When I switched from a Fisher tube amp to a solid state amp it was a noticeable cleaner sound. Now the purists say to go back to the $60,000 Pre-amps and amps and $40,000 dollar speakers. Maybe 8-tracks are next.

JJK

Welll......I'd have to dispute the tube comparisons and comments.
Tubes are much warmer, and allow for a pleasant distortion. Tube pre's are also noisier, but there are also good tube pre's like the high end Avalons, Joe Meeks, and so forth. They sound great, warm, fat, and are terrific for filling up space. Tube emulation in products like the UA100 plugs is great, but it's not *quite* the same.
Using tubes, high end tube gear for the purist, and tube processing definitely is a different value than comparing decent speaker cable and telephone wire.

"an audio engineer at the local university once told me that his testing revealed that old-fashioned ordinary 4 conductor telephone wire (28 ga.?) was as clean as the so-called high-end stuff"

Signal issues, natural elements conductive goes as the following; Gold, copper, platinum.... excluding super-conductiving materials. The issue is signal amplitude and slope of amplitude vs. gauge size. Think of a wire gauge size like a waterhose. The size of the waterhose effects volume, plus how fast a rate change can occur. But with this said, any near pure copper wire will work well, most speakerwires are good. Shielding is nice, but not a real issue, if you live near an airport or powergrid, tv station, or similar high energy, strong magnetic field sources.

Yes, tubes do have a curiously pleasant musical quality. I have a 40-year-old McIntosh MC240 power amp and C22 preamp and listening to certain kinds of music through them is a total joy. I would NEVER mix through them, but they are extremely musical.

John

In what sense? Copper content or sound?

As I recall, he was talking about sound. This was (still is??) 28 ga. solid copper wire.
Keep in mind that this was over 20 years ago and the "average" consumer didn't have the megawatt amps/receivers that are so prevalent today.

Mike

I design professional sound systems for my real job. I would never install anything more than #16 wire in a home. You probably would be OK to go down to #20, depending on how loud you want it to be, and how much power your speakers can handle. (Don't use small wire on your subwoofer though)

It's OK to splice. I wouldn't recommend that you solder it, just twist on some wire nuts. The red ones are perfect for #16 cable. The wire nuts will actually make a better connection that will stand up to any heat or corrosion. When I inspect wire splices that contractors install, I always require them replace soldered splices because over time they deteriorate and fail.

Someone mentioned that they found #12 electrical wire. We do this all the time for large speaker cluster systems in auditoriums. We have a formula to calculate the required wire size bases upon the length of the run and the amount of power to the speaker. When you send 800W of power down a 120 foot run from the amplifier to the front of the stage to the main sub-woofer, you need larger wire. We rquire that the loss be less than 5% on the cable and most home systems will be in the neighborhood of 1% to 2% in the worst case scenario.

Most audiophiles are complete idiots. We have also done testing on Monster cable and found the difference to be so negligable that our testing equipment had a hard time detecting any difference.

Hey I bought 500.00 speaker cables!
I'm having them put in right after my Teflon coated water pipes are installed, cuz they get the water to my shower sooo much faster than that amature copper or pvc crap!
and my new DVD rewinder (with the patented "Centriptal Velocity Spindle" )that SPot recc. is getting those 450.00 wood knobs the VVidkid recc. , installed, but not by me , whoa no......They're gonna be dynamicaly balanced first @ 20000 rpm on a dyno by an indy pit crew.

Now you want real" MONSTER "speaker cable,howz about just clampin some automotive Jumper Cables from Auto Zone on the back of your amp to the speakers, (see the secret is the tension of clamps, it maintains a solid contact to the terminals of 13.26 newton meters, the optimum pressure for cunducting audio signals)!

its funny that you said teflon coated water pipes, teflon coated tubing is used in the medical field in most equipment, carrying from h2o to chemical solutions.

I like the dyno tested DVD rewinder, a perfect gift for final cut pro users who have the $500 cables.

Here's an interesting article turned up on google, about speakers and wires:

http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm#resistancehigh

Most amazing thing is a chart showing average male hearing is down 11db at 8000 Hz at age 35. At age 55, you're down 30 db. Sooner than we'd like, everything will sound like a telephone conversation.

Retailers will push the Monster cable, even swear by it -- very high margin. A lot like buying a computer cable :^(

No problem.
It's only audio.
Just make a clean splice.

Terry

Well it's not all snake oil. The theory behind Monsetr Cable is that every conductor is not just resistive, it also has an inductance, in other words its resistance gets higher with frequency. At audio frequencies this has pretty close to zero effect. If it worries you you don't have to dpend a fortune.
The way to beat the inductance is by having mulitple conductors in parallel. A type of wire used in RF circuits is Litz wire, this is many stands of narnish insulated wires twisted together that are only electrically bonded at each end. For speaker wiring you can achieve the same thing by using say 10 lengths of thin hookup wire in the same run, joined only at the amplifier and speaker terminals.
You can also overcome the issue of damping in a number of ways. Shorter cables or use a servo amplifier, that requires 4 wires to the speakers. One pair carries the power and the other measures the volts as the cone moves back and drives the amp to compensates for the cable impedance.
From the little I know these things make no real difference, but if they do bother you you don't need to sell the car to address them.
I did see a secondhand set of these magic speaker cables on eBay. The guy had paid $7,000 for them and was willing to take $1,500. I think he said he was selling them so he could buy better ones!
And then there's the mob who'll pay $35K for a turntable, no arm, no cartridge, just $35K to make a piece of plastic go around.
The world is going NUTS!
Bob.

