Reference

Postscript—June 2020

Made or Makes—Difference or Diff'rence . . . this article's namesake is an 86 year-old jazz standard, first encountered by many as a smouldering, LA-produced disco tour de force set alongside the maudlin dross that infested the English singles charts in the fall of 1975.

It starts with a first verse of breathy sighs: Huurh! Haarh! Not in any lyric sheet. Then "What a difference / a day makes, Twenty four / little hours." (Forward slashes are any writer's limited attempt to show phrasing—as in The Oxford Comma.) Even sheet music only shows so much. Meantime, the telephone-nasal vocals are by a steamin'-hot Esther Phillips. Aural spice for the dance floor, a full two months before Donna Summer also breathed deep and was banned. Esther is huskier, and more romantic. Born with Venus in Scorpio for added smoke and danger. Some of the phwoarr-calisations are disguised from BBC censors behind a guitar-sax curtain raised by top sessionists—Joe Beck, a Sanborn and two Breckers.

Time / On your Menu: The feel of this starcast disco number, is arising in part because Esther is a master singer—of the same Johnny Otis stable as Etta James. So she's singing just behind the beat, creatin' / a feelin'. Whatever the evocation, this nuance that's so small, yet makes everything, depends on timings in the low milliseconds. Timing is everything in all jazz-derived music. Other versions of the song, other timings, other feelings. Likewise, at live events, a delay (digital-land salesmen slyly calls it latency) of just 1–2 milliseconds can make it impossible to play a good set. Ask John Newsham, live sound engineer for 1001 acts including Underworld, Roger Waters, and Steve Hillage.

Clearly, any messing with timing is simply verboten (with an 'ef) for refined listening. Sloppy speaker damping is bad enough. The failure of some cables to stop promptly, like drunken drivers, shows a blatant lack of fidelity, of serious jazz timing. And, in an area—damping factor—so greatly pontificated upon, yet barely explored nor tested. Confronted are those people who follow Objectivists, and their primary-school electrical theory, as "the be-all & end-all."

"These graphs" announces The Professor, sternly, "show clearly how some cables are better at transmitting transient signals, hence music." He went on about how Objectivists had naysaid; then when confronted with facts, claimed that everything shown was obvious and antar'ly trivial. Yet kept completely secret. About how pages of musically-deprived equations like some math horror-movie, free entirely from words or graphs or diagrams of any sort, would be waved, and where no wood from trees could ever be discerned. And, this only ever after the fact of Alice and her ilk, asking nail-bitingly awkward questions.

"For in the most part, never do they identify variations in transient-signal damping as relevant to the design of conductors employed to handle music. Even though they say it is all trivial. And dismiss the whole subject, quickly." The Professor began to read faster now, as if near the end. "This article is part of a series of works on cable science, showing plainly the clear basis in electrical engineering, or indeed physics, for more and more of what the more musically and aurally, astute humans have been able to hear over the past 45 years."

The screen went abruptly black; the Zoom conference had ended.

A Deluge of Proof: The professor is right—this article is one in a series, of 35 years of investigations into audiograde parts, primed to 'run rings around' cable naysayers. Of those, 27 years of the research has been into cables, and has shown repeatedly that what listeners report has a metallurgically solid basis, that can be found, if one bothers looking: Electrical behaviours that are measurable, modelable, and inferable from studying materials and processes.

In the English journal Electronics World (footnote 1), I showed how diodes in wire, hence diodicity, and also skin effects could be modelled. With transient damping variations like those measured here, and also arrived at from a different direction by Malcolm Omar Hawksford.

My article riled Objectivists—the late, great Bob Pease posted pages solid with A* word (footnote 2). Another "real beauty" sought to disprove Jenving's work by marinading lamp flex in brine.

In 1997 (footnote 3) and then in '99 (footnote 4), supported by Steve Harris, then-editor at Hi-Fi News, I tested two other varied cable groups, the first to compare transient spectra, the second after finding means to use AP System One's deep-phase measurement capability, to look for phase anomalies caused by skin displacement and, particularly in speaker cables, proximity effect, which simple electromagnetic theory neglects.

Lo—logically designed cables had both lower and more linear phase dispersion, meaning musical timing would be stable with high current peaks. In supporting articles in Hi-Fi News (footnote 5), unique "rainbow" oscillographs made with MicroCAP, showed how waves at different frequencies—they could be harmonics—would experience timing-slip. Such suggests shifting a harmonic structure on the fly—a feature of the Hammond B3 organ. Which rather amply shows the importance of cables not doing it too, if they are made for high fidelity. In case it's not obvious (sarcasm intended).

In 2000 (footnote 6), I showed that axi-symmetric directionality could be detected in a MIL-spec coaxial lead, as used for S/PDIF cables, using RF and AM. Audio cables were then blind-tested and a wire factory confirmed the direction-matched spooling. In 2005, another way to measure directionality was devised (see photo above). Metal purity could also be gauged, inverse to directionality, a proof of Jean Hiraga's original reports of cable sonics in 1976.

By 2007, puzzled by scrambled readings, lab results captured how ground vibrations or slight re-arrangement could disturb cable conductivity for days. Well-known by audiophiles: that bedded-in cables shouldn't be touched. And are best shock-isolated.

In 2008, with high-end RF test kit, I showed (see photo on first page) how RF rejection claimed of woven cable like Kimber, was real. A certified EMC lab confirmed the work, and an attempt to ban high-end cable was thwarted. More recently, MicroCAP's latter-day distortion analyser has shown complicated harmonic structures arising from wires' diodicity (hence directionality) and any cable's many-fold construction permutations.

Overall, the more the research, the greater the discoveries and measurables amassed, and the more that plain-as-day explanations become apparent—for the varied effects that musically sensitive listeners have said they observe with cables. Proofs have been coming in for 25 years now. Firm education about the state-of-the-art in cable science, is sorely needed. The makers need to seriously brush-up on this, and also robustly connect serial naysayers with some facts.—Ben Duncan

The Author
Ben Duncan's musical connections have run alongside electronic engineering, product design, manufacturing and research for audio, at every stage. In the mid 1960s Ben was chosen by audiology testing to learn violin under Margaret Dennison, colleague of Malcolm Sargent. Later at another school with composer Patrick Hawes; a school which had earlier hosted one Rod Temperton and Bernie Taupin's brother.

Not being a songwriter, BD built audio gear, collected vinyl, organised a rock concert in 1974, then, like many, became a DJ in time to play Esther. Then a consultant to musos, makers, and recording studios and also show sound companies with their A–Z of top-rank artistes and UK stages, up to the giant Glastonbury and vast dance-field events of the '90s. Nowadays, BD is founder of a parkland venue, home to nearly two decades of small music festivals.

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Footnote 1: Modelling Cable, Electronics World/Wireless World, February 1996.

Footnote 2: I attended a lecture by Bob Pease in 1995, where he bemoaned the fact that the advent of simulation programs like SPICE had led to almost none of his electronic engineering students having actually constructed a physical circuit or even being able to use a soldering iron!—John Atkinson

Footnote 3: "Wired for Sound," Hi-Fi News, September 1997.

Footnote 4: "The Great Cable Test," Hi-Fi News, July–September 1999.

Footnote 5: Black Box (column), Hi-Fi News, July–September 1999.

Footnote 6: Black Box (column), Hi-Fi News, August & September 2000.