REGISTER NEW USERLOST PASSWORD? WELCOME, Logout

It’s just wire

Paul's Posts — 27 August 2011

By

It’s just wire

I was reading one of the print magazines and noticed an ad for a high-end wire company.  They were crowing about their product and how it will add this or that to the music: better bass, increased transparency, depth etc.  Virtues of the product that we, as a wire manufacturer as well,  have written about in the past.

As I reflect upon what they wrote, it occurs to me that many people may believe wire can add something to the system’s performance.  It cannot.  Wire is passive and can add nothing.  It can only subtract.

I first ran into this years ago when we were developing some of the first high-end power cables to hit the market.  I noticed that the heavier the gauge I used for the power cable (thicker the wire) the more pronounced the bass and, at the time, assumed we were adding bass.  Of course, wire cannot add anything.  It’s just wire.

Silver cables add brightness to the sound?  Wrong.

As I don’t want these daily posts to get too long, how about together we contemplate this question and tomorrow, let’s delve into the subject a bit more.

It is, after all, just wire we’re talking about.

email Its just wire Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers

Get new and fresh stories like this each morning by joining the folks reading Paul's Posts. Click here

Related Articles

Young turks Get that mole! Treat the cause or the symptoms? Jelly rolls

Share

About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(10) Readers Comments

  1. August 27, 2011 at 5:55 am

    Paul, you have strange clean powers: you are brave enought to put your finger in the wound… I really appreciate such attitude as I think that finally it is time to go back to real electronic science (True HiEnd) and keep it separated from the typical marketing gimmicks (glowing false HiEnd).
    My most sincere congratulations for your honest and brave articles. If we have to get worried for a wire… what about the city of components that there is inside any product :-) .
    In the past I was commented about a funny experiment in the first store where I initially started to work when I was young: “Get a big piece of BullS–t, sprayed carefully with some gold paint, wrap it into a beautiful piece of shining red paper, put it into an elegant big box with a short name and beautiful font. Put that product at one side… Now, get a small piece of pure solid gold, wrap it into a newspaper’s sheet, and put it inside a simple carton box. 99% of the potential clients will go for the gold sprayed piece of BullS–t. That’s how HiEnd Audio works. Don´t forget it: it’s not about how it works, it is about how it looks and how it makes the user feel himself about it. We are not dealing with professionals, we are selling to wannabees or wannahave and this is not an audio-school: this is a store where we have to sell as much as possible”.

    Again thank you for your sincerity.

    Victor
    http://www.audiofilodigital.com

    • August 27, 2011 at 8:52 am

      Victor, while I too don’t like the BS and snake oil foisted on people in our industry, I am not sure I completely agree with you and should set the record straight. Wires DO make a difference. Their effects are clearly audible on a good system (gold plated BS or not :) ).

      What the article objected to was someone trying to convince us that wires ADDED something when clearly, they cannot. What they CAN do is subtract and that’s the subject we’ll explore in the next couple of days.

      Certainly we can both agree that at the extremes, a poorly designed audio cable can degrade in measurable ways as well as a power cord. The subjective aspects of wire are a tough subject, one we should probably explore more in these ongoing posts.

      For now, I am going to assume most following these posts hear differences that in fact exist in wire – we’re just going to look and see why and hopefully set the record straight about adding vs. subtracting.

      Wires cannot add – they can only subtract – but subtract they do and this is what we hear.

  2. demeter

    August 27, 2011 at 8:10 am

    then the best wire should be one, which chance nothing in the signal path. The rule should be: First in, first out. You have to hear the string of a contrabass first and then its body. Some cable do that revers to decieve a bigger soundstage

    • August 27, 2011 at 9:39 am

      Yes, I think I understand what you mean. By de-emphasizing the lower fundamental frequencies, we emphasize the upper frequencies and the effect is exactly as you describe – although I doubt it is a timing issue – although I don’t know.

