Vipera Cables

[Jonziebal]

Jeg er derfor ikke fortaler for andet, end man skal følge sine egne øre. Og det gælder uanset om der gælder højttalere, forstærkere eller kabler. Synes man A lyder bedre end B, så køb dog A – hvis man vel at mærke mener, at den eventuelle prisforskel kan forsvares.

Det henvender sig til lyddelen. Og det siger at er der en forskel er det super.

Jeg hører til dem, der ikke kan høre nævneværdig forskel på kabler og vil af den grund ikke spendere en formue på de dele af mit anlæg. Dog mener jeg, at kabler skal være solidt bygget, så man undgår løse forbindelser. Desuden sætter jeg pris på terminerede højttalerkabler, så jeg slipper for selv at afisolere dem. Og endelig er der - i hvert fald for mig - en tredje væsenlig faktor: De pågældende kabler ligner et kvalitetsprodukt: de er, som det også er beskrevet her i tråden, 'lækre'. Så selv om jeg ikke kan høre forskel, vil jeg gerne undgå, at sidde og spekulere på, om jeg nu alligevel ikke skulle udskifte et billigt noname kabel med noget kvali-hejs. Og disse Vipera-kabler opfylder derfor mine krav til et sæt højttalerkabler til en pris, jeg absolut ikke finder afskrækkende.

Det handler i bund og grund om personlig præference. Nogle mennesker er meget visuelt prægede (min kæreste, som eksempel), og kan godt lide at eks. deres lejlighed udstråler kvalitet (for dem). Da nytter det ikke noget at have en VHD CS122 liggende tværs over stuegulvet, også selvom det er et helt fornuftigt kabel. Som jeg læser det.

For tre år siden ville jeg ikke have haft noget imod udseendet af et VDH CS122 kabel, hvis jeg mente at kablet lød helt fantastisk. Idag er jeg i højere grad påvirket af om det også tager sig godt ud som del af min indretning. Jeg vil dog vil sige at lyden rent personligt stadig har klar top-prioritet. Så hvis de to ting kan kombineres og jeg føler det er en god handel all in all, så er det 2 fluer med ét smæk.

Men jeg kan tydeligt se på gallerierne, at det ikke er alle der har det sådan...

[dreamz]

Og den kvalitet er så altså så noget med hvor lækkert kablet tager sig ud kan jeg forstår.

Ja, kvalitetsindtryk er bestemt et parameter. Og så skrev jeg forøvrigt også, at det skal være solidt opbygget - og for højttalerkabler - at de skal være termineret, så du fik vist ikke det hele med!

Men det med at gå op i, om det tager sig 'lækkert' ud er for mig også en faktor. Hvis jeg iklæder mig et Armani-jakkesæt, tager jeg ikke et par billige Bilka-underbukser på. Ikke at det betyder noget for andet end mit egen velbefindende. Og på samme måder med kabler. Jeg bryder mig ikke om tanken om at have mine dyre enheder forbundet med billige standardkabler, selvom jeg ikke kan høre forskel.

/dreamz

[ZIG]

My twittering friend michael lavorgna har også en mening om disse ting:-

Quit by accident, I stepped into a new and trans-formative hi-fi tweak – The Clever Little Shit.

First some history – One day one of our dogs accidentally poo’d in my listening room. My first reaction was obviously one of horror but as I bent to wipe up the mess, I noticed something unexpected – Jennifer Warnes had moved farther back, much farther back into the soundstage!

I quickly put on one of my favorite reference discs Jazz At The Pawnshop and it was as if I was right there ** in the Pawnshop ** surrounded by all of those great sounding musicians whose names I can never seem to remember. In any event being as curious and inquisitive as anyone with a thorough knowledge of DBTs and fiberglass-based absorption is wont to be, I brought some dog shit to a few audiophile friend’s homes and discretely left a wad or two in unobtrusive places.

“Say Mike, what did you do while I went to the bathroom? The soundstage is suddenly HUGE and the bass is much tighter.  And I swear I can hear more sparkle from those cymbals. And what’s that godawful smell?”

Well imagine their surprise when I showed them the shit! The only drawback that everyone seemed to agree on was the odor-coefficient and some of our better listeners, corporate jingle-writers by trade, seemed to notice a lessening of the positive effects as the tweak hardened.



