Audioquest Thunderbird Zero Speaker Cable Review: 72V DBS Legit Science or Snake Oil?

Alright my friends, we have the Audioquest Thunderbird Zero Speaker Cable with 72 Volt Dielectric Bias System. Is this

science

legit

or is it

snake

oil? That's the question I'm going to answer in today's video. Alright, my friends, I've waited decades. To get some Audio Quest

speaker

cable

s or whatever type of

cable

s they make just to see them in this series. The Thunderbird series has what they call the dielectric bias system and you can see that when you press the little LED light it turns on. This is basically a 72 volt bias. There are six 12 volt batteries in series.

Here they do this on a lot of the interconnects of their high end

speaker

cables and I think even their power cables and their claim as to why they do this is that they want to eliminate distortions. that happens in the dielectric now I know I often talk about

snake

oil and cables and I'm not trying to single out Audioquest but let's be honest they are the biggest manufacturer of high end cables at the moment and they also make a lot of claims on their site web that go against basic and understood engineering principles, we are talking about established

science

in cables and signal transmission things that have been around for hundreds of years and are very well understood.

Audio Quest claims to have its own knowledge that cannot be assessed by traditional means, so I will try to do the best I can and go over some of their claims. Yes, they have made many claims about how there are so many different distortions. in cables and how they have to match the impedance now I want to give you a little background in case you don't know before I went into audioholics full time, I obviously got my electrical engineering degree, took graduate courses in microwave engineering and passed six to seven years designing small signal based equipment that would work with potentiometers, so I did it.

I did adsl mvl with all these different phone technologies that also ran high speed data and spent a lot of time worrying about the effects of transmission lines. transmit very small signals over a telephone line that you've known for miles and impedance matching made a lot of sense in those cases because we were transmitting seven megabit data, very high frequency stuff over telephone lines, you have to really understand how does the signal work and the importance of signal integrity load noise low distortion proper impedance matching I also worked in government defense and did audio communication systems so a lot of things where I had to do board designs I understand the Transmission line behavior and the end result when it comes to Transmission lines are not a problem at audio frequencies with speaker cables and we'll get into that.

I have several articles that I will reference if you want to continue reading, but let's get to the heart of the matter. on this speaker cable now, before we even get into the measurements because you know I'm going to show you the measurements of these cables. I just want to point out the fact that this is a very thick cable, it's very stiff, it's very hard. cable to put in a rack it is very difficult to connect it to your speakers because it especially puts your amplifiers, it puts a lot of stress on them, in fact, when I was connecting one of these cables to one of my speakers, I feel sorry for my amplifier.

I had to push it in and then as soon as I pushed it in, it stuck and broke, so these are five thousand dollar speaker cables and the banana plug broke. I've never done it in over 20 years. A banana plug broke so I was surprised to see this and if you look inside the barrel of this plug, it's hollow but it has like a center pin. I don't know if it's supposed to be silver, it looks like copper clad aluminum. I can't really say, but the bottom line is that these are very fragile connectors, so if you have these cables or are considering purchasing them, keep that in mind because they could break quite easily, you don't want to break a five. thousand dollar pairs of cables, that's right, these cables cost five thousand dollars for an eight foot pair, the most expensive cables I've ever brought to measure, so I want to show you guys, as you know, I have an impedance analyzer , the wayne kerr and it is the model 4300.

I do all my lcr measurements on cables and why do I do lcr measurements. Basically, it is very well understood what a cable is and if you can, if you can measure the three parameters of the cable, you know its behavior, those parameters include resistance. inductance and capacitance. I can measure all of that on this impedance analyzer and that's what I want to show you now, so the first thing I want to show you is the wire gauge. Audio Audio Quest claims it is now 10 gauge wire if you look at my measurement here, I simply took the DC resistance, the loop resistance and plotted it on a gauge curve.

Now I have 11 gauge and the reason I got 11 gauge is because I couldn't remove these connectors and there are some. contact resistance and because this is only eight feet long, it creates a small error in the DC resistance due to contact, so that increases the resistance. I'm going to give you a pass that this is a 10 gauge wire. I'm not going to say it's an 11 gauge wire. I'm going to tell you that I agree it's a 10 gauge wire, so the first thing I want to look at and one of Audioquest's biggest claims is that their cables solve the skin effect and that there is no skin effect. in your cables what is the skin effect and I have an article that I want to show you as a quick reference so you can understand this and I wrote, I wrote these articles decades ago, so this is what has been around for quite a while and I want to show you here and I'm going to put a link in the description below, so here I did an article on the relevance of the skin effect and speaker cables, and what happens is that as the frequencies increase in a cable, the density of current flows to the surface, what is called what you have here is a skin depth and it is based on a frequency dependent resistance and I have all the equations here for the heads of your propellers.

