Audio Interconnect cable Performance - is Return Wire Diameter a Factor?

On Monday, December 7, 2020 at 8:08:05 AM UTC-5, -dsr- wrote:
> On 2020-12-07, Peter Wieck > wrote:
> >> **Nothing (in this universe) can move faster than 'c'. Not light, not
> >> electrons, not gravity.
> >
> > Never stated nor implied that. What I stated is that as with water in a pipe, when water goes in at one end, water instantaneously comes out at the other end. But, IT IS NOT THE SAME WATER.
> >
> The first and second sentences here are wrong.
>
> The speed of water signal propagation is the speed of sound in water, which is
> around 1400-1600m/s depending on temperature, salinity, etc. That is literally
> the speed at which water molecules can push each other around; it is not
> "instantaneous".
>
> Applicability of this argument to audio:
>
> 1. The speed of sound in water is about 4x the speed of sound in air. Therefore,
> there is a major impedance mismatch at air/water boundaries, leading to
> sound reflection.
>
> 2. The speed of an electrical signal is finite (but very fast), so we can measure
> and discover that it doesn't matter whether your speaker wires are the same
> length because you can't hear the timing difference for any reasonable
> difference in length. (Say, 1 meter vs 1000 meters -- you'll get differences
> in signal level before you get audible timing differences.)
>
> -dsr-
Before I get snarky: I was making an analogy. Water in a pipe to electrons in a wire. What goes in is not what comes out, even though what comes out is very nearly instantaneous to what goes in. Nowhere was I suggesting sound in water, signals in water, and/or so forth.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA

On 2020-12-07, Peter Wieck > wrote:
> Before I get snarky: I was making an analogy. Water in a pipe to electrons in a wire. What goes in is not what comes out, even though what comes out is very nearly instantaneous to what goes in. Nowhere was I suggesting sound in water, signals in water, and/or so forth.
>

No need to get snarky. There's a big difference between "instantaneous", a word
which you kept using, and "nearly instantaneous", which is a measurable quantity
in all cited cases. As long as you keep using the qualifier, we're all happy.

You are correct: the electrons pushing at one end of the wire are rarely the
"same" electrons that come out, because the signal has both positive and negative
components which we expect, over time, to balance out*. When you hit a diaphragm
on a full water pipe, the shock/signal/wavefront is transmitted to the other side
without carrying the water itself from one end to the other.

*interesting case: there are situations where it would be bad to have a signal
which unbalanced the overall electric charge of the two end points. One solution,
used in analog audio, is the balanced signal pipe, in which one conductor carries
the inverted signal of the other, guaranteeing continuous balance. A solution found
in digital transmission is a balanced coding, where extra bits are used to encode
each payload bit so that different amounts of charge can be selected on-the-fly.

-dsr-

On 7/12/2020 11:55 pm, -dsr- wrote:
> On 2020-12-07, Peter Wieck > wrote:
>>> If our Sun winked out of existence tomorrow, how long would it take for
>>> our planet to cease circling where our Sun once was?
>>
>> That would be as soon as the gravity wave ceased - which would also be largely instantaneous. Objects in orbit are not truly "in orbit", but in Free Fall. The earth would travel in that direction on the arc that it was on when the sun went away - with minor perturbations from the other objects in the former solar system.
>
> Your first sentence is, again, wrong. All experiments in gravity propagation show that
> it moves at 'c', which is to say, about 8 minutes between the Sun suddenly failing
> to exist and the planet no longer falling towards it.
>
> -dsr-
>

**Correct.

--
Trevor Wilson
www.rageaudio.com.au

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On Sunday, December 6, 2020 at 9:57:23 AM UTC-5, Peter Wieck wrote:
> Electricity in a wire, AC or DC, moves much faster than the "speed of light" - which is defined by its speed in a vacuum.

100% wrong. Any way you might choose to define "electricity", it under no circumstances
whatsoever moves much faster than the speed of light. Increase the voltage at one end
of the wire, "put more electricity in", if you will, and the effect of that cannot and will not
propogate along the conductor faster than and, indeed, as fast as the speed of light in
a vacuum. Indeed, it will travel significantly slower, for most conductor configurations,
on the orders of 30-60% slower.

> Pop an electron into the system at one end, and that instant, one pops out at the other.

Nope, 100% wrong. It does not and CANNOT happen, in your words, "at that instant."

> The water that one puts in a pipe is not the same water that comes out the other end
> (unless the pipe was empty initially - not possible with electrons in a wire).

And continuing the analogy with water: stuffing water in one end of the pipe WILL NOT
result in water coming out the other end "at that instant", whether it is the same water
or not. It will take some time for the change in conditions to propagate down the pipe
before water starts coming out the other end.

> With AC current,
> it is entirely possible that no individual electron makes it down the entire length of the wire.

And, indeed, how would anyone possibly know if it is the same electron or not? And why
would anyone possibly care?

Dick Pierce

On Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 9:47:46 AM UTC-5, Peter Wieck wrote:
> The typical patch-cord from an active pre-amp of modern design may carry as much as
> twenty (20) Volts at some small fraction of an amp, and unless something is very wrong,
> always AC. So, not many electrons (amps), but those few are moving REALLY fast at higher
> frequencies.

Uh, no, they are not. The movement of the electrons themselves are described by their
"drift velocity", which is dependent upon the conductor material, the cross-section of
the conductor, and the current it is being asked to carry. Frequency plays no role.