Not to be discouraged, I decided to get serious and hired an ex-NASA custodial engineer who helped us create a synthetic poo that embodies all of the positive effects of real poo without any of the negative side effects. Our shit lasts forever!

What’s more, Mr. NASA has also applied a Quantum DiLithium Cryogenic Crystal Tesla Area 51 shower to our Poo which alters the synthetic poo at a sub-atomic level imbuing it with EMI/RMF shielding properties! And say goodbye to Alzheimer’s to boot! (while we’re not certain of this last benefit, my great-grandmother who unfortunately suffers from the malady declared upon seeing our newly developed tweak – “That looks like shit.”)

Zig

[Skorpio]

Den har tråd får mig til at tvivle på hele branchens troværdighed....

[Wymax]

Den har tråd får mig til at tvivle på hele branchens troværdighed....

 

Huh? Hvordan tvivle på "hele branchens troværdighed"?

[Thomas Bagge]

Den har tråd får mig til at tvivle på hele branchens troværdighed....

 

Ja, lige som man vel bør tvivle på troværdigheden for dem der føler behov for at have 2 forskellige aktive profiler..

 

[Janils]

My twittering friend michael lavorgna har også en mening om disse ting:-

Ja .... og hans mening er ikke spor sjov, men bare totalt under lavmålet. Findes der slet ikke seriøse personer her mere?

[dreamz]

Det må være varmen...

[klimbim]

jeg er bange for at det ikke kun er varmen der gør det der er desvære en kedelig tendens til at sætte seriøsiteten på standby når man sætter sig til tasterne og skriver løs  :?

[fan of the man]

"Den, som kun tar spøg for spøg og alvor kun alvorligt, han og hun har faktisk fattet begge dele dårligt"
P.Hein.

[ZIG]

Det var ikke varmt d. 19. juni 2010. Jeg var forkølet og havde gang i brændeovnen.

Efterhånden tror jeg, at der kun findes seriøse personer her på nørdene, og seriøse personer har som bekendt kun lyst til at være sammen med seriøse mennesker.

Lad mig citere fra Stereophile september 2009 - heller ikke en særlig varm måned og heller ikke et særligt seriøst blad. Det er Michael igen.

Back in early spring, I stupidly sprained my ankle while running (footnote 1). At 2am. The injury kept me off my feet for a few weeks, and I found myself spending time reading and actually participating in a hi-fi forum, an activity I generally try to avoid. One thread that caught my attention was on the Stereophile forum, and the subject under discussion was the Furutech DeMag device. In brief, Stephen Mejias shared his experience of a day spent at Michael Fremer's house, during which they listened to, among other things, an LP before and after it was treated with the DeMag.

The thread began innocently enough: "Last week, JA and I took a trip to Mikey Fremer's place. You might be interested to know that we played around with the Furutech DeMag. We only had time to try it with one LP, but, with that one LP, it made a big improvement."

Can you believe that these three sentences generated over 700 replies and 1000 views? They included such statements as, "Unfortunately, as far as the hi-fi hobby is concerned, the shit-throwing will never cease," and "I take the many comments supporting the above alleged experiment from people who should see the same flaws as an indictment of the teaching of Science by the American educational system." Some of the people posting weren't even American! Sacre bleu!

As I waded through this debate, it became evident that the people on the "science" side of the argument were more interested in theories of sound and perception than they were in the actual experience of listening to music on a hi-fi. I quote from a recognized authority, loudspeaker engineer Siegfried Linkwitz, in the June 2009 issue of Stereophile (Letters, p.9): "Steve Guttenberg correctly pointed to recordings as the most serious limitation in the attempt to reach audio nirvana."

If we want to understand the scientific/objectivist point of view, this simple statement by Linkwitz gets us a long way in a few words: recordings are the greatest limitation to audio nirvana. My reaction to this statement is: Huh?! I always thought recordings were the reason for home audio, not the other way around. After all, what good is the greatest nirvana-inducing hi-fi if there's no music to play on it?

If I can boil the opposite side of this argument down to a simple statement of purpose, I'd do so by borrowing from a conversation I had with Peter Qvortrup, of audio manufacturer Audio Note: "Your hi-fi is only as good as its ability to play your worst recording." This point of view is rooted in the passion for the discovery and appreciation of recorded music as it exists, the relishing of our musical heritage as an invaluable record (pun unavoidable) of our human condition, with all its frailty and less-than-ideal measured performance intact.

