Instrument cable help...

[Bob Lee (QSC)]

No idea. Wouldn't changing properties of the signal transfer affect the signal? Even if it's just signal level?

What would change the "properties of the signal transfer," including signal level?

 

[superchicken_VI]

What would change the properties of the signal transfer, including signal level?

I'm not an audio engineer, I'm a trained musician as I've plainly stated, and I don't know. I would expect something like inductance, capacitance, or resistance.

 

[Bob Lee (QSC)]

I'm not an audio engineer, I'm a trained musician as I've plainly stated, and I don't know. I would expect something like inductance, capacitance, or resistance.

Never mind. I was just asking you to explain the claim that because cables can have different capacitance, inductance, and resistance, you can hear the differences among them.

 

[Geri O]

Maybe voicing, but not tuning anymore. The meters do it. Good meters or software is still expensive though. So some might because they have cheap meters.

I have a $300 iPad app that allows me to store tunings that I, or the owner, like and can be repeated. It also suggests tunings (mostly in the octave stretch area) based on criteria that can be entered).

But for the home, church, practice, or teacher piano, my ear still works well and is faster. Some clients even "prefer" my ear tuning, but I'm smart enough to know that this is rooted in tradition.

If I want to tune a bunch of pianos in a day, I break out the iPad. It has its place, or I wouldn't have spent $300 on it. And it's a fantastic program, no doubt. Again, something tuners would have sold their flesh for back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even 10 years ago.

 

[Mark Reccord]

I used science to find cloth between tin and gold and only found these,
50- 118.71 Tin Sn
51- 121.76 Antimony Sb
52- 127.6 Tellurium Te
53- 126.9045 Iodine I
54- 131.293 Xenon Xe
55- 132.9055 Cesium Cs
56- 137.327 Barium Ba
57- 138.9055 Lanthanum La
58- 140.116 Cerium Ce
59- 140.9077 Praseodymium Pr
60- 144.24 Neodymium Nd
61- 145 Promethium Pm
62- 150.36 Samarium Sm
63- 151.964 Europium Eu
64- 157.25 Gadolinium Gd
65- 158.9253 Terbium Tb
66- 162.5 Dysprosium Dy
67- 164.9303 Holmium Ho
68- 167.259 Erbium Er
69- 168.9342 Thulium Tm
70- 173.04 Ytterbium Yb
71- 174.967 Lutetium Lu
72- 178.49 Hafnium Hf
73- 180.9479 Tantalum Ta
74- 183.84 Tungsten W
75- 186.207 Rhenium Re
76- 190.23 Osmium Os
77- 192.217 Iridium Ir
78- 195.078 Platinum Pt
79- 196.9665 Gold Au

I like to think I have at least a Tungsten ear.

Dowsing or herb potions? Because nothing like tree bark or mold could ever cure diseases?

"Science" isn't infallible.

It has been said elsewhere in the thread that changes in inductance, capacitance, and resistance change the sound of cables. I'm sure each cable I ever auditioned had different inductance, capacitance, and resistance properties, therefore they'd sound different.

Have you guys ever done a folk science cable test like I've described?

I'm a trained musician. I use my ears extensively and intensively to make music. I trust my ears. You can trust meters.

In the context of a passive instrument with high output impedance driving a cable then yes LCR parameters absolutely can and do affect the way the signal propagates through the cable in an audible way. In most other audio contexts, its a low impedance output driving a high impedance input which acts to move the effects of cable impedance way out of the audio band. Simplified example: if you're driving a cable with 200pF capacitance from a source with a 100k Ohm output impedance which wouldn't be uncommon with a passive instrument, that makes a low pass filter with a corner frequency of about 8kHz, well within the audio band. If we change the driving impedance to 100 Ohms, which is perhaps even on the high side for most actively driven outputs, that filter moves out to 8MHz, which I think you'll agree is well outside the realm of human perception. For most audio connections, the LCR parameters of cables are largely irrelevant unless they're very large because they are swamped out by the nature of the outputs and inputs associated with them. Impedance bridging is a wonderful thing. This is (I think) what Bob is driving at.

I spent a bunch of years in the hifi business as a designer of some very high end gear and worked for a fellow who was fully bought into the high end cable concept. There were many "blind" tests of things that weren't actually blind. My experience with truly blind tests of cables (interconnects, speaker cables and power cables) was invariably that no one could reliably hear any differences between cables, assuming they were functioning correctly. Again, in a situation with a passive instrument, differences between cables can be apparent.

You say that science isn't infallible and while that is true, the same can definitely be said about our ear-brain perception system. I mean, I trust my (Tungsten) ears but I also know that they can be easily fooled. Piano tuning is a different thing than what we are talking about with differences between cables.