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The look pretty so they must work... testing the ENACOM de-ringer

Posted by tonemaniac (A) on August 20, 2006 at 06:56:25

This was a quick'n'dirty test ounder abhorrent conditions.... my setup here is a theater where I'm doing a pro-bono job... as an aside... "experiential education" is as important to developing young minds as any other kind of education... if there is to be any hope for the future not turning out to be an ocean of homogenized crapola, inane drivel, and lowest common denominator imaginative waste products aimed at the youth market, we 'philes have to get out there and conclusively demonstrate to these kids that there is something better.... infintely better than the currently reigning idea of "cool stuff"... OK, enuf of that sermon...

The venue is a smallish theater that was wired with *what they were led to believe* was a good sound system.... as should be no surprise, the system was wretched, the native acoustics of the room were wretched, the electrical wiring in the building looked like it was done by total amateurs... and the place now is stuffed with RF generating things... the lighting system itself uses the AC wiring as a signal path to tell remote dimmers how to function, Wi-Fi bleating away, three cell phones going at once, cell phone antennae on nearby roofs.... basically this is 1, a worst case scenario, and 2, a fantastic laboratory for testing how well various audiophile devices really do work under adverse conditions.....

For this round I'm about to pull out the long, uneven runs of 16 ga.
of zipcord-as-speaker wire and replace with heavily Audiodahrma cooked Kwik-12 by Kimber.... nice stuff, a bit devilish as it comes off the spool way kinky... note to Ray Kimber... could you ship this wire loosely wound in cardboard boxes like MIT does with their raw wire ? Tight spooling leaves wire in difficult twists that are almost impossible to remove.... serious inconvenience there...

I thought I'd test a set of ENACOM speaker wire filters on the existing rig before I puilled it off the wall.... bad wire going to spring loaded speaker wire grips on the back of some high efficiency JBL speakers... which are actually pretty good sounding... this would be fairly persnickety as the CD player was replaced with a Superclocked and PSU2 (btw... if you're going to the trouble of a Superclock, definitely put the PSU2 in as well if there is room... it does absolutely improve the fine textural quality of the sound)...

The ENACOMs resulted in an immediate transformation of the sound... which *might* be excessive on a finely balanced ideal conditions home system... they just scraped off a load of high end rasp and left the mids and upper mids far cleaner and more articulate... it sounded like the lower mids almost became fat, but not so far as to be described as bloated... a lot of this may be the "garbage removal effect" where the entire perceptual envelope is altered by eliminating a powerful distraction at the higher frequencies.... the real high frequencies sounded like they were not too badly softened though, except perhaps at the most extreme upper ends...

In a premium home or otherwise personal system I'm wondering if a carefully tuned RC filter, Walker or otherwise *at both ends of the speaker cable* wouldn't be particularly effective...perhaps if they were tuned to different corner frequencies... a la Al Sekela's notes... where you might have the second unit tuned to the resonant frequency of the first unit....

A further thought is with the case of highly capactitive cables... which are basically using their internal capacitance as an RF filter, such as with the braided designs, perhaps a simple shunting resistor would turn these cables into an RC design, and if you could then determine the resonant frequency of this structure (like with Kimber's excellent 8TC... one of the great under the radar conductors that loves cryogenic processing) a second tuned RC filter could be added at the resonant peak...

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

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