I don't want to go through this. I did all this work. Know? back in 2003 2004 and I did all the calculations here this is the equation to calculate the skin depth it is a number divided by the frequency and then here is the relationship and then I plotted it for a 12 gauge wire and as you can see that a As frequency increases, the ratio of AC resistance divided by DC resistance increases, meaning you have more AC resistance than with DC resistance, so at very low frequencies your rac is approximately equal to your rdc as the frequency increases and I'm talking over 20 kilohertz, I'm talking hundreds of kilohertz, you get more AC resistance which means less current could pass through the wire and most of the current goes to the surface of the conductors and as a result reduces the internal power inductance and You can see that the series reductance of the wire decreases and we'll go over that in a moment, so when I simulated the AC resistance of a 12 gauge wire , I showed in the measurements that, sorry, in the calculations you get a 34. increase in resistance of 12 gauge wire at 20k, but here's the interesting thing: all of these equations assume solid core conductors, most 12 gauge are stranded and have a high value, if you have a cable with a high strand count, your AC resistance is actually much lower because what happens there is when you have a multi-strand cable, there is a small air gap between the strands and that acts almost like an insulator so it almost behaves like a lighted wire meaning the AC resistance goes down because each of the individual conductors acts as its own path for current so you can see actually measuring a 12 gauge wire at 20 kilohertz only increases the skin effect resistance by only 3 so it's very negligible and that's why I've always been a much bigger fan of um I've always been much bigger fan of stranded cable than solid core cable, two reasons why stranded cables are more flexible and the second reason is that the AC resistance profile is usually better in a stranded cable than in a core conductor cable solid equivalent and Audioquest is everything.

Regarding solid conductors, they claim that the wires in a cable cause jumps, which causes rectification of the diode, which causes distortion. Now that's impossible because the cable is a linear device, it can't introduce non-linear distortion, if that were true we never could. to propagate signals for miles like we did with telecommunications or anything else, you couldn't transmit any data if the cable itself was causing distortions. Now we could talk about impedance mismatches and all that, but that's separate from what I do. I'm talking about non-linear distortions, cables can't do that, it's physically impossible for a cable to cause non-linear distortion, so I want to show you the AC resistance of this Thunderbird, so here's a very interesting graph.

I basically took a 10 gauge wire, which I consider the gold standard for speaker wire, which is the blue, and I took the kimber atc, which is an expensive wire, you know that's my go-to wire. I always speak highly of kimber because I just like their cable, it measures better than 10 gauge and then I picked up Audioquest's Thunderbird which is light green. I probably should have chosen a different color. Sorry about that, but as you see, as the frequency increases, the resistance also increases. Now see if there is a 10 gauge wire and you will see. I can see it's down here, it's a little bit above two ohms and then when you get to 20 kilohertz, there's a slight increase, you know, a little bit less than three, sorry million, not ohms, this is a resistor. million per foot loop, check out the

audioquest

. cable look at the slope of the AC resistance, this cable has the worst problem with skin effect, it is not the best, the cable they have claimed for decades solves skin effect, actually has more resistance burst frequency than Belden's standard 10 gauge cable and look. on the kimber regarding the kimber being actually the flattest AC resistor of all cables, kimber doesn't even claim on their website that they solve the skin effect, but in fact, because they are using multiple strands in one braided configuration, this cable is superior, the Kimber cable has much less skin effect issues, not that any of these cables are even an audio frequency skin issue.

In fact, this is just me showing you the measurements, this doesn't necessarily translate into anything that is audible. I'm just showing you the science here, the company that claims to have solved the skin effect obviously hasn't solved the skin effect because their cable peels at audio frequencies, as you can see the AC resistance increases now as I told you before, as you see. The AC resistance increases because the current density flows more in the outer conductors, its internal inductance decreases and you should see the inductance drop as the frequency increases and that is what we have here, if you see we have the blue, it is the 10 gauge zip wire you might see a little bit above almost 20 kilohertz, I'm going to say around 15 kilohertz, you start to see the internal inductance go down to the wire because of the scanning of the 10 gauge, the Kimber wire is almost like a line straight, it's perfect, I mean everything. the output at 100 is 100 kilohertz so this is way beyond human here and human hearing stops if you are lucky at 20k and as you get older it goes down again we see here that the inductance of the

audioquest

cable is dropping from internal skin effect inductance now here's another interesting thing look how much higher the inductance of this expensive audioquest cable is this inductance is over 0.2 uh microhemorrhoids per foot that's about what I measure on a gauge zip cable 14 very cheap that you get at Home Depot.