Getting back to my journey into the heart of hi-fi forum darkness, the Furutech DeMag debaters ultimately fell into two camps: objectivists looking for a better measurable, repeatable, and verifiable experience; and subjectivists looking for a better experience, period.

We're reminded by the objectivists that our senses deceive us and so are the root cause of bias, which makes it impossible for us to objectively evaluate hi-fi gear. Further, they remind us that we can remove this bias and focus on the sound alone by performing unsighted listening tests. We're also reminded that every other field of scientific inquiry embraces the use of blind tests, and that only audiophiles remain in the dark ages of sighted listening tests. No objectivist worth his or her salt would rely on any commingling of senses to make such important life-altering decisions as which speaker to buy or whom to marry. It's also interesting to note that another group of people who view their sensual apparatuses as invasive distractions are monks. But I digress.

My response to this objectivist position is simple: Can you demonstrate the relevance of the blind listening test as it applies to the way we experience and appreciate our hi-fis in our homes over time?

I can understand how a few dozen people locked in a room, listening to the same pieces of music over and over, while being asked to determine which presentation of unseen gear they prefer, is a scientifically rigorous test whose results are applicable to the whole of humanity. I can appreciate this in the same way I can appreciate the idea of getting marital advice from virginal men with no experience of living with a woman. What I fail to understand is how their experience is supposed to inform my experience of putting a record on my turntable, sitting in my chair, and listening to music—something I sometimes even do with my wife.

For those of us who cherish the sensual experience of listening to music on a hi-fi, and of connection with the people who made that music and all the magical human stuff it embodies and conveys, I suggest that the most effective way of ensuring an engaging musical experience over time is to rely on all of our biases all of the time. We bring bias to the listening experience in our homes and in the concert hall; why not allow it to inform our hi-fi buying?

After all, you don't have to be right to enjoy listening to music on a hi-fi. You also don't have to prove your enjoyment or take a test. If you've tried and want to buy a device that purportedly "demagnetizes" records, and you think you can better enjoy listening to your music because of it, good for you. Those who believe they need to bring science into that equation, or to the rescue, need to reevaluate their priorities. And any scientist worth his or her salt steers clear of people enjoying a hobby.

From now on, when I start to read series of posts in which people argue about hi-fi, I'll remind myself that I could be doing something actually worthwhile—like running (at a reasonable hour), or listening to music on my hi-fi. I could be reveling in experiencing, biases in full sway, drinking in and delighting in our fragile, shared, deeply personal, and powerful humanness, as embodied and evoked by music. The only way to leave our differences and distractions behind is to listen with abandon

.

Efter min mening kan hans holdninger ikke bare bagateliseres og han forklarer hvorfor der efterhånden kun er seriøse indslag på Nerds.

Zig

[ZIG]

Hvor sidder seriøsiteten?

Fra Jonah Lehrers blog The Frontal Cortex

We are all natural essentialists. Frank Keil, a psychologist at Yale, has done some interesting work that captures this tendency at work. He begins by showing his young subjects a variety of visual transformations: a tiger that's been dressed in a lion suit, a porcupine that has been turned into a cactus, a real dog that resembles a toy. Not surprisingly, the children dismiss these transformations as irrelevant and superficial. The porcupine is still a porcupine. The dog is still a dog. The tiger is still a tiger, even if it looks like a lion. It was only when Keil told the children that the transformations also took place on the inside - their internal essences had been altered - that the little kids were convinced the animals had changed categories. The tiger was now a lion.

