Snakeoil OS: The Blog

Power cables, a touchy subject with Audiophiles. Audiophiles are roughly separated into 3 camps when it comes to power cables.

1. They make a difference, those who don’t think so are not listening
2. They do not make a difference, those who think they do are not measuring
3. People sitting on the fence looking over in glee

Goes without question I am in camp #1. Power cables make a difference. /thread.

But the arguments continue. The second most common take down from the other camps is that expensive power cables is no different to any power cable you brought at a local store.

There is no point getting better power cables than what you can buy from a local store because you have tens of metres of “normal” in wall cabling, and kilometres of grid cabling. In other words, the power cable is not the weakest link on the grid. There is little point getting after-market/audiophile power cables when everything on the grid is of poor quality.

Is this true? Let us take a closer look!

Pages: 1· 2· 3· 4· 5

Truth be told - all professions are to be respected; but not everybody holding a profession deserves the respect extended from his/her job.

There are some statements that irks me incessantly on the Internet. Some examples are:

I’m an engineer, cables makes no difference.
I’m a scientist, what you said cannot be  true.
I’m a scientist, you are wrong.

Statements like this always surface in audiophile discussions when topics like inter-connects, power cables, and the latest craze right now - MQA. There is a very high probability the above statements will appear in any controversial topic where there is strong interest (i.e. lots of clicks), and strong opinions from two opposing extremes.

In my opinion statements like this is a lazy argument - it’s often as if the people have run out of things to say, and just throw this into the mix because they can. There are several problems with statements like these.

Pages: 1· 2· 3

Introduction

Audiophiles tend to be opinionated people, there are two big arguments that will flare up periodically on the Internet - Accurate vs Musical, and Objective vs Subjective. In this article we’d mainly be talking about the first case.

Accurate and Musical, what do the two words mean to audiophiles? According to the Stereophile Glossary, they are defined as:

Accuracy - 

The degree to which the output signal from a component or system is perceived as replicating the sonic qualities of its input signal. An accurate device reproduces what is on the recording, which may or may not be an accurate representation of the original sound.

And Musical - 

A personal judgment as to the degree to which reproduced sound resembles live music. Real musical sound is both accurate and euphonic, consonant and dissonant.

Unfortunately people who align themselves to the camps above do not really stick to these definitions. The long version is different people will bend these words in an attempt to fit their arguments. The short version is we simply like an argument!

In this article we’d discuss my take on why these two words are the bane of audiophiles, and the reasons to avoid using them in critical music listening.

Pages: 1· 2· 3· 4· 5· 6

With the advent of computer players we are seeing more and more examples of people saying high power (i5, i7s and Xeons) or FPGAs are better than the Digital to Analog Convertor (DAC) chips of old.

This claim is debatable, there are certainly some cases where this statement is true.

All processors work the same way at it’s most basic level- it recognises 1s and it 0s. The difference is the kind and type of operations each type can perform on these binary stream. There are trade offs between power consumption, calculation speed and flexibility as you look across the board.

Computer Processing Unit (CPU) from makers like Intel and AMD are what we call General Purpose Processor. These chips power the computers we use today. It has the largest instruction set, is capable of having the most applications, are highly adaptive and can be customised to perform jobs like playing games, word processing, internet web browsing and more. The downside is the high power requirements (to power all the extra transistors).

The complexity reduces as you move from CPU (most complex) → FPGA (somewhat complex) → ASIC (least complex). There are a lot less components in the ASIC when compared to the FPGA. There are so many components in a general CPU, and packed so tightly we need a heat spreader over it to conduct heat away.

Pages: 1· 2· 3· 4