I was actually hoping the Artic Quest would have low inductance like the Kimber. You can see that the Kimber has less than 0.05 microhemorrhoids per foot. The Kimber is the lowest inductance wire I have measured recently and then the 10 gauge is. like 0.16 microhemorrhoids per foot, so real 10 gauge construction wire has a lower inductance and I want to show you, if you want to find out how much inductance a wire has, I'm going to show you a little trick here that you might See if I can figure out how turn off the display, so if you check out the Audioquest literature here, if you want to minimize cable inductance, you really want the plus and minus conductors to be reasonably close together, you don't want them sandwiched on top. from each other like the go hertz cable did years ago when you sandwich two flat conductors on top of each other yes you get incredibly low inductance but you also get incredibly high capacitance and you don't want high capacitance within which you don't want. nanofarads per foot of capacitance, if you are running long runs, it could cause weak amplifiers to oscillate or it could cause voltage spikes.frequency in very wide bandwidth amplifiers, so capacitance usually doesn't have to worry about if it is less than a pair. of a hundred picofarads per foot, but if it goes up a lot because you're sandwiching conductors on top of each other, that could be a concern and in those cases, when the cable company does that, they usually put in a zobel network uh, which is usually a resistor . and a capacitor on the other end of the network next to where the speaker side is and that helps alleviate some of those problems, but in this case because they put a bunch of solid conductors in the middle here and solid conductors here , there is a great distance here.

Basically, you know, it looks like I don't know, maybe a little less than half an inch or so, maybe a quarter of an inch. That distance is what is causing this amount of inductance in this wire to have more inductance than the standard 10 gauge I measured, if you look at the 10 gauge belt and those conductors are a lot closer together it really makes a difference there, so the next thing you know I want to

review

is the capacitance. This is the interesting thing. This is where this little battery is. So far it works fine when I plug and unplug the battery, I measured the resistance it had no effect, I measured the inductance it had no effect but when we looked at the capacitance this is what got interesting so if you look at the power cable 10 gauge which has the lowest capacitance, Kimber has the highest capacitance again because it has the lowest inductance, it's about 100 picofarads per foot, but here's what surprised me: the Thunderbird cable actually had about half the path capacitance, but when there was no battery biasing, the capacitance actually dropped and I was thinking to myself that it doesn't make sense that the battery is causing the capacitance to rise because if you think about when you bias a capacitor, I'm talking about a real capacitor.

It is not a wire when you polarize a capacitor, it is sometimes used when you have a capacitor that has a very high dielectric constant, they put a DC voltage on it generally to linearize the response of the dielectric so that it maintains the capacitance, sometimes it minimizes the capacitors, it just stabilizes it because a capacitor could change the value depending on temperature or bias voltage because you could get bias currents in it, so there are cases where you bias a capacitor with DC, it could also reduce distortions. There are all kinds of benefits to biasing a capacitor, but a wire is not like a capacitor, it doesn't have a lossy dielectric like a capacitor, not at the audio frequencies we're talking about.

I wrote a whole article about this and I don't want to go into it too much here because it's very complex, but I'm going to show you the basics of what we did here, so one of Audioquest's claims is that their cable eliminates dielectric absorption, so I did all this stuff about dielectric absorption and basically what I found was the dielectric constant. even a PVC is in mega ohms, mega ohms up to about a couple hundred kilohertz, so you could never have a problem, you can never have dielectric absorption in a speaker cable, it's complete nonsense and if you want to read this article , I really suggest it.

Go through it, I go through all the equations, I even have simulations, and then I even bring in some experts like Dr. Howard Johnson, who is one of the leading experts on skin effects and signaling, and he talks about basically breaking down the theory of transmission line and signal. propagation in these five regions so in the rc region there are very low frequencies like the audio range and as you know I always tell you that speaker cables the most important metric in speaker cables is resistance and then in the interconnects they have to worry about capacitance. so when you want to worry about slightly higher frequencies it's the lc region and then you can calculate the characteristic impedance of a cable using the square root of l over c and I'll show you that in a minute and then when you get above the frequencies of audio, you worry about the skin effect region like I was showing you and then I'm talking hundreds of kilohertz in the megahertz range, that's when you start to worry about the dielectric loss region and then when you get into the region of gigahertz, you enter the waveguide. dispersion region, so this whole dielectric thing about dielectric biasing for distortion is complete nonsense, it has no relevance at audio frequencies and especially with audio cables, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just going against the grain of science, demonstrable scientific material that has existed.

