The blind test
Contents
Very nice and all that talk about materials and geometries; now how do they sound? The differences are striking, we can tell you! And that the viewers of the livestream felt the same way, as evidenced by the reactions we saw in the chat – thank you all for your intensive participation!
Stock lamp wire
This blind test kicked off with the stock lamp wire cable. This cable should be the baseline for the rest. Yung and Martijn didn’t know what whas playing. But funny enough, both were not impressed and write: bit grainy, forward projecting with little depth. Little layering and harshness in the soundstage.
Viewers in the stream reacted similarly to Martijn and Yung. No one was really impressed. The bulk know what this system can sound like. So they can hear the loss this cables causes.
Pure 5N Silver
The change that the second cable brings – pure 5N silver – is almost shocking. Everything is so more open in terms of image and clarity! And with it comes a richness that can almost be called bizarre.
Yung writes: much more coherent and the acoustics in the music return. Martijn notes: You hear the space much better. The compression is gone and instruments can be recognized again.
The chat almost explodes. It is particularly funny to see how this cable arrives with the audience! For many, it’s a relief to hear that there was nothing wrong with the recording or the system, but that the cable turned out to be such a drag.
Graphene
Now things go south… Again, the soundstage changes considerably, but so does the imaging. The graphene cable plays with more energy in the midrange, but it also creates a gap between the midrange and low end. It doesn’t really feel coherent anymore.
Yung writes, “where has the bass? Textures are gone and the kick drum sounds hollow”. Martijn notes the same thing. With Sinead ‘o Connor, he also writes that it feels like a Soprano. The vocal characteristics are gone.
There are equivalent comments on the chat. People are not fond of this cable and are also glad that the we just stop the track: it is really unpleasant.
Copper /Tin
This one is a bit odd. It is admittedly better than the graphene cable: it also now plays very forward. Now we know this from this type of conductor. And so do others.
Martijn notes that there is quite a lot of space in the image. And that the breath sounds are turned on a bit. An insane amount of detail is audible. Whether that is pleasing is another question.
Yung phrases it as: all at once…. to which Martijn adds: a kind of high-pressure hose. That’s aptly put.
The Chat is not quite there with this one. Opinions are more divided.
Graphene/Silver
This one is kind of funny, because the only difference with the graphene cable, is that the ground is substituted for a silver wire. In theory that shouldn’t matter, but it does. This cable is much more balanced than the cable that is all graphene.
Both Martijn and Yung do find it a pleasant cable. A cable with an open and fast character and a very tight stereo image. According to Yung, the piano is a bit too much up-front; the midrange seems a bit overdone. Martijn hears a very pleasant balance in this cable.
The Chat during the livestream is alighned with us: this is a fine cable. It’s mostly on par with the silver cable. Which is remarkable and shows what an ground does! We totally did not expect this outcome!
Gold / silver – Mundorf
The last one in the line up is the gold/silver wire from Mundorf. This one is 0.5mm diameter (there is no 1mm of this conductor), so it measures differently from the rest (also to be seen later).
It is striking how different this cable sounds. Rhythmically it is different, but tonally there is also something that makes this cable characteristic: the mid high does seem more “polished” than with the rest of the test field. Whether that’s your taste is another question, of course.
Martijn finds the imaging a bit weird: the tenor in Vespers suddenly stands apart from the rest. And the rhythm feels slower than with the other cables. The emphasis is also more on the midrange than on the bass and treble. Yung endorses the feeling in his notes. He also feels less engaged with the music.
The ranking
We asked everyone in the stream to share lists. We combined these lists with our own top three.
- 5N solid core Silver – Unanimous
- Graphene / Silver – For the majority of viewers and for us: 2nd place
- Mundorf / WE – Varying. This was leapfrogging.
The stock cable and the pure graphene version finished last with everyone.
“After we made the six cables, they all played for at least a few days”…
Absolutely not enough. A minimum of 10 days is necessary so that we can confidently talk about the differences. If you had followed that, the test would have been much more valuable.
R, L and C make complex or imaginairy numbers for Z.
But dos not matter if jou measure the amplitude and phase response or an impulse response and compare.
Another example, more advanced.
Like all those who believe that everything is reduced to the domain of time, without taking into account another form of analysis such as the revolution brought about by the Fourier Transform.
A transformation that many use but that very few really understand. With this I want to indicate that many engineers lack additional knowledge and try to understand reality from a limited academic training that prevents it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform
– The End –
Fourier transform is nothing more than a mathematical transition to the frequency domain. Makes math easier but adds nothing more as signal in time domain.
My comment was not completely correct.
Fourier transform can lose time information:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93frequency_analysis_for_music_signals
Conclusion: time or impulse response is as important as frequency domain analisys.
Spectacular results. Anyone who still doubts that there are big differences is that they are fanatics or are deaf or, probably, have big bottlenecks in their audio systems that prevent them from appreciating the differences. Even so, the difference of the 5N silver cable with respect to the others is so enormous that it must be easily appreciated unless the small speakers of the laptop are used to do the test, I say (surely there will be not a few).
There are differences in the speaker cables too but not as huge as with that pure solid silver cable.
Many engineers just memorized knowledge without really understanding it, especially those who only studied electricity or electronics when more knowledge is necessary to deal well with the audio world (for example, wavesm electromagnetic fields, antennas, signal processing, electroacoustics…).
To understand us, many of them live in the world of mathematics of Real numbers, unable to understand that there are others, such as Imaginary or Complex ones. You know: Z = R + j X(w)
Always is all R, L and C to them, anything more.
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Greetings from Tarragona (Spain). If one day it occurs to you to come, give me a call and I will invite you “The Three Musketeers” to a good seafood platter or similar (if you are vegetarian, better, less onerous for me 😛 ).