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Asterope cable?

#21
slyjoe said:
This has all the hallmarks of a cable scam.
1. Big appeal to authority (big name players)
2. Can't give specs -trade secret

I agree that cables CAN sound different; mostly dependent on capacitance. There are really only 3 things to worry about, and they can all be measured:
1. Noise
2. Frequency Response
3. Distortion

Anyone who has this cable can MEASURE the specs, without knowing how the company built the cable (i.e., so called trade secrets). There is a common fallacy that says "I can hear it but you can't measure it". False. If you can hear a difference it can be measured.

Insert argument against double blind testing here.
Click to expand...

Does anyone here on the forum have this cable to do such tests?
 
#24
slyjoe said:
This has all the hallmarks of a cable scam.
1. Big appeal to authority (big name players)
2. Can't give specs -trade secret
Click to expand...

They do offer a money back guarantee, so I wouldn't call it a scam.

I don't give the specs of my pickups either. ;)

I agree that cables CAN sound different; mostly dependent on capacitance. There are really only 3 things to worry about, and they can all be measured:
1. Noise
2. Frequency Response
3. Distortion

Anyone who has this cable can MEASURE the specs, without knowing how the company built the cable (i.e., so called trade secrets). There is a common fallacy that says "I can hear it but you can't measure it". False. If you can hear a difference it can be measured.

Insert argument against double blind testing here.
Click to expand...

You can measure anything as long as you know what you are looking for, and can devise a test that works. For instance, if you are testing for frequency response, what are you going to drive the cable with? A passive bass will react much differently from a signal generator.

The key things are capacitance and inductance.

But even with pickups, things get quite complicated, and no one has really figured out how to test some stuff. For example, you can't model a bass pickup in something like SPICE or FEMM.
 
#25
Point taken. ETA: Perhaps "scam" is too harsh.

My view is that a passive bass will act differently than a signal generator. But if there is a difference in the cable, it can be measured. The cable's properties and characteristics are what they are.

I seem to remember some discussion on here a while back about driving the strings in real bass/pickup and making measurements. Playing has too many variables for meaningful measurements. Haven't been able to find that thread.

Not sure why you can't model a pickup in SPICE. Any SPICE model will have some errors (it's a model, not the actual device). It boils down to the fidelity you are looking for, and knowing the capacitance. inductance, and resistance of the pickup. Certainly good enough for first order effects.

ETA2: I am sure you have much more experience than I do designing real world pickups, so no offense intended. :)
 
#26
slyjoe said:
Not sure why you can't model a pickup in SPICE. Any SPICE model will have some errors (it's a model, not the actual device). It boils down to the fidelity you are looking for, and knowing the capacitance. inductance, and resistance of the pickup. Certainly good enough for first order effects.
Click to expand...

The problem is that a pickup is an imperfect inductor, with resistance and capacitance, and SPICE has no model for that. So you have to do a work around by using a simple model using an inductor with a resistance in series, a capacitor in parallel, and a resistor also in parallel. Needless to say it doesn't work right.

Then there is the effect of eddy currents on conductive surfaces.

There was some discussion on that here:

A new model [of] the impedance of a humbucker, compared to measurements

ETA2: I am sure you have much more experience than I do designing real world pickups, so no offense intended. :)
Click to expand...

None taken. We have similar conversations over at the pickup makers forum. It's always fun to debate this stuff. :D

And sometimes when designing pickups, it's part trusting your hunches based on previous examples. Sometimes you know that something has a certain effect, even if you don't know why.

In real life many things are discovered by accident. Then we go back and try to figure out why something happened.
 
#34
StrangerDanger said:
People will buy them though. Maybe play their SX's with Asterope cables.
Click to expand...

rofl.gif
 
#35
Rick Auricchio said:
The web site says their cables are unidirectional. So they think electrons can't travel both ways in a piece of wire?

Run far, run fast.
Click to expand...

+1

Anyone claiming unidirectional cable for audio is a victim (or if they're selling something based on the claim, taking advantage of victims) of the common error that the audio signal flows through the wire like water through a pipe.. that in order for my signal to get from bass to amp, electrons have to flow out of my bass and into the amp.. those electrons being the signal.

