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Guess I've gone over the edge


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do you mean new cables or the cable lifters?  i always thought the idea of putting cables up on stands was to reduce interference from static electricity riding on carpet surface.  is that still the thinking? i was going to 3d print some stands, but plastic might attract static?

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1 hour ago, grue2cesig2 said:

do you mean new cables or the cable lifters?  i always thought the idea of putting cables up on stands was to reduce interference from static electricity riding on carpet surface.  is that still the thinking? i was going to 3d print some stands, but plastic might attract static?

The lifters (although the cables are new too). They always seemed a bit snake-oil-y to me, but thought I'd give them a try after seeing this post by Paul McGowan of PS Audio. He says they work a little with speaker cables, but not interconnects. 

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haha ok.  yeah, i mean i first heard about it in the mid 90's where people were using alum pop cans to lift their cables. and the static electricity interference was the thought that i heard at that time.  i never really thought much of it other than it's possible. it wasn't until recently that i thought since it's winter by me, with such dry dry air, there could be something.  i suppose vibrations could perturb the electro magnetic field. all these things sure could add up.  to me, it could all be too little of a difference to notice.

i mean, i sold hifi for 7 years, and i've heard differences between equipment, recordings, and speaker placement. to me those were usually so obvious though. i ended up at a point where if i couldn't immediately identify a difference, then i would tell clients - do you what think is best.  and i had clients that could hear things/differences i couldn't .  the other point i ended up at was that each piece had it's own voice.  so really it was what do you like to listen to, and does product a "do it for you" or product b?

i see it in other hobbies too - tuning your car for auto cross or track days, optics on telescopes, profiling and calibrating color for photo taking, editing and printing.  there's low-hanging fruit that makes a big obvious difference, then it's just too much.  but yeah, i'll probably put my cables up on books or 3d printed stands - ha!

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I can recommend a number of engineering books you can read as to why moving the cables away from the floor might have some electrical effects.  There's also the question of mechanical effects that in turn become electrical effects.

But, you may not want to spend your time reading that stuff.  The plots are always kind of thin.  Character development mostly non-existent.  

So, think of it this way:

If hardwood, plywood, or carpeting had great dielectric properties as insulators, wouldn't you think that some enterprising cable entrepreneur would make cables with any or all of those as jacket material?

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All good points BK.  I went with some of the Audioquest lifters.  They maintain that 6" over the floor is best.  Garth has done a lot of research into these things and they didn't cost much.  I"ll play with them in Jan to figure out what they do, if anything and if so, is it positive.  

They 3D print their's too, lol.  

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  • 5 months later...
On 12/24/2020 at 10:16 AM, BKDad said:

I can recommend a number of engineering books you can read as to why moving the cables away from the floor might have some electrical effects.  There's also the question of mechanical effects that in turn become electrical effects.

But, you may not want to spend your time reading that stuff.  The plots are always kind of thin.  Character development mostly non-existent.  

So, think of it this way:

If hardwood, plywood, or carpeting had great dielectric properties as insulators, wouldn't you think that some enterprising cable entrepreneur would make cables with any or all of those as jacket material?

Oh yeah.  I definitely want see those "engineering references".  😄

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