For hundreds of years that is well understood, nothing I did here is misunderstood. This is all something I learned from my engineering background over the years. I've had doctors teaching me this kind of stuff and this is the kind of thing that You have to know when you're designing a board or you have to know when you're doing high speed signal propagation or you're doing any kind of long range signal distribution. that they are low, that they are small signs and you are trying. with high frequencies and you have to worry about transferring energy without reflections and without distortions.

All this is something that is well understood. I just want to be very clear about this because I know people are going to say, how do you know that you know the audio is so? Complex audio is a musical signal. We now know very well how to propagate signals through a piece of cable. This is not something to be misunderstood or sorry to say and I'm not trying to criticize anyone who believes in those things, I'm just trying. to educate and if you like having a cable that looks like this and it's heavy and it has a little battery, you know you have more power, you know, if you want to spend five thousand dollars on speaker cables, I'm not here to tell you.

Don't spend five thousand dollars on speaker cables. I'm just here to tell you some truths and give you some science. So what I did next with this cable was measure how it performed when I connected it to an amplifier and a speaker. and now I use my precision audio analyzer, the amplifier, the last time I did a test, I used the Denon A110 integrated amplifier, which is a great amplifier, but people say that you need to use high end equipment, so I use a six thousand dollar hymn. amplifier that is the amplifier that was used in these measurements and I still use the revel f328be speakers 16,000 speakers 6,000 amplifiers I would venture to say that most people will agree that it is a decent piece of equipment, so first I want to show you the frequency response, now I understand one.

What I did have was that I only had a pair of eight foot audioquest cables, so I used a pair of eight foot cables and compared it to a 10 foot 10 gauge cable. I didn't want to cut my cable, so the cable 10 foot 10 gauge is at a disadvantage. Because it is two feet longer, it has a little more resistance than the Audioquest cable, but that's okay, I just want to make it clear that the 10 gauge cable was longer than the Audioquest cable and you can see a very small difference here in the low frequencies. We are talking about point

zero

five five db point

zero

five, that is not something that is detectable, but it is there and this is only because the audio search has a slightly lower resistance because it is a shorter cable, since at the same time Going in you can see that it is actually 10 gauge.

It had less loss at higher frequencies. Now look at the scale here. Basically I have a vertical axis of about two and a half db. I had to get really close to see this. Now people will say, well, why didn't you measure the acoustic output? of the speaker, you can't really do that for these kinds of fine-grained measurements, you'll have too much variation in the microphone and variation and measurements in the room acoustics that would interfere with even seeing this kind of thing. Why do you have to look at the electrical response on speaker load with the cable connected to an amplifier?

As you can see, there's very little difference in the frequency response here between 10 gauge and audio search and we saw this last time when I did the video on 14 gauge versus kimber wire versus 10 gauge, but here's what I want to show you that it's interesting, this battery thing, this didn't make sense to me, that when the battery was turned on, the capacitance increased in the cable. It should go down like I told you with capacitors when you bias a capacitor with DC voltage. I couldn't figure this out. I spent, you know, a couple of hours at night banging my head, looking at all my old books and I'm like this.

It just doesn't make sense, but I had a hunch and wanted to see if the battery was causing this problem or if there was something else going on, so let me show you what I did here. Well, we are measuring the parallel capacitance of the cable we have. the dielectric bias system is activated and as you can see the capacitance shows 566 picofarads for the entire cable. Now when I disconnect the battery you see the wires disconnected and the capacitance has dropped to 506 picofarads so now we are trying to figure that out. Is the battery actually working or is there some other mechanism so what I'm going to do now is remove the battery and this is a bit tricky it's hard to open this case there is a little tab that you have to slide out and you can see I removed the battery here, six batteries of 12 volts each have to reconnect my cable, so the cable is now reconnected.

Removed the battery pack and you can see it's 505,506 picofarads, the same as what we got when we unplugged. The cable before the battery now I'm connecting the empty battery again and the capacitance is back to 565 picofarads as you can see with no battery just the battery connected to the case and the cable. the capacitance increased the same amount as when we had the batteries in, so the battery was essentially doing nothing, it's not the battery that they did when they ran this cable through their shielding or whatever they have here that goes into the dielectric, it acts as a parallel capacitance it is adding capacitance to the wire so just without battery just plugging this in not only does it add capacitance but I suspect it will act as an antenna so I wanted to measure some distortion to see what works with this battery. does when it's plugged in versus when it's unplugged I want to show you that now I mean, you just can't invent this kind of thing in a thousand years.

