Car Audio Central - Ultimate Car Audio Forum and Community

William from NOLA wrote:I agree totally. One thing that crosses my mind is efficiency though. If you had all silver (be it solid or plated) connections including speaker wire, would you have the most efficiency possible?

I think the "logic" behind it is if you minimize all the "unnoticeable" things... it will add up in the end.

But most of the time... the gains are absolutely insignificant to the ear.

Spose if i had 500 grand to throw on a home theatre... i'd probably get the "best" of everything though :)

"Does that mean to say biwiring and silver wire wont matter in a car, but will in a HT setup?"

point being in a car you're overcoming lousy acoustics and 90dB of road noise you don't contend with in a good listening room, so that makes a huge difference in the end result.
As for bi-wiring, I think it does more harm than good unless you are bi-amping the speakers as well, and have everything well balanced. Even tehn you run into time alignment issues from unbalanced propagation delays. The only really good reason to bi-amp anything is to get more power than you can achieve from a single channel of power from an amplifier to one set of speakers. As for cables in reality, any decently made cable should do the job. If you have noise issues, use balanced XLR signal paths for home audio instead of unbalanced RCAs.
In cars you can always go with a fiberoptic/TOSlink signal path like Alpine uses for their F#1status products if you want a noise free signal path and have the money to spend.

You can just as easily listen to your car closed up in the garage, which IMO makes for a much better listening area so long as your not in a noisy neighborhood.

That being said, the house isn't that great of a listening room either... planes flying overhead, cars booming by, birds, the fridge poppin on and off. Of course depends on where you live and how your listening room is setup.. but 99% of hometheatres aren't setup in a perfectly silent area, just like 99% of cars.

BUT, that doesn't mean you can't have one hell of a listening room if you work at it, and that doesnt mean you can't seal your car up like a coffin and park in the middle of nowhere while enjoying ure music.

You can't really do judge SQ on the highway... lol

Fishy wrote:Are HT cables the ones with the "lil black box" on the end(Zoebel network)? I thought these types of cables involved passive filters which simply altered a signal's frequency, thus making things sound "better".

As far as silver being "sonically superior to copper", what the heck does that mean? As far as I know acoustics has absolutey nothing to do with the way current flows in a conductor. If you want to make up for the higher resistivity of copper simply use a larger conductor. It'll be much easier on the pocketbook.

Frankly I believe the claim that silver is superior in any other way is simply a case of "Voodoo" electronics, a myth perpetuated by a high end cable manufacturers in order to sell more product and by certain audiophiles seeking to justify the ridiculous amount of cash they've dropped on such items.

-Fishy

I just like to say that these comments weren't specifically aimed towards you Kiki and if they came off as a "flame" of some sort that wasn't my intention. I know you're not necessarily recommending the use of silver wire. Its just that I've seen the term "sonic superiority" used an awful lot by manufacturers when describing its benefits and still don't understand what they mean.

If I had the money and was satisfied with my other home equipment I wouldn't have a problem spending the extra cash just to guarantee that I had the best. Its perfectly understandable why some audiophiles go the extra mile in this situation.

:)

-Fishy

a room in a house is much much easier (though not cheaper) to make into an acoustically acceptable environment, and there are several approaches to doing so.
The shape of the room will play a factor, but that's taken into account when building a listening room. overall a good listening room in a house is always going to be far more sonically accurate than any car's interior unless you distort the conditions to prove some deluded point :)

Yes if you live in an apartment in the inner city you're not going to have an ideal listening room, but most people who can afford speakers and amplifiers worthy of a dedicated listening room are going to own their own house anyway and can afford to design a room around those speakers if that's their passion, much the way we modify our cars around the audio systems because we go beyond the average Joe, too.

If you want to see some insane interconnects and some voodoo descriptions of sonic superiority, check out a company called Kharma:
http://www.kharma.com/

http://www.kharma.com/products/products.htm#KEC

cables

http://www.kharma.com/products/products.htm#ESR

room acoustics

I hate to belabor the point, but I'm still sceptical on the silver cable thing.

I can understand how low level cables could be susceptible to noise and how a superior DESIGN could help things out, but I've yet to see any empirical evidence other than basic resistivity figures that could explain the superiority of silver as a conductor. All I see are fancy words like "musical", "magical" and "revelation".

The Grand Referece Loudspeakercable has 56 conductors of pure silver/gold in a massive mechanical vibration reducing tube. Enormous dynamics together with extreme revelation of smallest details. A sense of quietness and easyness and henceforth an overwhelmingly musical cable.

Does that make sense to anyone?

