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:)

Posted by Ted Smith (M) on June 1, 2008 at 22:47:22

In Reply to: No, you read me correctly the first time. posted by Al Sekela on June 1, 2008 at 21:35:33:

Howdy

That's what I thought you meant. And to beat a dead horse I disagree at least in the context of some systems. In fact I really don't think you can improve my system with any kind of cable shielding... There simply isn't any of the sound of RF artifacts that you describe here or any of your other posts, yet I get amazing amounts of detail without fatigue. I have spent a lot of time making sure that I don't have any fatiguing symptoms since my system is on 24/7 and playing sound probably 20 hours/day on average. (Now that I'm married I don't sleep in front of it anymore, but I used to :)

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to generalize my experience and say that properly built shielded cables don't exist, but in my experience they appear to be as rare as systems that don't need them are in your experience :)

I tend avoid any changes to my system that mess with the tonal balance, it both sounds right and measures well (at least with a crude 1/3 measurement. Someday I'll either write or borrow a good spectrum analyzer for measuring my room more accurately, but it's fine for now and I have higher priority work to do.)

Perhaps you haven't looked at my profile to see what speakers and other equipment I have as well as you might have missed my room treatments... With amps flat to 200kHz, speakers flat to 40kHz (or is it 50kHz?), and silver speaker wires and interconnects some might think my system would be bright or etched, but far from it. It's appropriately smooth top to bottom.

Believe me I can hear/measure the effects of RF in my room. (Tho my scope only goes to 200MHz I've been measuring things enough to have a pretty good idea what's happening up to there...) In other situations (my older office system or in the store where I bought a lot of my components) I could easily hear when people's cell phones were receiving a message before they plinged, etc. and could tell when people were downloading on the computers in the next office... In my old house I had to move components around to avoid the interference from my old Sony Wega: it had horrible fields about 6" directly under it rendering the top shelf Tivo/video/UPS land, not audio land. Different Tivos are built quite differently, some have horrible ground loop issues and others are clean as a whistle. Some have noisy disk drives, others are quiet. The fans are all over the map.

It used to matter what time of the day I played my system, but that's long behind me, it's clear, clean and engaging any time of day or night. These kinds of fixes (find a problem, measure it, do some research if necessary, design a fix, measure that, iterate) for various problems have left me with confidence that I'm not (in general) chasing my tail and that (also in general) I have a good idea what's going on in my system. I have explicitly not addressed some known issues because I don't like any fix that's avaiable, but these are more like room issues...

I'm rambling so I'll stop. I just had to engage you on this topic at least once :)

-Ted

Edits: 06/01/08

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