I've gotta a 24 year old Pioneer SA 740 valve amp. Wouldn't leave home without it! Well, 'cos of its weight it doesnn't leave home anyway! - Just listenning to Daft Punk on it .. gets the old energy levels up & going in the morning - here on a bright Winter's London day . . . .

Love it . ..

Grazie

I know this thread is getting really OT, but I have a reason of my own why I just love vacuum tubes. When I was a kid of 10 or so, we visited a neighbor down the street that had a ham radio setup. He had a tower with a great big antenna, the kind you can make yourself and looks like a 30-foot square of wire coiled together. I forget the name.

Anyway, I'm in his "shack" where he had his rig, and it was something he built all himself--1Kw AM, which was (is) a lot of power for a ham rig. You could see all the filaments glowing behind the metal screen that served as the transmitter casing there in the rack. Big meter dials, too. When he pressed the microphone button to transmit, all the house lights dimmed slightly and there was this ominous "thummmm" coming from the rack. Cool.

I took a lot of electronics classes in my technically-oriented high school just before tubes went away in the middle 60's. It was easy to get inside the thinking of a tube--cathode, grid, plate. You could almost see the electrons flying through space. Not so with solid-state circuitry. Let me understand this: you have "holes" in a PNP device controlling whether current flows across a junction?? I don't think so.

BTW, a few years later I learned just how much power could be stored in the capacitors of a transmitter. I had built my own ham rig, and one day while testing I happened to accidentally touch the +700v DV output terminal with my metal-tipped Eico probe (the other end was grounded). Very impressive flash of light and sound, and the probe tip had disappeared into the ether. I'm surprised I survived adolescence.

The antenna sounds like a quad.

When it comes to cables, why not forget the theory and actually listen to some different ones and then buy the cheapest one that sounds good?

It's funny, I have never heard this "measures the same" discussion when it comes to microphones or speakers. "If two speakers are both rated at 4 ohms, they sound the same." "These two microphones both have 1000 ohm voice coils, so they obviously sound the same."

No, for some reason it's OK to discuss mics and speakers subjectively, but not wires. Perhaps it is because we think we understand wires. How complicated can it be? It's just a piece of wire, right?

Well, if we take the view of the famous child who saw that the emperor was naked, how about just saying "for whatever reason, this cable sounds much worse than the other one in the same setup!" Listen for yourself, and leave it to somebody else to figure out the science behind it.

Tubes are just another way to amplify signals. Most of the time I think they are a pain in the ass, for the obvious reasons. Still, I remember hearing one homebuilt stereo system in the 70s. I was shocked by the clarity and oomph of this system. How did he do it? A really simple tube output stage that maxed out at 2x12 watts. OK, that's why it was so clean, but how did he get the oomph then? Horn speakers. He got as much SPL as we'd use a 2x200W amp for today with typical home speakers.

I went to an old audiophile store somewhere beyond Pasadena (which is near the Middle Kingdom as far as an Angeleno is concerned). They had bumper stickers expounding the sound of tube gear, "It's the law, stupid!", which I thought was pretty funny (that would be the mu-law [transfer function] which is much more linear than the transfer functions of transistors). Only one thing impressed me there, and that was a fairly inexpensive system that was playing on low volume as I got in. I have never heard such good sound at low volume, not even on $250,000 systems. This good low volume sound may be easier to do on a tube system.

Today I have only two tube micpres, including an Aphex 207 that I use for recording audio for video. I never even have to think about the tube inside, as there is no heat and no excessive wait after turning on (it, not me). What the tube buys me is a nice clean sound and very smooth limiting (thanks to Aphex's patented MicLim circuit that would be hard to match without the tube). There are definitely micpres that sound better, but this one is only $500 list (I got it for $300) and I couldn't find anything close in this price range. Recommended.

Now if I were to measure this against other micpres, comparing every parameter known to man, I don't think I would get that much correlation with how good these units actually sound. In the beginning there was total harmonic distortion, THD. Then it was found that this was not a good way to determine which systems sounded better. One day we learned that, no, indeed THD wasn't the whole truth after all. There was also intermodulation distortion, IM, and that was a bigger factor in sound quality. Then many years later transient intermodulation distortion, TIM, was discovered, and it changed power amplifier design very quickly. And so on.

I'm convinced we'll see the same thing with cables.

Don't listen to me, listen to your cables!

Fond childhood memories... pulling tubes out of "dead" tv, hauling them off to the local Walgreens, and using the tube tester to find the bad ones, later discovering the Heathkit catalog and joy of joys, they had a retail location in the area.

