Re: Cables again. For Arny, et al.

"Sonnova" <sonnova@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:fp9ji10t59@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:59:48 -0800, dpierce.cartchunk.org@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote
>(in article <fp7tdk02527@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>):

>> There are fields in which signals a orders of magnitude
>> more fragility than ANYTHING in audio are routine, where
>> none of the outright floobydust and flimflammeryof
>> high-end audio holds.

Oh so true.

>> Go take a look at the requirements for detecting and
>> preserving the signals in fields such as SQUIDS, radio
>> astronomy, encephalography, particle physics and
>> more. These fields left high-end audio in the dust
>> decades ago on pretty much every topic the high-end
>> claims to have made fantastic "innovations" and
>> "discoveries" in (including cables, jitter and more).

True, but one need not go so far afield. One can see all sorts of 
interesting obvious misbehavior by cables and simple components like 
switches while going no further than the 15 pin video cable coming out of 
the back of the PC one reads USENET posts with. Of course high-resolution 
video signals relate to  200-500 MHz, as opposed to 20 KHz for audio, or
in 
the case of digital audio, perhaps 10 MHz.

>> Also look at the amount of the stuff you see in high-end
>> audio that has made itself into other fields (hint:
>> pretty much nothing). Many of the so-called "innovators
>> " in this industry know little or nothing about the
>> topics they choose to hold forth on, and would be the
>> laughing stock in any serious scientific or engineering
>> forum.

I first became familiar with the process of reclocking digital signals
using 
PLLs while servicing IBM mainframe tape and disk drives in the
middle-1960s.

>> Yes, the laughed at Newton (well, no they didn't) and
>> they laughed at Einstein (again, no they didn't).

I think both gentlemen paid some dues in their early years, but when they 
hit their stride, they were taken very seriously indeed.

Einstein must have set some kind of high water mark for being taken 
seriously because his signature launched the Manhattan Project, which 
absorbed a significant ****tion of the GNP of the USA for several years. As

the story goes, all he had to do is sign a letter that someone else wrote 
for him.

>> But, as Carl  Sagan observed, they also laughed at Bozo the clown.

LOL!

> These are exactly the points I was making. conductors are
> among the most well understood of electronics
> technologies. Why would one think, for instance that when
> high-frequency radar came about in WWII, that engineers
> already knew that waveguides were needed to carry the UHF
> radar signal to and from the antennas and that coax
> wouldn't work?

We're up in the 100s ( and 1,000s, and 10,000s) of MHz again. Coax does
work 
at very high frequencies, but its losses go up with frequency. For example

HDMI handles bitrates on the order of 10 Gbits over 4 ****elded twisted 
pairs, for a data rate of 2.5 Gbits for each pair. Alternatively this can
be 
viewed as  up to 16 bits per pixel per component color, and data rates of
up 
to 680 million pixels per second.

> Because the physics of signals at those
> frequencies were already well known, even then. This is
> not a subject that lends itself to debate because there
> is, unlike, perhaps, other areas of audio, little "wiggle
> room" for the technology of wire to have any voodoo
> associated with it. It's too mature of a discipline and
> too basic a technology for that to happen.

Case in point, in another group someone is all turned on about headphone 
cable that has been cryogenically treated. As their argument goes, if it 
works for drill bits, why can't it work for headphone cable? ;-)