What does essentialism have to do with pleasure? Consider the deliciousness of a particular wine, which turns out to have little to do with the taste of the wine. In How We Decide, I describe a recent experiment led by neuroscientists at Cal-Tech:

Twenty people sampled five Cabernet Sauvignons that were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the people were told that all five wines were different, the scientists weren't telling the truth: there were only three different wines. This meant that the same wines would often reappear, but with different price labels. For example, the first wine offered during the tasting⎯it was a cheap bottle of Californian Cabernet⎯was labeled both as a $5 wine (it's actual retail price) and as a $45 dollar wine, a 900 percent markup. All of the red wines were sipped inside an fMRI machine.
Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better. They preferred the $90 bottle to the $10 bottle, and thought the $45 Cabernet was far superior to the $5 plonk. By conducting the wine tasting inside an fMRI machine⎯the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes⎯the scientists could see how the brains of the subjects responded to the different wines. While a variety of brain regions were activated during the experiment, only one brain region seemed to respond to the price of the wine, rather than the wine itself: the medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is believe to "integrate" sensory information with our expectations. In general, more expensive wines made the medial orbitofrontal cortex more excited. The scientists argue that the activity of this brain region shifted the preferences of the wine tasters, so that the $90 Cabernet seemed to taste better than the $10 Cabernet, even though they were actually the same wine.

What's causing this silly behavior? Bloom argues that essentialism plays a big role. We automatically believe that more expensive wine has a tastier essence, and that belief alters our sensory expectations. Those expectations, in turn, alter our perceptual interpretations, so that what we experience conforms to what we expect to experience. The essence of the thing has thus been confirmed: more expensive wine tastes better, even if the expensive wine is really Gallo Hearty Burgundy.

Vipera cables og dog dirt.

Deres seriøsitet eller manglende seriøsitet sidder i hjernen som et lille chip. Subjektivisterne har en fejl i denne chip og de lader sig ikke narre af hvad andre kalder virkelighed.

Zig

[lydarne]

@Zig prøver du at sætte lighedstegn mellem nørd, Subjektivisterne og det du kalde "seriøse personer" eks.v. på et forum som dette.
Eller hvad er det du prøver at fortælle?.

Jeg mener at det meste af indholdet i dine indlæg er det jeg vil jeg kalde subjektive fordomme om Hi-Fi entusiaster/"nørder" .

Det eneste fornuftige jeg har set i de refererede udtalelse er at Linkwitz skulle have støttet at indspilningsfasen (softwaren) er  er en meget afgørende og begrænsende brik for at opnåelse Hi-Fi gengivelse.
Her er Jeg er 100% enig. Udfra at definitionen af Hi-Fi er at gengive musikken så tæt som muligt på den lyd der var ved fremførslen.

Der vist ikke nogen Hi-Fi entusiast med nogen erfaring og alder der falder for pris og dyre mærker, for mit eget vedkommende er det lige omvendt, jeg bliver mere kritisk når det er dyrt og flot.

Igen hvad er det du vil fortælle med dine indlæg?
Skal jeg jeg som "nørd" blive fornærmet, jeg kan faktisk ikke rigtigt finde ud af det . Har jeg misforstået det hele?, Håber faktisk  jeg har, Venter spændt på opklaring eventuel uddybning af hvad du mener.

At et firma fyre vilde påstande om alt muligt som eksempelvis på Vipera  webside er der nok ikke meget at gøre ved, det kaldes vist at prøve at sælge varen, selv om det nok for manges vedkommende virker lige modsat, her må man bare prøve at forholde sig kritisk.

[Janils]

Masser af løs snak uden indhold .....

Jeg har nu bestilt 2 sæt signalkabler og afventer levering!  

Til de priser tør jeg godt - om ikke andet kan de vel se pæne ud, når de hænger på væggen.

Fortsættelse følger!

[ZIG]

@Lydarne.

Du efterlyser lidt afklaring....fair nok.

Jeg sætter lighedstegn mellem objektivisterne og seriøse mennesker. Jeg prøver at forklare, at det dog er biokemi i hjernen, der giver disse seriøse mennesker den fornemmelse af absolut-virkelighed, de lider under og vil pådutte andre.

Jeg prøver at sige, at man skal lytte til lidt mere musik og dele glæden ved den i stedet for i ophøjet ensomhed at skændes om teknik.

Jeg har i tankerne et berømt experiment, hvor man havde to grupper. Den ene var kristne og den anden var æteister. De blev tvangsindlagt til at lytte til et foredrag af en lærd professor om, hvorfor religion var noget bras. Selve foredraget blev gengivet igennem hovedtelefoner, hvori der blev indlagt noget støj, som de kunne skrue op eller ned for.

Gæt hvem der skruede op for støjen, så det blev svært at høre, hvad der blev sagt?

Zig