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In Reply to: RE: You forgot the best argument against directionality. Let me help you out. posted by geoffkait on November 12, 2022 at 12:47:59
I asked you if the directionality you hear was a result of a change in what's arriving at the loudspeaker terminals.
I asked because part of our hearing is also what we see and know and so, while building a loudspeaker or amplifier with exotic hifi parts those WILL give the builder a better listening impression when finished (even for me) and for the most part, those kinds of improvements won't be measured, noticed or heard by a someone who didn't know of those mods and so has to be told of them first.
Scoff at the idea of blind testing if you will but if you can't hear the difference between two things like speaker cables switching back and forth without knowing which was which , how much of that impression is actually based on hearing?
There are a number of examples like the "McGurke effect" which show for instance your brain will choose what you see over what you actually hear, even when you know what's happening (google it and try)..
The problem is designing a speaker product others will use, there are so many actual acoustic and electronic things actually going on and your brain seeks information and rejects noise, so that loudspeaker development by ear only reaches a point where changes make some recordings better and others worse.
It is difficult to make a speaker that is neutral, harder yet so that it disappears into the phantom image and not be part of the image..
So let me help you out, for a moment pretend you had worked in electronics and sound for the last 40+ years, building measuring and researching new things and were responsible for about 30 patents.
And that you had an open enough mind enough to figure out how to levitate and melt glass with magnetic fields, how to levitate an object with sound at 1600 degrees C, designed the transducers and circuitry to do all that and built several experiments that flew on sounding rockets and the space shuttle.
Further pretend you had been fascinated with "how things work" and especially loudspeakers since childhood and had been building both drivers and speaker cabinets since 8th grade.
Perhaps you might ask questions like i did should someone tell you there is a whole world of audible electrical phenomena that was not observed in any other field outside high end hifi.
While i never observed anything like directionality in cables (outside of the cable factors i outlined) , i have observed a connection between what can be seen in some kinds of measurements and what random strangers hear.
I have observed objectively that when you make a generation loss recording with loudspeakers, that the more generations a loudspeaker or electronics can reproduce and still be listenable, the better most people will think it sounds with any kind of music and the better demonstrations go.
To not be fooled by expectation bias, one needs both subjective and objective observation and knowledge to have a stool to design from. Clearly you have an unusually strong belief, what is your objective background in this area ?
Follow Ups:
You wrote,"To not be fooled by expectation bias, one needs both subjective and objective observation and knowledge to have a stool to design from. Clearly you have an unusually strong belief, what is your objective background in this area ?"
You make it sound like a religious argument, when it's actually a scientific argument. You haven't found anything to support the idea of cable directionality. You have mistakenly assumed cable directionality applies to areas other than HiFi. You have assumed you are a real skeptic therefore you must be right. These are all logical fallacy arguments on your part, mostly of the type Appeal to Authority and Appeal to Experience. If all PhDs thought alike then any PhD could say I have a PhD, therefore I win the argument, no? But all PhDs don't think alike.
What is my objective background in this area? Oh, goodie, a battle of the resumes!
Edits: 11/15/22
"You make it sound like a religious argument, when it's actually a scientific argument."
Is it that the "breakthroughs" are so new that credible peer review groups have yet to process this information or is it that there has been plenty of time for that to happen and no credible peer groups seem to be echoing your result?
Surely what applies in hifi would also apply in pro audio and therefore this information, if it really exists, would have importance outside of tweak circles.
"What is my objective background in this area? Oh, goodie, a battle of the resumes!"
Says the guy who immediately resorts to name calling and questioning others degrees. Roll eye emojie here.
"You make it sound like a religious argument, when it's actually a scientific argument."To which you responded,
Is it that the "breakthroughs" are so new that credible peer review groups have yet to process this information or is it that there has been plenty of time for that to happen and no credible peer groups seem to be echoing your result?
> > > > > HiF stuff is not peer reviewed. There is no peer review process for HiFi. Hel-loo! Besides, as I said many times already in this thread, directionality is not a new breakthrough. Directionality has been controlled for high end cables for 25 years. Have you been living in a cave somewhere?
You also wrote,
"Surely what applies in hifi would also apply in pro audio and therefore this information, if it really exists, would have importance outside of tweak circles."
> > > > That's a logical fallacy. I didn't say it was only in tweak circles, I said it was in HiFi circles, I said "directionality" applies to fuses, cables, speaker wiring, transformers. Wire directionality actually applies anywhere there is audio, even pro audio. You can pretend directionality doesn't exist, you can even hold your breath until your face turns blue, it's no skin off my nose.
I wrote, "What is my objective background in this area? Oh, goodie, a battle of the resumes!"
To which you responded,
"Says the guy who immediately resorts to name calling and questioning others degrees. Roll eye emojie here."
