|   Anyone who has any interest at all in wire or interconnects. | RADAR O_Riley
Nov 6, 2003 9:27 PM | | Today I told Jneutron that I would be taking a vacation from posting here for a few days, and that is still the game plan. However, I want to make sure that those who are interested in wires and cables, one way or the other, don't miss an opportunity.
Anyone who has any interest at all in wire or interconnects should take a moment to throw their two cents worth into the conversation taking place at http://ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/5/6528.html.
The lines have been formed, and the battle has already begun. It looks like put-up or shut-up time for both sides of this debate. Somebody who can stomach AA Cable should post a link there, as their input is needed as much as any other.
For a change, everyone will apparently be made to stick to the subject. That alone has to be something worth seeing.
RADAR O'Riley |
| re: Anyone who has any interest at all in wire or interconnects. | mtrycrafts
Nov 6, 2003 10:13 PM | | Interesting, yes. Some miss the point altogether. Just because thewy have been doing it for a long time they cannot make mistakes or cannot be biased:) Right.
However, I don't like their straight down tree, hard to follow who post to whose response and cannot see the message you responding to by the posting box. Is it changeable to this type of tree? |
| Beats me. | RADAR O_Riley
Nov 26, 2003 12:23 PM | | b "I don't like their straight down tree, hard to follow who post to whose response and cannot see the message you responding to by the posting box. Is it changeable to this type of tree?"
Like you, I like it better when the messages are divided into sub-threads as is done here. Since I know zip about the software they're using I don't know if they can use a tree structure, but you might ask their Web master.
R.O. |
| re: Anyone who has any interest at all in wire or interconnects. | FLZapped
Nov 7, 2003 9:51 AM | | i Today I told Jneutron that I would be taking a vacation from posting here for a few days
Why? You were gone for an extended period of time already. Sorry, but you've used up all your vacation time, now get back to woik!
-Bruce |
| Hi Bruce. | RADAR O_Riley
Nov 26, 2003 12:31 PM | | b "Why? You were gone for an extended period of time already. Sorry, but you've used up all your vacation time, now get back to woik!"
It seems that the vacation has turned into a retirement. I'm just visiting today, to see if anyone bothered to read the post and click on the link. Everyone who responded made some good points, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to say "hello" to you all before going off into the void again.
Since I don't realize that the stupidity is irritating me until after I've barked at a few people I think it's better for me to spend my excess free-time in other ways.
Never know, I might finally get around to doing something with that Web site I was messin' around with.
Take care, Bruce.
R.O. |
| The real significance | RobotCzar
Nov 7, 2003 1:01 PM | | Last night "Frontline" discussed the "alternate medicine" market. That topic seems quite similar to the cable situation. A ton of money spent on things that are not proven to work (and in the case of alternate medicine may not even be safe) and logically cannot work as claimed. The fact that many people seem to want it (expensive cables and quack medicine) is held out as some kind of proof that the concepts are valid. People want it, so they deserve to have it. (Or, at least, someone is entitled to make money on it.) Ok, but must we pretend that there really is a logical, perceptual reason behind these things?
Sorry, to me these things simply indicate the general gullibility of humans. And also indicate the low level of science literacy of Americans.
The fact that many people want to have expensive cables, or feel that they improve sound, or that they add to the overall "experience" of audio is no justification for the money and time wasted on them. It is just sad in detracting from the many factors that are important.
The real significance the reflection on our society where money justifies anything and ignorance is worn as a badge of honor. |
| The real significance | Rockwell
Nov 7, 2003 2:32 PM | | That reminds me; I read this article about Pam Anderson who is using a homeopathic medicine to treat hepatitis instead of the regular medicine, which effective half the time. Why doesn't this surprise me...
http://u.sbsun.com/Stories/0,1413,216~24287~1716097,00.html |
| Marketing 101. | RADAR O_Riley
Nov 26, 2003 12:50 PM | | RC, you're right, but stop short (IMHO) of giving a complete picture. "Marketing" takes many forms, including:
1) Letting the public know how a new or improved product or service offers benefits that they need or want.
2) Creating a market.
The first type only works is one has a product or service that offers benefits that someone will need or want. Since there are a finite number of state-of-the-art, optimal, or best-value solutions to any given problem, the second type of marketing is far more common. Nobody needed deodorant until slick ads convinced us that the old method of avoiding body odor, a bath, wasn't good enough. We use to believe that if you smelled, you needed to take a bath. Granddad would have had a fit at the notion of covering up body odor rather than taking a bath. The notion would have seemed odd at the very least, and would likely have been seen as somehow unsanitary. Ad's changed our culture to create a need for a product that we all now "need" before going out in public. Most ad's are not actually intended to provide information about a superior product or service, but rather, they are intended to create a perceived need for a product, to make a particular product look superior to competitors whether it is or not, and to persuade consumers that they need things they actually don't need at all.