I would never have dreamed that someone would basically put something on a cable that would make it measure worse, I don't get it, maybe you guys get it, I don't know, maybe you could leave some comments below about that, so okay, first I want to show you the baseline of the 10 gauge wire I measured on the 10 gauge wire connected to my Revel speaker from the Anthem STR amplifier. You could and this is a very low signal. You know it's under one watt. I wanted to keep it very low to see the little signal noise and you can see that the 10 gauge doesn't.

There's no distortion, there's a little bit of stuff here that's coming from, you know, maybe the amplifier, some switching distortion or whatever is happening from a clock, I don't know, there's just some noise here, it's very below detectability, it is at point zero three. thd plus n percentage now look look what happens when I plug the quest audio cable in boom wow now you see our noise floor went up here it's doing some weird things here it really went up here I don't think it's detectable because it's still at zero point two percent here, but who knows, who knows, who knows when you're turning it up if it can amplify it even more, but look at these peaks, whatever kind of noise there is in the room next to the amplifier or whatever, basically. amplified you didn't get this with the 10 gauge look how clean the 10 gauge is bam that's with the battery pack audio search so now I want to see what happens when you unplug the battery pack now the green is unplugged the purple is plugged in So the green still has some noise, but these big spikes here that are at 0.1 percent have disappeared or shrunk, you see, they're here, they're 0.05 percent here, they're about 0.035 percent here , still compare that to the 10 gauge so you can see that there is definitely noise caused by the audioquest cable that you don't have with the 10 gauge, whether the battery is in place or not.

Now I did this. I had the battery placed on the side of the amp for these. Testing I believe Audioquest has a directional arrow on its cable. They recommend that you have the battery on the speaker side, so I went and re-ran that test and I have the measurement here so you can see it's not that bad, but you still have these. There are dominant peaks here that are almost 0.1 percent of the level you didn't have with just the regular 10 gauge. Now the level changed a little because I changed the signal amplitude when I reran this test, but still these peaks are not present with the 10 gauge cable or they are much lower, they are almost at the noise floor compared to have it on the battery sideon the amplifier side, it's worse, it's basically showing you that it's acting as an antenna, so the question you guys need to ask yourself is asking yourself if you want to spend five thousand dollars on a pair of speaker cables that can potentially act as induced noise in his system.

It can act as an antenna. Do you want that type of signal um going into your speakers or your amplifier? I'm not here to judge if you prefer more distortion. Some people prefer tube amps because they have higher order distortion. They are right? You are wrong? I'm more or less here to talk about the accuracy of signal propagation and my goal is to have a cable that is not a cable and has the least amount of loss, not a cable that acts as an antenna that induces noise in his system. The goal of a hi-fi playback system is to reduce background noise to reduce distortions audioquest do not live up to their name, they basically said they have a noise mitigation system in the cable, that is not the case, it is doing Exactly the opposite, they claim to fix the effect of the skin, that is not the case.

Dress up the AC resistance. uh, come on, they claim to linearize the dielectric, but that's not the case. We saw that it's not even a big factor when it comes to speaker cables, so I also want to go over the rest of their literature here before I close this video. so they make a lot of claims about audio searches, you know, they have this zero technology, no defined characteristic impedance, they basically claim that they are removing the characteristic impedance of the cable, I don't even know what that means to be honest. It just doesn't make sense to me as I told you in the past characteristic impedance doesn't matter when it comes to audio frequencies, okay, but characteristic impedance is something that is very easy to calculate even at audio frequencies.

It is a very basic formula, since I was talking about the lc region before the different signal propagation regions. The characteristic impedance of a cable, whether it's coaxial cable, dual feeder, or speaker cable, is basically a ratio of inductance to capacitance, so it's the square root of l over c. Audioquest claims that their cable has zero characteristic impedance or minimum characters, I don't even know what that means, but to have zero characteristic impedance you wouldn't have to have inductance, right, you would have to have a zero over a number that would be zero. That is not the case.