> > > > > That's an other logical fallacy since I never resort to name calling unless I'm called names first. That's fair isn't it? I have never questioned anyone's degree. Why would I? I just got though saying in my previous post it's an Appeal to Authority to claim a superior education or background. It doesn't prove anything. You can't win any argument by claiming you have a PhD in electrical engineering.
Edits: 11/15/22 11/15/22
The problem is your claim of it being a scientific argument when there is little/no evidence suggesting it meets the standards. The claim implies the accepted scientific principles are being adhered to: (1) Pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically; (2) Link research to theory; (3) Use methods that permit direct investigation of questions; (4) Provide coherent chain of rigorous reasoning; (5) Replicate and generalize; and (6) Transparency and scholarly debate.
When/where is the evidence any of this research/experiment/debate has occured surrounding cable directionality questions?
Let us know when you've finished your research and report your results. I can hardly wait. It's actually not my job to provide evidence. Keep looking, have you contacted NASA or IEEE? Maybe they can help you.
Edits: 11/16/22
I'm not the one making the claims then calling them scientific.
It's not up to me to prove anything or even to provide evidence. Which I have already, you just refuse to listen. If you're curious and believe in the scientific method, which you probably don't, you investigate the claim yourself. Or you hire an outside independent third party to verify and validate the claims. Is not observation part of the scientific method? I saw an Apple fall from the tree. That sort of thing.Here's a challenge for you. Prove that directionality doesn't exist.
Edits: 11/17/22
Normally, if one proposes something "new to science" it is the duty of those proposing to show proof it exists. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
That there is a directional effect in speaker cables is such a claim but lacks anything like "engineering proof" that you can point to other than some people say they can hear it.
Some people say a lot of things, here, most likely "if you can't hear it, your system doesn't have enough resolution" or other cop out.
Meanwhile the fact it is only folks associated with the audio aftermarket biz that seem to promote this idea, that there is no attempt to show and engineering explanation, leaves many rightfully skeptical and some going to great lengths to promote it.
I'm not proposing something new to science, as you say. Whatever gave you that idea? Do you consider yourself informed of everything in science, is the real question. I'm beginning to think so.I am under no obligation to present engineering proof, as you say, or proof of any kind or even evidence. This is not a peer review forum, in case you haven't heard.
By the way, I never said directionality is real because some people claim to hear it. Why do you insist on putting words in my mouth? (You are very adept at using pseudo skeptic arguments.)
Because systems can sometimes have errors and peoples' listening skills are often unreliable, negative results of a test for directionality are meaningless. Even if the test is a controlled blind test. Meaningful results start to emerge after many tests on many systems with many test subjects. Repeatability and transferability are the key.
You keep trying to argue that only niche audiophiles are concerned about directionality. That's true but it doesn't mean it's not real. You can follow that logic, right? That's another pseudo skeptic argument.
Edits: 11/17/22 11/17/22
"Meaningful results start to emerge after many tests on many systems with many test subjects. Repeatability and transferability are the key."
And you have that data? Can you share it?
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
It's not up to me to provide any data. If you had read more carefully you'd have noticed I said tests by many people on many systems. I.e., independent testing. You probably aren't familiar with IV&V, I bet.
Edits: 12/19/22
"Because systems can sometimes have errors and peoples' listening skills are often unreliable, negative results of a test for directionality are meaningless."
It is the exact same reason to be skeptical of positive results, or if you really believe in cable directionality, the ability of a manufacturer to deliver the products to the customer consistently without any case of somehow confusing the customer into installing them backwards.... mislabelled cable direction indicator per manufacturing defect as an example.
"Meaningful results start to emerge after many tests on many systems with many test subjects. Repeatability and transferability are the key."
There seems to be some logical flaw in the following line of reasoning: "listening skills are often unreliable", and yet the proposed method of detecting the effect, ie (paraphrasing) "just listen myself and see if I like one direction better than the other".
There are at least two conductors per interconnect per channel. However the only thing most of us would consider practical is multistrand not solid core. That is a ton of book keeping just to get one cable built correctly with out any mistakes. It's hard to imagine how all this overhead wouldn't be prohibitively expensive for a boutique audiophile manufacturer to control. And really begs the question why bother doing the listening test on any old manufacturers multistrand cables with presumably random distributions of strands within the multistrand bundles pointing in one direction or the other.
No, positive results are not the same as negative results. Negative results from a single test have no meaning. That's because too many things can and do go wrong with tests. But positive results are meaningful because they were positive *in spite of* the many possible pitfalls.What are those pitfalls, you ask. Fair enough, here is a short list,
1. Error(s) in the test system, including but not limited to, speakers wired out of phase, cabling connected out of phase, absolute polarity of system inverted, cables or electronics not broken in sufficiently. These error would potentially mask differences in sound.
