sako243
Member
- Messages
- 3,214
- Location
- My mansion in Wales
The main thing with good audio (well any signal processing in general) is keeping stable and linear power supplies. If the power supply is wobbling around all over the place then that has a knock on effect downstream in what is output from the speakers. The simplest way (but not the whole story) to removing ripple is large capacitors, unfortunately they tend to get big and expensive fast so everything is usually a compromise, particularly on lower end stuff.A mate of mine is massively into his hifi, he's one of the "if it's expensive it must be good" types.
He convinced me I should swap my standard "kettle" type amplifier power lead for a posh one he had going spare.
I managed to convince myself I could hear enough difference to warrant paying what he was asking for it.
I then got hold of a different one and tried that and the difference was proper night and day. Don't ask me how it works, I was as sceptical as anyone but I've since bought two more of the same and couldn't be happier.
I had another mate come over one day and we did allsorts of swap tests with my and his cables and on another day went to his and did the same.
He now owns a set of the same ones too.
Now couple this, pardon the pun, to the mains cable which is basically an antenna, then to your mains supply in the house which has a load of carp hanging off it (cheap USB chargers for example injecting noise back into the network) and you get a lot of ripple coming in from the mains. What you'll probably find is the more "expensive" cable has the two conductors in a nice twisted pair and the earth is attached to a screen around the cable. The screening helps minimise the antenna effect of the cable (well it actually just sends any stuff picked up to earth). The twisted pair nature means that any interference affects both conductors simultaneously resulting in "common mode" noise which is easier to eliminate downstream.
So there likely a physical difference in the cables that does have an effect downstream. However, decent electronics at the other end could help eliminate this - but again for the vast majority of people it's not noticeable and affects the bottom line.
A good example of this was a power supply I helped get working which had a ripple of 100mV or so on a 1kV DC output, 0.1% compared to a more typical 0.3% for some really good RF power supplies. However stuff started getting expensive for that kind of stuff (things like capacitors, inductors and MOSFETs were ~£1k each and we needed 12 of them per power supply). Those were just the big ticket items, even silly little things like crimps were £30 a pop and needed a 2 tonne hydraulic crimper. Mains input connectors were £50-100 each, dread to think what the total cost of copper and fibre optic cabling was. Then you factor in development cost and I think we broke £1.5m to build one prototype.