Horoscope books outsell the audio magazines by a factor of over two to one. That surely must say something about how gullible people are. People wanting to make money would have to be as dumb as dirt not to notice, and advertising reflects both the gullibility of the consumer and the questionable way many justify deception in the name of "business."
Audio is just like most other businesses. Slick marketing can make a man or a company rich and/or famous.
R.O. |
| re: Anyone who has any interest at all in wire or interconnects. | skeptic
Nov 10, 2003 5:35 AM | | It's hard to take someone like Gene DellaSala seriously when he tells you to spend up to 5% to 7% of your money to buy speaker cables with different capacitance, inductance, and resistance to equalize the frequency response of a sound system but doesn't tell you that you would be far better off buying and equalizer to do it much more efficiently, effectively, and predictibly at a fraction of the cost.
He also tells you "Provided that the cables are properly designed and meet your specific requirements I see no reason why you shouldnt invest in quality, not necessarily expensive cables."
Unless you are an electronics engineer who has managed to measure and analyze the equipment you own and can calculate the optimum parameters for solving a particular shortcoming of your particular sound system, how the hell are you supposed to make any sense out of that or use it?
He also said "Very few cable vendors, especially the exotic brands, manufacturer their own cables. Most of them buy large reels of wire from China and either repackage them locally or have them labeled with their Logo overseas."
The last place in the world I'd want to buy expensive electronic from is China. Their manufacturing often does not meet the standards of western countries and as far as what you are getting, how it is made, who made it, what quality control was exercised, the place is one giant black hole. Cables made in the USA however, especially those made by companies who manufacture for the military and telephone industry as well as consumers apply the highest possible standards for product uniformity and meeting design specifications. When in doubt, if you are going to spend a lot of money, look for "Made in the USA" on the wire or packaging.
It's also hard to take anyone seriously like the guy from Bryston when they talk in qualitative terms about interconnect capacitance when the average one dollar interconnect can easily pass a NTSC 6mhz video signal without any visual degradation on a high quality television set.
Is Patrick Matucci's test valid. I don't think so. Does the Kenwood amplifier he used have a series resistor in the B speaker circuit to prevent paralleling two speakers with unacceptably low impedence loads by accident causing the ML cable circuit to have a 2 db loss or is the loss due to the cables themeselves? (He didn't switch the cables at the speaker outputs to find this out.) If a speaker cable acutally introduced a 2 db loss (36%), I'd chuck it in the trash as worthless. And as we know, the louder of the two invariably sounds better on A/B comparison.
Whole thread sounded like a lot of BS to me. But them I am a "skeptic." |
| Black Hole? | pctower
Nov 10, 2003 9:25 AM | | b The last place in the world I'd want to buy expensive electronic from is China. Their manufacturing often does not meet the standards of western countries and as far as what you are getting, how it is made, who made it, what quality control was exercised, the place is one giant black hole.
True perhaps. But it seems we may all be on the verge of getting sucked into that black hole:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/1110chinatv10.html |
| Black Hole? | mtrycrafts
Nov 12, 2003 11:48 PM | | Yep, the race to the bottom has started. |
| Black Hole? You Bet! | skeptic
Nov 14, 2003 6:55 AM | | When you buy from an American source, a company that manufactures and sells its products in the United States (if such a thing still exists) it has to meet certain quality norms especially if it is going to sell to the US government or government contractors or subcontractors. Or to large industry. They are subject to meeting specifications that they publish or are part of a contract, buyer audits, and must keep records of how they made their products. Everything from the heat of steel that went into the fender of a car or the case for a refrigerator, or the ability to track tainted meat from Costco or a supermarket, to the tests of electroinics parts that went into your computer. Wire is no exception. When you buy products from importers, you are often at the mercy of whatever the standards are from the country it was made in. From Europe, you have EU standards including the old DIN and ISO. They still must meet American standards if they want to sell to the US government. However, consumer goods from China and places like it can be made to virtually any standard and if you get wide variations in quality and performance, it shouldn't come as a surprise. There is little government enforcement or trade association standards there and you can see that even large "Western" and Japanese firms have problems with their products. Every time I had a video cassette jam up on me, it was invariably a Sony cassette made in China. And they make some awful quality tools that look just like the much better tools made elsewhere, until you use them and inspect them closely. Then their shoddy quality becomes obvious (ever see a Chinese immitation Swiss Army knife?) BTW, be extremely wary of any dinnerware made in Mexico. Some of it (especially the cheap stuff) can contain very hazardous substances in the glaze which can contaminate food. |
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