THis would be true if we were talking direct current. In DC electricity there's a net migration of electrons down the wire.

However, a musical signal is alternating current. The electrons don't move steadily down the wire. AC is a wave. The electrons wiggle back and forth, staying essentially in the same place.

Think ocean waves at the beach. Waves wash ashore continually, each one bringing energy and information. But is water piling up on the beach, threatening to drown everyone? No, because the water just moves back and forth. The water, as a bulk medium, never actually goes anywhere. Same with electrons in a wire carrying an AC signal.

To complete an electric circuit, we need two wires, hence the two conductors in the instrument cable. But, if you combine this fact of two wires with the fact above that the electrons in an AC signal are just wiggling back and forth:

What this means is that:
The two conductors in the instrument cable are equally responsible for carrying your musical signal, and the electricity will move both directions in each cable.

Therefore:
Direction does not matter in an instrument cable, because both conductors are being used in both directions no matter which way you plug it in.

Literally, the wires in your instrument cable see the same action regardless of which direction you plug the cable in. Therefore, it's symmetric, therefore, no directionality. (Cable directionality implies some kind of electrical asymmetry in the cable)

Sadly, most people don't have a full enough understanding of how electricity works to see that something like directionality on a cable carrying AC is meaningless. And thus, the snake oil trade thrives.

The knowledge and reasoning steps needed to break up the 'directionality via the shield being connected on only one end' myth is almost identical.

Note: Before you attempt to shoot my argument here down, please realize that I have not used any esoteric 'pie-in-the-sky' type theoretical mumbo-jumbo here. All I've used are the essential principles that made building electronic amplifiers and magnetic guitar pickups even possible in the first place.
 
#37
On a more somber note:
Victor Wooten advertising for ridiculously overpriced snake-oil power cable.
Bob Babbit advertising for ridiculously overpriced snake-oil instrument cable.

*le sigh*

On the one hand this depresses me.

On the other hand, as a physics teacher, this just gets me all the more fired up to teach the next generation about physics!
 
#38
i've heard also that shielding and grounding are different on each end. Hmm. All i know is that when i make my own cables (and when i've seen these directional cables solder'd up) all I see is the same thing i've always seen: the main wire soldered to the top part of the connector, and then the braided up shielding wire soldered to the metal casing of the connector body (not the sleeve, just the body). I'm not sure how "ground can be lifted" as is often spoke of on The Gear Page and here as well. Anyways...
 
#39
OKay, so did some more scholarly research (google) and i think this is the skinny on "floating the shield" and such: Some cable companies (apparently Planet Waves has a cable like this) have a 2-conductor wire [plus shield] (vs. the regular, one conductor + shield). What these 2-conductor wires [+ shield] sometimes do is "lift" the shielding wire from the source end connector (so, they leave the shielding unsoldered/unconnected to the body of the connector).

Of course, this would 'incomplete the circuit' in a normal cable since, as we have just been told by the F=ma physics teach (nice work prof :)), in AC, electrons must be moving 'back and forth' and if the shielding is missing, this cannot happen.

Supposedly the whole point of this is so that ... what is the point of this?

One question for F=ma: in a normal wire, where the 'main' copper wire is surrounded by a shield wire, i always understood it as the atoms all being in a row (simplicity's sake here), and electrons being propagated in one direction, and then passed along in the other direction, but back and forth so fast no one notices. If i'm right about that, i don't even see the need for a shield wire. So why do we use a shielding wire?

Thanks for all your help everyone.

maybe we'll get back to the asterope discussion someday lol
 
#40
ac3320:

Actually, I've been turning the one-end shield thing over in my mind and I've begun to think that there may be something to it. If the shield is connected to one of the signal wires at both ends, you've got a closed loop. This opens that loop up to effects due to Lenz's Law.

Interesting! I feel like having some students do an experiment with it this school year.

That's a difference between one end open shielded and one end closed.. but the cable still won't be directional as far as I can figure.

And yeah.. Back to Asterope. Other than just shouting "Snake Oil!" I'll hush now. ;)
 

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