They're havin' a laff.

[discreet]

[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1399326679' post='2443228']
No one ever listened to Led Zeppelin on a radar or particle detector. That is why everything you have to say is a complete irrelevance.
[/quote]
[quote name='uncle psychosis' timestamp='1399327076' post='2443233']
Good lord! An audiophile admitting that physical reality is irrelevant to them!
[/quote]

What about Physical Graffiti?

[uncle psychosis]

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1399327173' post='2443235']



What about Physical Graffiti?
[/quote]

Overrated, meandering rubbish for the most part

Next question? :-D

[Dad3353]

[quote name='uncle psychosis' timestamp='1399327677' post='2443243']
Overrated, meandering rubbish for the most part ...[/quote]

Ah, but have you listened to it through silver cables, eh..? Well..? Have you..? Eh..? Eh..?

[Dingus]

[quote name='uncle psychosis' timestamp='1399327076' post='2443233']
Good lord! An audiophile admitting that physical reality is irrelevant to them!
[/quote]

I'm not an audiophile. I try and avoid being categorized as anything ending in "phile".

I'm not sure what physical reality is, but if it's anything to do with the scientific discipline of physics then that will be where you are going wrong. Physics can only do so much, then the real world takes over. According to the laws of physics a bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly and Wayne Rooney should be working in garden center instead of playing up front for a wonderfully underperforming and altogether hilarious Manchester United.

[Dingus]

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1399327173' post='2443235']
What about Physical Graffiti?
[/quote]

Good point.

[Dingus]

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1399327853' post='2443244']
Ah, but have you listened to it through silver cables, eh..? Well..? Have you..? Eh..? Eh..?
[/quote]

I have actually heard the remastered version through silver cables, and it still sounds thin and compressed, just like the original vinyl version did. Each side is mastered slightly differently though, and the first two sides don't sound as good as sides three and four.

[uncle psychosis]

[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1399327908' post='2443246']


Physics can only do so much, then the real world takes over. [/quote]

LOL!

[quote] According to the laws of physics a bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly
[/quote]

Completely untrue. Better luck next time.

[xgsjx]

Dingus, did you spend £2k on a nice shiny kettle lead?

[Dingus]

[quote name='xgsjx' timestamp='1399330005' post='2443263']
Dingus, did you spend £2k on a nice shiny kettle lead?
[/quote]

I'm not that bleedin' daft! ( or indeed that bleedin' rich).

I have got some very modest but well-chosen cables in my hifi , but I don't have any fancy power cables. I do have a fairly inexpensive power conditioner, though. Does that make me an eccentric? Probably.

[jonsmith]

Mains in laboratories (at least the ones I've worked in) and medical establishments is often conditioned and regulated though, so it ought to be more stable and interference free than what most people have in their houses. Not convinced that a different mains cable would have much effect on this though.

In the past, I have experimented with different speaker cables and interconnects & I can hear some slight differences. I wouldn't say that more expensive = better (I think this is fairly subjective anyway), but cables can make a slight difference, at least in the non-digital world. I can also hear differences between some instrument cables.

[xgsjx]

[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1399330501' post='2443266']
I'm not that bleedin' daft! ( or indeed that bleedin' rich).

I have got some very modest but well-chosen cables in my hifi , but I don't have any fancy power cables. I do have a fairly inexpensive power conditioner, though. Does that make me an eccentric? Probably.
[/quote]

A power conditioner isn't a bad thing to have, nor is decent audio cables.

When I had an HD V+ box, Virgin never supplied an HDMI lead. I called them a few times, each time they promised to post one. Eventually they told me to buy one & they'd reimburse me. Off I went & spent £80 on a monster lead.
When I A/B that next to my £3 HDMI lead I see no difference, though my wife swears that the 0s are a bit more O.

[discreet]

[quote name='xgsjx' timestamp='1399353893' post='2443291']
When I had an HD V+ box, Virgin never supplied an HDMI lead. I called them a few times, each time they promised to post one. Eventually they told me to buy one & they'd reimburse me. Off I went & spent £80 on a monster lead.
[/quote]

I bet Virgin were expecting you to buy £3 lead. Did they reimburse you the £80?

[Big_Stu]

[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1399330501' post='2443266']I have got some very modest but well-chosen cables in my hifi , but I don't have any fancy power cables. I do have a fairly inexpensive power conditioner, though.[/quote]

Don't know if they still do it, but Richer Sounds used to loan out a case with a variety of their hi-fi interconncets in it - to try out on your home system. If you brought the case back and said "I couldn't hear any difference" you got a free carton of cotton buds off them.

[cheddatom]

I thought the consensus was that our instrument lead can make quite a difference, your speaker lead might make some difference, and your power lead definitely doesn't. It made sense to me the last few times this came up?