2. Test system lacks adequate resolution for task at hand, making the sound differences impossible to detect.
3. Listener not sufficiently skilled at detecting differences in sound.
4. Listener doesn't know what differences in the sound to look for. What difference in sound does directionality produce?
5. Test procedures not followed.
6. Listener might be biased against the test item(s). He could be strongly anti tweak and nit admit to any Sonic differences if there are any.
One person's listening skill might not be up to the level of someone else's. If you don't know what directionality sounds like you might not hear it the first time around. That's what I meant by listener skill being unreliable. You can't drag some guy in off the street and expect him to hear directionality.
It's not difficult to control any wire or cable for directionality. You must "control" the wire as soon as it comes off the spool, every length of wire after that is in the direction. AudioQuest (and others) has been doing this for many years uh, 25, so obviously it's not prohibitively expensive, as you say.
For fuses, the wire doesn't have to be controlled during manufacture since it's easy to reverse the fuse in its holder and decide which way sounds best.
Finally, in an AC circuit there are two wires, one carries the electrical signal in one direction while the electrical signal travel in the opposite direction at the same time. The signals alternate direction on each wire according to the instantaneous audio frequency.
Edits: 11/19/22 11/20/22 11/20/22
Directionality: It's All About Noise
07.01.16
If you've ever wondered about the arrows on AudioQuest cables, read any of our educational materials, or merely followed any of the online chatter regarding our products, perhaps you've wondered what this "directionality" thing is all about.
There is the widely accepted version of directionality: In most audio-grade shielded interconnects, as compared to standard coax, negative has its own internal conductor and the metal shield is attached to ground at only one end, thus defining the cable's directionality. Many cable manufacturers end their exploration of directionality there, going only as far as to mark their cables for directionality based on the relationship of shield to ground, but altogether neglecting conductor directionality. Because we believe in directing noise to where it can do the least harm, we, too, believe in the advantages of controlling for the attachment of the shield. In fact, long before we controlled for conductor directionality, AudioQuest interconnects were also controlled for direction based on the relationship of shield to ground.
Over the years, our understanding of conductor directionality and its effect on audio performance has steadily evolved, growing stronger and more complete. While we've always been keenly aware that directionality plays a significant role in the overall sound of any hi-fi system, we couldn't completely explain it. This was okay: We trust our own ears and encourage listeners to do the same. The test is easy enough: Simply listen, then reverse the direction of the cable, and listen again.
I think your confusing what i was questioning with someone else i guess, i was very specific speaker cables and NOT small signal cables.
Rarely does one find an engineering approach where being skeptical is a bad thing, i find this discussion curious.
"Over the years, our understanding of conductor directionality and its effect on audio performance has steadily evolved, growing stronger and more complete."
Yes i get that impression from you and that there is a collective "our" somewhere too, it's just normally there is something in the objective world that indicates or suggests a mechanism for an actual change.
What does it look like when doing a google search on this subject, it would seem the only folks spending money to advertise or write about it are companies associated with hifi aftermarket.
Search any other topic about electronics engineering like skin effect or propagation velocity you you have many engineering hits.
I've already revealed the mechanism for the change in sound. Must be a mental block. This is what is commonly referred to as the backfire effect. When confronted with evidence to the contrary of strongly held beliefs or opinions a person clutches those beliefs even more tightly. We even have a name for it.Yes, there's a collective out there. It's a collective of advanced audiophiles, like the 140,000 who have bought directional fuses. Get on board the directionality train, toot, toot!
I did not say being skeptical is a bad thing, please don't put words in my mouth. That's another logical fallacy strike for you. What I'm saying is being falsely skeptical is bad, pretending to be scientifically skeptical but not really willing to do the leg work. We call them pseudo skeptics.
You wrote,
"What does it look like when doing a google search on this subject, it would seem the only folks spending money to advertise or write about it are companies associated with hifi aftermarket."
That's so funny you should say that because this entire discussion has been about directionality of cables and wire in audio systems. The concept doesn't exist outside of HiFi. Directionality is a HiFi word. Hel-loo!
Tip: If you use the search engine for Propeller Head Plaza to search for the word "directionality" you will get a boatload of results going as far back as 2002.
Edits: 11/14/22 11/14/22 11/14/22 11/14/22 11/14/22
It's not like I'm saying I've seen flying saucers. It's also not like I'm the only one who has heard directionality. AudioQuest identified directionality 25 years ago and developed perhaps the best way to control directionality during cable manufacturing. Don't shoot me I'm just the messenger. A part of why more than 120,000 audiophile fuses have been sold is because the issue of directionality is part of the fuse mystique, so to speak. Even an old stock fuse tgats been in the system for 10 years will sound sound better or worse if you reverse it in the fuse holder. What have you got to lose? I dare you.
Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica
Not too chicken to change
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