Talk about fireworks...

I must have been about 10 or so. Lived in a big aparement building then. Put together an Erector set Ferris Wheel, that had a little motor

http://www.legacystation.com/Erector.htm

that rotated it. It was just after Christmas, decided it would look better with some Christmas lights. It did. Till I tripped getting up off the floor, stepped on it, breaking a couple lights, that caused a short hitting the metal of the erector set, causing huge sparks and popping. Dad came running to the rescue, but not before I not only took out the whole apartment building, but the whole block went dark. Oops.

Dad probably saved the bother of changing "fuses" frequently by inserting some other metal object (equivalent to replacing 20 mm fuses in electronic equipment with 200A slow-blow soldering iron tips...).

In my early teens, I ordered a DIY radio kit, with tubes. Naked chassis, so my life depended on inserting the power plug the right way.

Anode voltage came straight off the 110V AC feeding a diode and a capacitor...

Now, where's the filament transformer? Hmmm, 6.3V for the filaments came out of the third wire in the power cord. What the @#@$?

Just Ohm's law in action: the third wire in the power cord was a resistive material (probably NiCr) that was matched to the resistance of the glowing filaments to provide net 6.3 V "or so."

After wiping the cold beads off my forehead I proceeded to pull out the extra cost "International Adaptor Kit," because I was living overseas at the time.

The 220V-110V converter seemed to consist of an extension cord.

Hmmm, could this be...? Yes, of course. Another piece of resistor cord, with its resistance matched to net 110V with the exact tube kit joint current consumption from anodes and filaments.

Wait, it gets better. The kit also included a 110V soldering iron. Hmm. By design, the soldering iron had exactly the same current consumption as the tube kit, so the extra cost "International Adaptor Kit" worked also for this...

Everything worked great, but I was really really careful about not getting myself grounded.

100 years ago, electricians used to check for 110V in lamp sockets by sticking their finger in to see if there was any. If you do that with 220V, you get thrown backwards about six feet. At least that's what happened to me when I touched a broken switch in a dark basement when I was a kid...

That's one scary piece of equipment. A lot of early European solid state TVs weren't much better. At least one TV technician was killed by them down here. These things had a live chassis and it was all too easy to get it really live with a MEN power system and the power point wired around the wrong way. The net result was that the aerial was 240V AC above ground. So the poor guy climbs up onto a metal roof to adjust the aerial and that was the end of him.
Bob.

Nothing like strolling down memory lane...

The store in Pasadena that had all the inventory was Dow Radio, on Colorado Blvd (the New Year's parade goes right by it). I bought so much stuff from them in the 60's I should have owned stock. There was another store down the street, call "C&H sales." They had tons of merchandise, too, but it was all surplus stuff, pulled out of old mainframes or ICBM control panels and such. Once I bought a ferrite core memoey panel there. It consisted of maybe a thousand tiny ferrite doughnuts strung on vertical and horizontal wires. 1k bit in capacity, and here I'm sitting in front of a box with 1 Terabyte of disk storage. Amazing.

Those ferrite core memory panels were actually knitted by little old women six days a week (this was before the 5-day week). One knot per bit, no joke.

Perhaps those women were all in Pasadena and because they were only able to drive their cars on Sundays, there are all these used cars in L.A. that were according to the salesman "only driven on Sundays by a little old woman in Pasadena "?

Some people DO discuss wires subjectively. Personally, I think most of them are nuts and haven't a clue about the terms "placebo effect" and "auditory memory". We can get past the measurement stage of mics & speakers so quickly because they are EASILY shown to sound different. Transducers often do. But wires...er, not so much. I cannot hear a difference between cheap 16 gauge speaker cable and Monster cable in any practical length for home use. But I do use 10 or 12 gauge power cables for my PA speakers.

I'd like to see the results of double blind A/B testing wherein interconnects were shown to be obviously different. I've never seen this, and haven't experienced this for myself, though Iprefer not to use the el cheapo stuff just for longevity reasons. Any links?

This cable review really cracks me up. I have to confess that I am fascinated by the placebo effect that putting a $700 price tag on a set of cables can have on some seemingly intelligent people.

I am thinking of marketing a a $500 tank of acoustically balanced compressed air to fill the listening rooms of these well-funded audio snobs who think they can hear the difference between a stereo with a plastic knob and a wooden one.

And what is this business about a "break-in period" for these cables?!? The only thing I can come up with is that if you don't experience the huge placebo effect immediately after plunking down the $700+ for these wires, you can rationalize it by trying to convince yourself that they will start sounding better after a few more weeks. By the time the electrons should have trained themselves on the optimal route through the copper atoms, it will probably be too late to ask for a refund. :) I wonder if there is a proper way to break them in? Can you do harm if you play the same music through them too many times and burn music memory into these cables? Maybe I can also market an audio version of a screen saver that plays white noise through them when you are not in the room for more than a couple of minutes...

It's not a placebo effect - it's the embarassment of being had.

Monster is a great marketing company and they share the booty with the dealers with a HUGE margin.