[quote name='Dingus' timestamp='1399327908' post='2443246']
According to the laws of physics a bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly
[/quote]

[leroydiamond]

Some years ago I upgraded my CD interconnect from the standard 50p piece of kit to one costing £25 and there was a definite improvement in sound quality ( back then my ears worked). Soon after I attended a Nordost promotion with cheque book in hand and despite comparisons between cables costing around the £100 mark and others costing thousands, I could not detect any difference.

[thepurpleblob]

The bumblebee thing reminded me of the word for all this nonsense - "Pseudoscience". You can demonstrate almost anything if you miss a few facts out or do some reckless approximations and hope nobody notices.

Sound reproduction is just good old-fashioned physics. It's just complicated enough to be like "magic" to most people. Hence how these charlatans make money out of the unwary and stupid.

Anyway, I'm off to speak to the faries at the bottom of my garden

[xgsjx]

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1399362309' post='2443339']
I bet Virgin were expecting you to buy £3 lead. Did they reimburse you the £80?
[/quote]

They did indeed.
I'd been chasing them for a good few months & they kept giving false promises, so as I wasn't getting the use of the HD side that I was paying for, I thought it would be an apt rebuke.
I hoped by doing that, that they would always make sure the HD boxes come with an HDMI cable & not mess other people about.

[Roland Rock]

[quote name='leroydiamond' timestamp='1399365339' post='2443367']
Some years ago I upgraded my CD interconnect from the standard 50p piece of kit to one costing £25 and there was a definite improvement in sound quality ( back then my ears worked). Soon after I attended a Nordost promotion with cheque book in hand and despite comparisons between cables costing around the £100 mark and others costing thousands, I could not detect any difference.
[/quote]

A very good example of the law of diminishing returns.

Bee news:
http://m.livescience.com/33075-how-bees-fly.html

[solo4652]

Latest in series of studies regarding players' choices between Stradivarius and modern violins:

[url="http://thestrad.com/latest/news/blind-tested-soloists-unable-to-tell-stradivarius-violins-from-modern-instruments"]http://thestrad.com/...ern-instruments[/url]

Edited May 6, 2014 by solo4652

[gafbass02]

[quote name='Big_Stu' timestamp='1399363982' post='2443350']


Don't know if they still do it, but Richer Sounds used to loan out a case with a variety of their hi-fi interconncets in it - to try out on your home system. If you brought the case back and said "I couldn't hear any difference" you got a free carton of cotton buds off them.
[/quote]

Crikey, that's going back a bit!

[Big_Stu]

[quote name='gafbass02' timestamp='1399368345' post='2443408']
Crikey, that's going back a bit![/quote]

That kinda tells you the last time I bought a piece of hi-fi.
"If it ain't broke don't fix it" & "It's not the hi-fi that's dated, it's my ears that are knackered".

[tinyd]

[quote name='jonsmith' timestamp='1399331320' post='2443269']... at least in the non-digital world...
[/quote]

That's the key to the whole thing - it's at least possible for analogue cables to make a difference to the sound. But once you're digital, as long as the cable is up to the minimum spec (which they just about all are) then a more expensive cable can't possibly make any difference to the sound. Unfortunately, a lot of 'experts' in the hi-fi world claim that they can.

[HowieBass]

I've recently had a few Virgin cable engineers trying to sort out problems I'd been seeing with data errors causing bad picture interference and what flummoxed me was some channels experienced high pre and post RS errors yet others were completely error free (more info about RS errors here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction if you're so inclined). In the end it turned out it was a problem with the cable between the internal wall plate/splitter and the decoder - they put a new cable in and the error rate dropped dramatically - it would seem that the old cable wasn't passing certain frequencies particularly well (for the channels affected). So yes, in this case, the cable really did matter.

[Dingus]

[quote name='tinyd' timestamp='1399391367' post='2443769']
That's the key to the whole thing - it's at least possible for analogue cables to make a difference to the sound. But once you're digital, as long as the cable is up to the minimum spec (which they just about all are) then a more expensive cable can't possibly make any difference to the sound. Unfortunately, a lot of 'experts' in the hi-fi world claim that they can.
[/quote]

Yes, there is a growing market nowadays in audiophile USB cables. Scientists say it shouldn't work , hifi magazines say it does. I haven't heard a demonstration yet so can't vote either way.

What I do know is that I recently invested a a basic but decent quality analogue interconnect to link my P.C to my hifi and it is a noticeable improvement on the few-quid-off-the-internet no-name cable I was using before.

Edited May 6, 2014 by Dingus

[Dingus]

[quote name='Big_Stu' timestamp='1399368559' post='2443411']
That kinda tells you the last time I bought a piece of hi-fi.
"If it ain't broke don't fix it" & "It's not the hi-fi that's dated, it's my ears that are knackered".
[/quote]

Hifi hasn't changed that much in the last twenty years or so, Stu. If you had a system that sounded really good in the early 1990's , chances are it is still competitive with what is about today, contrary to what a lot of magazines and hifi retailers will try and tell you . The 1990's was the Golden Age of two channel audio. Since then, like my body shape , it's all gone downhill.