I firmly believe that a good oscilloscope can reveal any "sonic irregularities" a lot better than the human ear.

Show me the money.

-Fishy

KikiTheCat wrote:a room in a house is much much easier (though not cheaper) to make into an acoustically acceptable environment, and there are several approaches to doing so.
The shape of the room will play a factor, but that's taken into account when building a listening room. overall a good listening room in a house is always going to be far more sonically accurate than any car's interior unless you distort the conditions to prove some deluded point :)

Yes if you live in an apartment in the inner city you're not going to have an ideal listening room, but most people who can afford speakers and amplifiers worthy of a dedicated listening room are going to own their own house anyway and can afford to design a room around those speakers if that's their passion, much the way we modify our cars around the audio systems because we go beyond the average Joe, too.

If you want to see some insane interconnects and some voodoo descriptions of sonic superiority, check out a company called Kharma:
http://www.kharma.com/

If you have the $ to build your own listening room, you have the $ to completely redo your car for SQ.

You could make it 100% dead... redo the entire interior to be a certain shape if need be...

Or move the seat to the middle if you really want to get fun with it.

"unless you distort the conditions to prove some deluded point"

Which you just did with HT... how many people actually have enough money to dedicate and entire *listening room* in their house? Out of those... how many have the $ to throw down to dedicate that room when they are building the house?

Both have major issues and both have workarounds... but saying a house is inherantly better than a car ignores all of the problems with a normal HT setup. What if you have a big opening on either side of the room into the other rooms.. that would be like having to always keep your windows down in a car... how is that better?

If you say you can do this and that to make a great listening room, you can say the same thing for a car... it can be easily "fixed" to provide a superb listening environment.. whether or not you are willing to hack your dash/move your seats is no different than whether you are willing to tear down a wall in your house and move it 2 feet so that you can have better acoustics.

Buying a car specifically for SQ is also no different than buying a room in your house specifically for HT.

And btw... who says whether or not equipement is "worthy" of a listening room? You could just as easily make a listening room for a boom box or a 100k master HT setup... the only thing that matters is that you HAVE a listening room. Does that also mean you can't put a 100k master HT setup in your existing living room that is 10x10 archway into the kitchen because the acoustics just arent good enough?

Or maybe you can't have kicks in your car because you run coaxials? Perhaps you should *only* be allowed to mount component sets in kicks... doors are illegal.

I'm not going to apologize for having an opinion - if you view my disagreement as flaming something is very wrong here!

Fishy wrote:The Grand Referece Loudspeakercable has 56 conductors of pure silver/gold in a massive mechanical vibration reducing tube. Enormous dynamics together with extreme revelation of smallest details. A sense of quietness and easyness and henceforth an overwhelmingly musical cable.

Does that make sense to anyone?

I firmly believe that a good oscilloscope can reveal any "sonic irregularities" a lot better than the human ear.

Show me the money.

-Fishy

It makes perfect sense... my snake oil makes you feel gooooood

so buy me a house

a room in a house is physically far more conducive to good audio than any car, simply by consideration of signal path lengths, obstructions, and noise levels if you pick a half decent room to begin with. A car will never, ever provide a superior environment to a larger room. If it did, we'd have Operas performed in cargo vans instead of Opera halls. I'm not arguing this one any more though. you're welcome to believe what you like about ideal environments, but it's not that difficult to sound deaden a room. You'll never get rid of all of the engine noise and road noise in a car and have an environment with anywhere close to ideal acoustic response.
What you want to put where is your business, but as I've said many times before, a chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, and if you stick a boom box in a room that's been shaped for acoustic control, you're wasting your time. That system isn't going to have the response needed to take advantage of the room. Again, irrational arguments to prove a point through exaggeration isn't going to win anyone over.

here's a simple analogy that should hold fairly accurate:
we're talking about good audio gear, in a well set up car or house, in either case.
when you start to talk about using a kitchen, or a boom box in the listening room, it's like using a pair of sony 4" speakers in your car set up for SQ, with no other audio gear but a factory radio. same result. weak link.
Like arguing sports cars, and using a ferrari with a 3cyl Yugo engine to prove a point.

as for the silver cables, I told ya that site was insane.. I never said it was believable. hehe They do, or did sell a system called the Enigma, though, which was something like a million dollars. they'd come out and build a dedicated subterranian listening room, and install the system for you, which was supposed to yield concert level volumes with ideal acoustic response. It was amusing to read about.

If you want to see more crazy interconnects, look at Kimber Kable, and Transparent.
Both make cables that sell for well over a thousand dollars per meter.