Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems My journey with Meridian (and Shunyata, AQVOX etc)

Hi Syles

With this in mind, would you also say isolating a hi-fi cabinet from vibration is unlikely to provide benefits in an all digital system?

Cheers
Tom

Depends what all digital means, digital sources with DACs and analogue amplifiers, or is it digital all the way to the 'speaker?

My experience is that decoupling and/or coupling make a difference with turntables (huge), CD players (not a lot), phono pre-amps (a bit, microphonic if you tap them, but that's not normal operation) and loudspeakers.

I've never used a valve amplifier, but they are very microphonic so I'd imagine supports are important.
Anything analogue can be subject to microphony, but with solid state electronics it shouldn't be an issue, if it was such a big deal, all active loudspeakers (including DSP) with the electronics built in would be terrible and would not be made.

Seen through your reality tunnel, and assuming a certain type of audiophile. However, removing your gloss and assuming another type of audiophile, this might equally appear a manifestation of curiosity rather than FUD.

Individual listeners can decide whether any given difference is relevant or not, no matter how small it might seem, and assign it a value in their own system, room, etc.

Read in context, Bob mentions only digital transmission in various forms -
"In my experience the Sooloos network endpoints will always give a better sound than a USB connection, especially from a PC or QNAP. At this level of performance everything makes a difference, including cables, router etc."
Can you say what leads you to infer from this he means analogue cables?

Bob also decided some Cat 5 cables performed better than others and even put a choke on the original 808 cables.
Both of these things fly in the face of the notion that £40k means you cannot improve things with snakeoil type audiophile tricks.

If it works for an individual then that is all that counts.

Discoveries about isolation of signal cable took us from ID40 to ID41. But that’s about signal, this is about a mains cable, so not flying in the face. They didn’t and haven’t changed the power cables even on SEs. So it’s either something they are oblivious to at this stage, even though it’s been talked about for many years or they’ve concluded it doesn’t give an improvement (fonal change maybe).

If it works for the individual then that may be all that counts to them but others want to know if it’s real or illusory. John Swenson explains the science, cause an effect. It makes sense and that checks out with what people hear.

Lots of discussion about DC, not so much mains cable. Balanced power supplies - that sounds interesting.

if you want to get into ‘reality tunnels’, then expectation bias should be right up your street.

fair enough, it just seems to me that worrying about vibration on a digital interconnect should be very low on the list of possible improvements and I’m quite confident that hardly any audiophiles have effective acoustic treatment that would actually make an easily demonstrated difference.

“ having the analogue audio parts well away from ‘radio noisy’ networking is a good idea”
If you want to be pedantic, all cables make a difference, take them away and there’s no sound at all…

Can anyone of you who hear a difference due to vibration in a digital cable give me an explanation of how the low frequency air bourne / foot fall vibrations in the digital cable alone manifest themselves on the converted analogue signal?
dB levels would be nice to know.

Of course. It's another area in which I find Bob Stuart's approach enlightening. He is highly versed in psychoacoustics and therefore completely aware of expectation bias, etc. He wrote an intriguing article about this kind of thing years ago in The Absolute Sound and I posted a link at the time. I'll repost now, as it seems relevant to much of the recent discussions, and it's fascinating anyway in terms of measurement vs. listening, etc., when Meridian go about designing their products Bob Stuart TAS interview.

It's hard to say, really in terms of how many. My own perception is that interest in room treatment has been growing for a few years now, and I believe that's a beneficial thing. However, my personal experience is it hasn't necessarily outweighed other changes which one might assume would be less influential. I can't speak for others, though.

In context that's a separate sentence, which is referring to a different point. However, I direct you back to another comment from Bob where he clearly states a 'digital interconnect' can make a difference, which I posted on a recent thread - "Stuart has been working with digital since the early days, and he started with this, "You will have readers who disagree, and that's fine. Everything makes a difference. Which is best? Well, that sort of depends on the DAC and the source (is it a server, PC or optical disc?) as well as the interface and even the digital interconnect cable. The better the rendering device (DAC), the smaller the difference."[/quote]

I’m also a Bob Stuart fan, I was surprised when he dismissed the importance of power cables at the meeting after the factory tour (or was it before?). However, I took him at his word – that all the important work on power supply is “done inside”. I was very specific about the question, his answer was unequivocal. It wasn’t that long ago, certainly post Anniversaries.

Signal cables or obviously different but what goes into a DSP, power, though a cable, hasn’t changed much, neither has the science.

I once asked Mark Koval the effects of my use of power surge suppressors/conditioners(I use Furman) and having a dedicated sub panel for the outlets to my main system in NC. In short he thought both are/can be beneficial. He added that 8000s are designed to be just plugged into a wall outlet.

His final comment was in effect that at the price of 8Ks, M engineered them to take care of most power pollution problems introduced, to ensure the buyer gets a very large amount of the potential of the flagship product. I don’t find that inconsistent with Bob’s quote in the prior post about that(at a certain level of fidelity), everything matters to some degree.

Hi Syles

Not having seen something happen (or, alternatively, not understanding why something happens) doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

Using your example about SpeakerLink balanced and shielded cabling eliminating noise, the bit that wasn't mentioned is that all cables exhibit a resistance, a capacitance and an inductance.

This impedance will invariably distort an AC signal, whether balanced, shielded, or sitting in zero gravity (which would be far too problematic to seriously consider, even if it did work).

Digital audio cables transmit two signal components: the audio data (which can be pretty easily read back without errors) and a timing signal, which for all intense purposes is analogue. Unfortunately, any distortion to the latter leads to distortion in both the amplitude and time domains.

What is happening is that the cable alters the signal so that the data arrives with all the nice sharp edges of the transmitted signal rounded off (as the data and timing signals are combined, this also has an impact on the timing), making it difficult for the system to figure out when each timing signal/beat really starts (think of it as a kind of metronome).

As I understand it, the theory behind say the AudioQuest cables I use is that they reduce the capacitance 'seen' by the equipment, biasing the dielectric keeping it constantly charged.

Does it make a difference? To my ears, yes. Is it worth what it costs? Only the person buying the cables can make that decision.

What can't be said is that cables don't change the signal, otherwise everyone could have 100Mbps VDSL regardless of how far they lived from the fibre cabinet.

J.

I could talk about how mains power running to the house via decent, thick cables provided by the utility company can be decimated by amplifiers drawing 40+amps of power in tiny high-frequency chunks through thinner mains cables because of the skin effect, but it's getting late.

Ultimately, I guess I was trying to make the point that there is often more to this story than meets the eye.

Um no, completely incorrect. For SPDIF and SpeakerLink (which uses a form of SPDIF), there is a single, ideally square-wave, binary signal with no predefined clock rate and biphase marking to indicate the bit transitions.

True, degradation of the signal can occur. The worst form of this (according to Richard Hollinshead who invented MHR to mitigate the problem) is non-75ohm connections leading to reflections in the cables which soften the ideal square waveform, reducing uncertainty in the exact timing of the transitions - this is jitter. MHR, by randomizing the data, removes correlated jitter (the most audible form), but not uncorrelated jitter.

The question remains as to whether vibrations and RF interference can cause a meaningful (i.e. audible) difference at the transmission frequencies involved. *Personally*, I call BS on this as I think that - if there is an effect - it’s going to be a 2nd (1/10th) or 3rd (1/100th) order effect compared to the primary problems inherent in SPDIF; naturally it follows that I believe that certain manufacturers are having a laugh at their customers’ expense.