Page 256 of 314

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 4:22 pm
by GlytchMeister
Huh.

Interesting. Wish I’d known that.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 5:50 pm
by Atomic
Ok then! So those $500 speaker wires on E-Bay aren't worth it, unless your speakers are 100 meters away from the amp?

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 8:54 pm
by GlytchMeister
Maybe? Speaker wires have to transmit amplitude and frequency, which is a much wider range than 1 and 0... even if it is a shitload of 1’s and 0’s.

Unless speakers use 1 and 0 now, too.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Thu Feb 07, 2019 10:21 pm
by AnotherFairportfan
Atomic wrote: Thu Feb 07, 2019 5:50 pm Ok then! So those $500 speaker wires on E-Bay aren't worth it, unless your speakers are 100 meters away from the amp?
They're not worth it then.

Almost all "wonder" cables are a scam.

I don't know how Monster Cables has avoided being sued or at least being hit with consent orders for all these years.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2019 12:16 am
by Dave
AnotherFairportfan wrote: Thu Feb 07, 2019 10:21 pm I don't know how Monster Cables has avoided being sued or at least being hit with consent orders for all these years.
I suspect it's a combination of several things. A lot of their advertising language looks as if it's probably tailored to be "non-falsifiable" - that is, you can't actually prove that it's false, because it's so general and unspecific. It's not all that different from what you see in ads for popular skin creams and cosmetics, or car ads which imply that driving the car will make the driver attractive to women, or etc. It's advertising-speak, and (I believe) the courts generally treat advertising as "OK to make imaginative claims and allusions, as long as you don't blatently lie."

If Muenster Cable advertised that their cable would cause your speakers to levitate in mid-air and turn into gold, they'd probably get slapped down hard... those are objective claims that it's possible to show the products don't deliver. If they claim that their cables are constructed in a way which "gives great, solid bass" and "lets you hear with a clarity you've never experience before"... well, those are subjective, a matter of opinion (what's "great, solid bass" and what's not?) and I doubt that a prosecutor could make much headway in court on those sorts of points.

It'd be hard for disappointed consumers to push a civil case over stuff like that... the subjectivity factor comes into it again, and the chance of winning the case wouldn't be good. And, who's going to spend their own money on lawyers to try to push a civil case like that? They'd probably end up looking foolish, sitting in court and claiming under oath that they really truly were deceived by those eeeevul wiremakers. The odds of success don't seem all that good to me.

There may be lawyers who have (or would) take such a case on contingency, hoping for a "go away, kid, you bother me" settlement from the company, but I haven't heard of any such cases.

Back around 1990 I managed to purchase a whole bunch of surplus cable - mil-spec and aerospace stuff, made with silver-plated copper conductors and shielding, and Teflon insulation and jacket... bought it by the roll, by weight. It's really beautiful stuff (most has a white tape jacket), it solders beautifully, the conductivity is excellent, and the Teflon insulation won't burn, won't melt at soldering temperatures and is very stable over time. One big spool is heavy-duty enough to use as speaker wire (four 14-gauge conductors, shield, clear fluoropolymer jacket) of some sort. I'm not certain why it was all surplused - canceled military projects perhaps. (Look up MIL-W-16878 cable such as https://www.alliedelec.com/product/olym ... /70194971/)

For a couple of years I sold batches of it by mail, to DIY audiophiles who wanted to make up their own interconnect cables (e.g. solder on good-quality RCA plugs)... and one thing I never did was claim that it sounded great (or had any sonic benefits at all compared to more prosaic wire). It's just excellent wire, electrically and mechanically... and since I'd bought it surplus I was able to sell it for about half of the usual distributor price.

I gave up selling when the "exotic audio cable" craze got started. Frankly, I couldn't stand to be in that sort of business... there was just so much BS being thrown around that I got disgusted and walked away from it.

I've still got hundreds of feet of it in storage, and find uses for it occasionally.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2019 2:10 am
by Atomic
Dave wrote: Fri Feb 08, 2019 12:16 am I've still got hundreds of feet of it in storage, and find uses for it occasionally.
When I was a kid, my dad brought home about 30 feet of 32 pair telephone cable. My HO model railroad was never the same...

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2019 5:51 pm
by Bookworm
Dave wrote: Fri Feb 08, 2019 12:16 am
AnotherFairportfan wrote: Thu Feb 07, 2019 10:21 pm I don't know how Monster Cables has avoided being sued or at least being hit with consent orders for all these years.
I suspect it's a combination of several things. A lot of their advertising language looks as if it's probably tailored to be "non-falsifiable" - that is, you can't actually prove that it's false, because it's so general and unspecific. It's not all that different from what you see in ads for popular skin creams and cosmetics, or car ads which imply that driving the car will make the driver attractive to women, or etc. It's advertising-speak, and (I believe) the courts generally treat advertising as "OK to make imaginative claims and allusions, as long as you don't blatently lie."

If Muenster Cable advertised that their cable would cause your speakers to levitate in mid-air and turn into gold, they'd probably get slapped down hard... those are objective claims that it's possible to show the products don't deliver. If they claim that their cables are constructed in a way which "gives great, solid bass" and "lets you hear with a clarity you've never experience before"... well, those are subjective, a matter of opinion (what's "great, solid bass" and what's not?) and I doubt that a prosecutor could make much headway in court on those sorts of points.

It'd be hard for disappointed consumers to push a civil case over stuff like that... the subjectivity factor comes into it again, and the chance of winning the case wouldn't be good. And, who's going to spend their own money on lawyers to try to push a civil case like that? They'd probably end up looking foolish, sitting in court and claiming under oath that they really truly were deceived by those eeeevul wiremakers. The odds of success don't seem all that good to me.

