A friend , has an interesting power cable, 8 layers of copper foil ..
Speaker cables like this :
The best speaker cables I have ever heard *** photos ***
Power cable :
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DSP is only one part of the picture, it doesn't solve the low level distortions which are a major impediment to getting realistic sound. Some years back I witnessed a full blown demo of the DEQX unit, by the people who actually build the stuff here in Oz - microphone, laptop display, got yourself a perfect frequency response, flat as a billiard table ... okay, the sound altered, was 'better', but still wasn't 'right' ...
and then select the mix with loudness war levels of dynamic range compression so they sound as loud as the last guy...
Well that is a large percentage of the work, but those tools are available for everyone. If that was all we wouldn't be needed. Many times there is little left to do, sometimes nothing, so I get to say "hey you do not need this! Everyone is getting better at getting acceptable level of compression due to the great tools and knowledge freely available. Spectra not as often yet.
The source is 75 Ohm (video output standard), the cable terminated by 75 Ohm (video input standard) and connected to high impedance of spectrum analyzer input.
My point exactly. We have a long way to go with DSP. Knowing what to fix for one thing. Flat response ignores our perceptions of the room space and how our ears/brain calibrate the ambiance to what they expect. Besides, a flat response is doing some brute force as you don't eq out nulls. I proved this to myself when I upgraded my movie room to surround and tried several AVR's with fancy push-button eq. Emo, Yama, Marantz. All sounded like garbage to me. My NAD only uses Audessy measurements to set the rear delay. No eq. Nothing to screw up the mix of reflections. I use an old Rane 1/3 octave analog in my sub line to tweak it just a bit. One of these days I will put the transfer function in a black box. I do my crossover by carefully matching my box design with what the AVR wanted to do. My result is effectively a 60 Hz fourth order.
Behringer is not worried about low level distortions. They are in the business of high value semi-pro PA equipment. They do that darn well I must say. HI-FI is not their business.
A friend has a similar setup: JRiver LR24 crossovers to a Steinberg UR824, with a Hypex UcD400 amp for the woofers and a UcD180 for the horn section. We've tried with and without linear phase (using rePhase), but it's hard to hear a significant difference. Be interesting to see what your conclusions are.
Cable Impedance: If you go high enough in frequency, a cable becomes analagous to an acoustic chamber. It gets to where you have to feed a cable that has a certain "characteristic impedance" (75 ohm for example) with the same source impedance (75 ohm), and terminate the cable at the other end with the same impedance (75 ohm). If you don't set it up that way, there will be reflections of the signal in the cable. Video processing equipment and digital circuitry has no choice but to deal with this rather accurately, or it's a disaster. Many runs on a computer circuit board are designed to have a certain "characteristic impedance" that works with the source and load impedance so it can move data at the fastest possible speed without mis-communication. Luckily this only applies to energies above hundreds of kHZ, from my experience anyway.
People are always putting Behringer down. Its just the thing to do, makes you "cool" They are pretty bad about knocking off aesthetic design, however that aside.....some of that gear is damn good at any price. I think a properly gain staged dcx used with digital in only will more than hold its own against most anything that does that job. I've yet to feel good about anythings adda sound.
Our 'problem', with analog audio, is that the complex harmonic inter-mixing of the signal being transmitted down/on an audio cable, does indeed reach well into the +100khz range.
Every single time the signal peaks, which is, on average, what..5000, 1000 times a second?...the signal is momentarily DC in nature. Just for a microsecond. Fractions, actually. and the collapse to core, begins.
What this means, is that the peaks are broken up into motions toward being discrete DC drops..to the core of the wire, then back out into being expressed as complex field, as the motion begins again and the field orientation peaks reverse.
We are sensitive to noise threshold, and we have a DB vs signal limit, in order to discern. We are wired to discern signal through noise, as an intelligent decoding computer, with incredible software/hardware.
Thus, we listen to signal on those cables, through noise. Noise that slowly overcomes the signal, as the signal level increases. At a certain point, once a person learns to 'hear' it, they can hear an audio cable reach 'overload' in signal level.
As long as people use the frozen lattice structures called 'metal' as a marginally conductive pathway for signal, this will be the result.
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