You can see the Audioquest cable here. 0.225 microhammers per foot of inductance the battery has no effect on inductance no effect on capacitance other than the fact that when that connector is connected to the battery it causes a higher capacitance so I calculated it and basically took the audio search with the battery, I did the square root of l over c at one kilohertz, it's 56 ohms versus 60 ohms without the battery, what does that mean? That is irrelevant because when it comes to a speaker and an amplifier, an amplifier has an extremely low output impedance and the speaker has a variable impedance because it is a reactive load, so if it is an 8 ohm speaker it could swing towards up and down from three and a half four ohms to 20 or 30 ohms, so there's really no way you can have a perfectly matched characteristic impedance. between an amplifier and a speaker and again at the audio frequencies, it doesn't matter, it's just another one of those myths that audio search is proportional, that is, they report that they have some technology that cannot be measured and that somehow removes features. impedance and we saw here that this 72 volt dial electrical bias system does not do what they say, it does not catch radio frequencies as far as I can tell, in fact it added noise, it was picking up noise, it was doing exactly the opposite.

So, you know, I could go over this with a fine-tooth comb, but that's not the point. The point is that this cable allows me to grab it again. This cable does not live up to the marketing claims of my measurements. It's difficult. In my opinion, when working with it, the connector breaks quite easily, as you can see here, just when plugging in the amplifier it broke. I was surprised that it is very stiff and adds a lot of weight, so you have to be very careful when you do it. I am connecting it to a speaker or amplifier and it is cost prohibitive.

I mean, what is it like if your speakers are 10 or 15 feet from the amp? This cable can cost more than five six thousand seven thousand dollars, so the question I have for you. Do you think investing five thousand dollars in this cable will give you some kind of 10 gauge sonic nirvana that costs 50 cents a foot or do you think you would be better off spending $5,000 on acoustic treatments, perhaps upgrading by adding a second subwoofer to your system maybe get better speakers, better amplifier, pay a consultant to optimize the room, so these are the type of questions I have for you, I hope you understand that I am not criticizing anyone who spends money on cables, I am just trying to understand them. guys, the real science because the science that's on that website doesn't make sense and they're not the only ones in the industry doing that, a lot of these high-end cable companies sell you a story, you know, they sell you a cable .

I mean, it has a fancy name, it's the anaconda or some snake or some tropical island and they sell you pseudoscience wrapped up. That's my biggest problem is the science suit. I don't care if they want to charge ten thousand dollars for a wired speaker, if that's the case. nice or whatever let's be honest give me some specs on the wire so I know it at least measures as good as 10 gauge belden wire which is 50 cents on the dollar a foot give me some actual specs and don't give me the jargon no tell me nonsense if you're going to give me real information about the cable give me the facts based on demonstrable and repeatable engineering science all these measurements i made today are very easily repeatable in fact amir at audio science

review

did a measurement of the Audioquest cable, uh, I think he was on an interconnect and saw the same thing.

He saw that the noise increased in the low frequencies. He couldn't explain it, but I think I found the reason why I think it was the same in his case. That battery pack, even without the batteries plugged in, acted like an antenna and may have shown increased noise pickup in its very sensitive measurements, so I'm not the only one. I'm glad there are other people doing this. this and we need more of this so I encourage anyone who is an engineer and wants to tell the truth about signal propagation and audio cables. I could use your support because it bothers me a lot to be one of the few people. who do this and I take the time because I think it's an important issue, I think the truth is it's a marketable commodity and I think that's an advantage that we have over a lot of the YouTube influencers or a lot of the online critics is that we just They do not do it.

They either have the measurement tools or they don't have the knowledge to refute these claims because let's face it, these claims sound interesting, I mean, they tell a good story and if I didn't have the technical expertise that I had, I'd probably believe it too. But now you know better, so why don't you do me a favor? Tell me what cables you are using. Tell me if you fell victim to some brand bs that you now realize was nonsense and tell me if these educational videos are helpful. so you understand signal propagation and we will continue to let you know, we will continue to add articles and videos on cable.

Link below skin effect article and dielectric absorption article; those are very heavy reading articles, but they are necessary, they are necessary to defend the science behind signal propagation for audio because it is not a mystery to anyone outside of consumer audio, if you are in pro audio or if you are in any kind of discipline that involves signal transfer, this is not a mystery the only mystery is when it comes to consumer and high end audio, so that's all I have to say about that. Don't forget about our Patreon channel at patreon.com. Audioholics, get direct access to If you want to ask questions or suggest video topics, don't forget about our weekly educational acoustics seminars with anthony gramani, which are at 11 p.m.

ET on Thursday nights and all I can say is be nice, we're not trying to start a war incitement here we're just trying to tell you the truth and until next time my friends are still listening