or the occlusion provided by the body / head. So much of the information is irretrievably lost at that point.
The second one is that the sound of the real world as we experience it is not emitted from two point sources - but is incident on us from all directions.
So while good HiFi will make a very credible job of capturing the azimuth of a sound source, its somewhat much poorer at the depth, and totally useless for capturing the elevation or whether the sound is in fact in front of or behind the listener.
The centre speaker serves two purposes really - dialogue is directed to it, creating the impression the voice parts are originating from the same place you see the lips move, and also for reinforcing the loud dynamic bits - to give extra impact, and smoother pans left to right etc.
A real centre speaker is very much better than a phantom one which tends to lose the dialogue in the ambient effects and noise.
Not sure why you conclude that most DIYers are in some why cheapskates or do not appreciate quality. It seems like a weak stereotype.
Sure, if you can get good stuff for free, then why not. You may find it harder to get a full surround setup for free obviously.
Which misses the point. How do a pair of stereo speakers in front of you create a sound that you can hear coming from behind you? Or how do they create the effect of a sound that is orbiting around you? The answer is that they can't. Even if the stereo sound track recorded exactly those events, the recording playback is not capable of reproducing the original origination points of those sounds.
Hence you need more channels.
Sorry, not following that bit..?
If the CSA is sufficient I would agree.
You seem to have a much broader definition of bell wire than most. Personally I would not dream of calling something with 2mm^2 CSA bell wire.
Is there a formal definition of it?
Indeed - which is fairly substantial.
Well rather than argue about it, just go listen to something. If you can't tell the difference between a sound that is in front of you, from one that is behind you (or above or below) then you will not derive any benefit from surround sound (and it would also explain why we are having this discussion when (to me) the audible difference is so clear).
Just understand that for some of us, it adds a extra element of immersion and realism to watching films etc, that stereo alone just can't come close to.
Its not a scientific survey, but I have spent many years working in electronics/engineering labs and I generally got the impression that most engineers (hardware and software) were usually somewhat more practical than the general population - and are generally not adverse to DIYing. There were a broad range of skills and complete exceptions as you would expect.
To be fair its not really relevant.
To suggest that a recommendation about surround sound systems somehow carries more authority from someone who understands electronics is condescending. Its like suggesting that a mechanic is better placed to tell you what a car is like to drive than someone who has actually owned and driven it.
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