      • Bazza13

        August 27, 2011 at 10:27 am

        Once again Paul you have provided a very important outlook. I am certainly not an Electrical Engineer however I read the marketing literature of high profile cable manufacturers, including PS Audio, and I have experimented with many different “wires”. I have concluded that skin affect and vibration seem to change the sound to my ears so dielectrics like teflon, polypropelene, etc seem to sound different. Lessloss Audio claims to have developed a filtering material incorporated into the dielectric and to my ear it subtracts noise from the wire and I clearly hear the difference.
        If with heavier wire we perceive more bass is it not “adding” it rather than “subtracting” something?

        • August 29, 2011 at 10:04 pm

          Indeed, “more bass” is really reduced everything else. This is a little hard to grasp but once you get it, easy.

          Active noise reduction in the jacket is something we invented nearly 5 years ago and I can attest to the fact it works.

  3. juraj

    August 27, 2011 at 10:58 am

    Nice article Paul (actually as all in this series I have read to date).

    There is no doubt that cables make a difference in sound of the system. Now, while I can somehow on certain level understand why we can observe these differences in cables passing the analog signal, it remains mystery to me, why it is also happing for cables passing the digital signal :) (and it certainly does).

    How could possibly a wire influence anything in digital domain? And don’t mean only cases when transferring digital signal of high “density” (e.g. DSD or 192/24) where it could potentially be attributed to jitter, but differences are also heard for plain CD data stream.

    If someone could shed some light on this “mystery” (or me) that would be great :)

    Thank you,

    Juraj

    • August 29, 2011 at 9:51 pm

      Great question and I am not going to claim to have the answers but I might be able to shed a hint of light for you.

      As mentioned in the article, cables filter and remove – they can’t add. Digital signals are very high frequency and while they may start out as good looking square waves, once they get through the low pass filtering of a digital interconnect, their square shape has change significantly – resembling more of a truncated triangle.

      Why this matters in some digital receivers is because of the way we detect a change in state from 0 to 1. We use what’s called a zero cross detector. This means when we go from zero voltage to a higher level, it detects the change and registers as a 1. The point at which that change occurs (how high the voltage needs to be) is dependent on the type of semiconductor used, but for this example, let’s imagine TTL and the threshold of 0.6 volts. Anything below 0.6 volts looks like 0 and anything above, a 1.

      The rate at which the digital signal transitions between 0 volts and 0.6 volts is dependent on the rise time or the shape of the slope of the square wave. The steeper the slope, the quicker we can transition from one state to another.

      Problem is, the low pass filtering of a cable limits the rise time of this slope so the point at which the transition from 0 to 1 occurs changes in time due to the cable. If this happens at a constant – then it’s no problem – but if it happens differently for changing frequencies (which s what happens) then the net result is increased jitter because of the cable.

      Add to that impedance matching, reflections etc. and you have a very complex network affecting the digital data stream.

      That’s just a taste of what designers are up against.

      Hope that helps.

  4. esimms86

    August 27, 2011 at 1:14 pm

    The interesting question to my mind is, is there such a thing as the perfect speaker wire? Certainly, wire can influence sound and some wires are intrinsically better than others(e.g., audiophile grade wire should be better than your standard lamp cord). At the same time, there are subjective forces at play such that people often prefer wire that provides a certain kind of signature sound. Just like there are adherents for tubes vs. solid state, there are people who prefer a “warm sounding cable,” just as there are those who find a very detailed sound to be “sterile.” There are also people who find a particular cable to be fatiguing with extensive listening.

    Manufacturers and designers also make all sorts of choices in product design when deciding what capacitor, resistor, connector, etc. to put into a device built to meet a certain price point. The DIY and mod industries certainly tap into those markets. At the end of the day, howver, most of us are left with the original, unmodified product and we are just looking to get the most out of it,

    Esau

    • August 29, 2011 at 9:54 pm

      Boy, you have that right!

      But to your first question, no, there isn’t a perfect cable because there’s no such thing as a perfect transmission method through wire. The very act of sending it down a wire loses something, no matter how small.

Leave a Reply