There may be lawyers who have (or would) take such a case on contingency, hoping for a "go away, kid, you bother me" settlement from the company, but I haven't heard of any such cases.

Back around 1990 I managed to purchase a whole bunch of surplus cable - mil-spec and aerospace stuff, made with silver-plated copper conductors and shielding, and Teflon insulation and jacket... bought it by the roll, by weight. It's really beautiful stuff (most has a white tape jacket), it solders beautifully, the conductivity is excellent, and the Teflon insulation won't burn, won't melt at soldering temperatures and is very stable over time. One big spool is heavy-duty enough to use as speaker wire (four 14-gauge conductors, shield, clear fluoropolymer jacket) of some sort. I'm not certain why it was all surplused - canceled military projects perhaps. (Look up MIL-W-16878 cable such as https://www.alliedelec.com/product/olym ... /70194971/)

For a couple of years I sold batches of it by mail, to DIY audiophiles who wanted to make up their own interconnect cables (e.g. solder on good-quality RCA plugs)... and one thing I never did was claim that it sounded great (or had any sonic benefits at all compared to more prosaic wire). It's just excellent wire, electrically and mechanically... and since I'd bought it surplus I was able to sell it for about half of the usual distributor price.

I gave up selling when the "exotic audio cable" craze got started. Frankly, I couldn't stand to be in that sort of business... there was just so much BS being thrown around that I got disgusted and walked away from it.

I've still got hundreds of feet of it in storage, and find uses for it occasionally.
Ooooh... I might want to buy a few feet of that from you. I need to make good quality testing 'jumper' cables, and the shielding is more important to me - most of the wire I find now has crap coatings. We can talk later. :)

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2019 5:58 pm
by Bookworm
Atomic wrote: Thu Feb 07, 2019 5:50 pm Ok then! So those $500 speaker wires on E-Bay aren't worth it, unless your speakers are 100 meters away from the amp?
Frankly, if you flush the crap out the window, wire is wire. The insane high end oscilloscope cable used for instrumentation testing is the exception. It's usually silver (or silver alloy), measured to the closest mil that they can (thousandths of an inch), and sealed to keep the silver from oxidizing. Even then, it's not that different from copper.

Music, on the other hand, is an analog audio signal, and that's very forgiving to minor flaws - you get more distortion from the speakers themselves than anything but the most garbage wire can create.

They're still in business because of a large proportion of people that won't believe it's quality unless it's expensive.

Gold plated connectors - they're not for quality. The gold plating is to stop oxidation; gold is both inert, and able to be made enormously thin while retaining that ability.

Similar - Nothing wrong with copper clad aluminum wiring in and of itself. I have CCA jumper cables in the back of my car. You go up two gauges against similar pure copper cables, but they're a lot cheaper, and will last for years. (4 gauge instead of 6, etc) The problem is that CCA requires _different_ connections for general electrical use. For jumpers, the heat/cooling expansion doesn't matter. I just wanted cables long enough to go from the front of my car to the back of my car with space to spare.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2019 10:54 pm
by TazManiac
First of all-


PAGE 256!

That said, I have a new thread running over in the Audio forum, check it out. (It's not really about audio though...)

now, I gotta go back and actually read the post above this one so I can be all caught up, n'stuff.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2019 10:44 am
by jwhouk
No, it's page 100000000.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2019 2:33 pm
by TazManiac
jwhouk wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 10:44 am No, it's page 100000000.
That's so Black & White of you, so Polarizing...

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2019 6:06 pm
by Warrl
Definitely binary thinking.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2019 10:33 pm
by Bookworm
Warrl wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 6:06 pm Definitely binary thinking.
Maybe, maybe not.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Sun Feb 10, 2019 10:45 pm
by Warrl
Bookworm wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 10:33 pm
Warrl wrote: Sun Feb 10, 2019 6:06 pm Definitely binary thinking.
Maybe, maybe not.
Now that is fuzzy logic.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2019 7:41 pm
by Typeminer
About the wire: Long time back, I heard a discussion about the value of magic wire on the local public radio station. Format then was mainly classical music. The station engineer said he used plain old zipcord, like for extension cords, for speaker wire. Low cost and plenty of conductance.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 12:19 pm
by Alkarii
I'm not sure if I had already learned of it before, but apparently, there's a formation in the Ozarks that's in or around Harrison, AR called Glory Hole. I was already aware of the name of the highest point of the Ozarks, though, and it's also kind of bad...

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 2:12 pm
by Bookworm
Alkarii wrote: Mon Feb 18, 2019 12:19 pm I'm not sure if I had already learned of it before, but apparently, there's a formation in the Ozarks that's in or around Harrison, AR called Glory Hole. I was already aware of the name of the highest point of the Ozarks, though, and it's also kind of bad...
Well, except that a Glory Hole is a random storage closet, basically. It's a place to put your junk (get your mind out of the gutter, it's blocking my periscope) that's out of the way. It's also the name for a glass working furnace. (Not where you melt the glass, but where you keep it malleable and reheat while working)

My first exposure to the phrase was due to mining - Basically, it's a collapsing ore body, where as you pull ore out of the bottom, more falls down. When the surface collapses into a hole, that's a "Glory Hole" - Probably based on the glass furnace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrou ... ock_Caving

The sexual connotations came MUCH later than the 'real' usages.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 12:10 pm
by jwhouk
So - have you been to the Grand Canyon in the last, say, 19 years?

If so - have you been to their Grand Canyon Museum Collection at all during that time?

If so... you might want to get checked out for radiation exposure.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 8:26 pm
by Alkarii
Actually, when I read that there was a rock formation by that name, I suspected there might have been an older definition.

Re: More Stuff

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 7:01 pm
by jwhouk
Northern Arizona is getting hit, hit, HIT hard by snow. The rest of us are getting rained on like no one's business.