Let's take an example: consider a small signal wire, say 24 AWG with a diameter of about
0.5 mm. Let's say it's being asked to carry 0.001 amp (one milliamp, which is HUGE for
a preamp interconnect: your unrealistic example of 20 volts into, say, a 100 k load would
be on the order of 0.0002 amps., but let's go with 1 mA).

The resulting electron drift velocity would be, what?

1000m/s? Nope.

100m/s? No way.

10m/s? Way too much.

Try 0.13 cm/hour. 0.00000082 miles per hour.

Independent of frequency.

Dick Pierce

On Monday, December 7, 2020 at 7:45:52 AM UTC-5, Peter Wieck wrote:
> > If our Sun winked out of existence tomorrow, how long would it take for
> > our planet to cease circling where our Sun once was?
> That would be as soon as the gravity wave ceased - which would also be largely instantaneous.

Well, you're statement is imprecise, but largely wrong. Yes, the effect would be felt when
gravity ceased at the earth, but if the sun were to cease to exist, it would take about 8
minutes for the lack of garvity to propogate to 150 million kilometers to the Earth.

It would absolutely NOT be "largely instantaneous" with the cessation of the sun's existence
Indeed, the arrival the "dark" would be simultaneous with the departure of the earth into
interstellar space.

Dick Pierce

> Nope, 100% wrong. It does not and CANNOT happen, in your words, "at that instant."

> Dick Pierce

If you had a large supply of entangled particles, then you could have instantaneous information transfer, what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". Unfortunately there are no practical means of getting entangled particles. Then you would also need a quantum computer to deal with it and, these days, a sub-liquid helium refrigerator to keep the particles from decaying. It would probably need audio-blessed power cords with poky electricity to run it.

Dave Harrison - Hi Dick, glad to see you are still yourself.

On Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 8:49:56 AM UTC-5, Dave Harrison wrote:
> > Nope, 100% wrong. It does not and CANNOT happen, in your words, "at that instant."
>
> If you had a large supply of entangled particles, then you could have instantaneous
> information transfer, what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance".

If I had a large supply of entangled particles, I'd be picking up my Nobel
Prize and having dinner with the King of Sweden

Dick Pierce

On Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 9:47:46 AM UTC-5, Peter Wieck wrote:
> First of all, let's make sure that we agree on terms:

And, just fo laughs, physical reality...

> It is current that matters.

Well, it is the signal that matters...

> The typical patch-cord from an active pre-amp of modern design may carry
> as much as twenty (20) Volts

really?

REALLY?

Given that the vast majority of power amps have their gain set so that something
like 2 volts result in full power, a voltage of 20 volts would result in the amplifier
attempting (but failing rather miserably) at outputting 100 times its rated power.

So, let's consider the 20 volt numberf to be possibly true but completely irrelevant,
to paraphrase the lawyers.

> at some small fraction of an amp,

Okay, so assume the amp has a 50 kOhm input impedance, and assuming our true
AND relevant voltage of 2 volts, that works out to:

I = E/R

I = 2.0 volts / 50kOhms

I = 0.00004 amperes

or 40 micro amps (a more realistic figure than I cam up with elsewhere.

> So, not many electrons (amps),

Well, since we're piling on, let's, just for entertainment, see how many electrons
that is.

One Ampere is the same as one Coulomb per second.

An electron has a charge of 1.602 x 10^-17 Coulombs.

Thus, a continuous flowing current of 1 Ampere means there are 1.602 x 00^17
electrons (or, more precisely, the equivalent of 1.602 x 10^17) passing a point
each second. That's 6.4 x 10^12 electrons pass a point each second. But, to be
fair, the current is not continuous. So let's assume that we're looking at a small
interval of time, say 1 millisecond. We're down to 6.4 x 10^9 electrons in that
brief interval of time.

Yeah, 6,408,000,000, not a "lot" of electrons. And, in fact, all of them that (virtually)
got sent that way (or ones that are indistiguishable), they's comin' back son anyway.

The poont of this reductio ad absurdum is to show that for the domain of our
problem set (sending audio down a wire), moving electrons is, again as the lawyers
are wont to say, true but irrelevant: it's the aggregate movement of lots of charges,
jiggling about in a not-entirely-random fashion that results in the actual audio
"signal" being sent down the wire.

And when it comes to making our preamp drive our power amp and thence the
speakers, it's not them true but irrelevant electrons that we care about, it's the signal.
Consider, for example, making your cables out of paladium, raise the temperature
to about 300C, and embed it in a hyrdowen atmosphere. At that point, those wires
would work just as well, but instead of electrons being the mobile charges wondering
around a metallic crystal lattice, it would be protons the protons as the mobile
charges wandering around a mettalic crystal lattice.

As to the assertions suggested in the original post of this thread, one of the more
laughable and entertaining collection of pseudo-techno gobbledygook seen in
quite some time.

Dick Pierce

The Dynaco PAT-5 biFet makes 15V @ 50MA +/- 5%
There is an Aktika (sp?) pre-amp that makes 20V @ 50MA +/- 5%
And there is a mod for the PAT-5 to get it to 42V @ 20MA +/- 5%

The reasoning for those superficially absurd voltages is headroom. And that is a long, difficult, and very nearly futile discussion mostly based on revealed religion.

And, that is AC voltage. Not DC - so those electrons are flying back and forth at whatever the audio frequency might be. Not departing for parts-unknown and in only one direction.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA