Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler What the heck!

I was looking through the Audiogon site and found this little tid bit in an add for a set of speakers.

"Monster Cable High Resolution Precision Stranded "Time Correct" Speaker Cable"

What the heck!

Rick, I'm sure JohnK will be along shortly to explain, but my understanding is that the speed of sound is much slower than the speed of the electrical current running through the cables. Consequently, if you don't put up little traffic lights in the cable every so often, then the signals reach your speaker before you are able to hear them.

It's all very simple, actually. It is probably only relevant if your amplifer goes more than 88 mph and your speakers' throughput is less than 120 gallons/hour. In addition, those redbook CD's with the green marker and blue laser really confuse the traffic patterns.

Combined with the fact that the CD sampling rate is 44.1kHz but most speakers only reproduce up to about 20kHz, and I'd think the necessity of time correction is obvious.

M80 owners. Sheesh.

Tom, you're on a roll today! (In 3 different threads!) Must have ate your Wheaties this morning!

Shawn, the three-legged stool of cholesterol health is oatmeal, cranberries and bourbon. I typically have the first two for breakfast. Typically.

Nah, with a trustworthy name like Monster and with a product as sensitive as cables, it's definitely for real. Definitely.

I just have a very hard time believing that anyone no matter how gullible would believe this crap.

But their ears! They trust them! How could you not trust someone's ears? How DARE you?!

It leaves me shaking my head in disgust.

I remember, many MANY moons ago - long before I was an Audioholic, I had a big box salesman give me the "time alignment" spiel. I knew little about electronics, less about speaker cable theory, and my response was, "How does the cable know which signal to speed up and which to slow down?" The salesman's mouth opened and closed a few times as he tried to come up with an answer before he just turned and left.

Better not bring that three-legged stool in to work. OSHA will be all over your ... posterior.

wid: it never ceases to amaze me the number of fools that reside out there!!!!!!!!!!

Wouldn't it be nice if Monster was slapped with a $ Million fine for false and misleading advertising??

Yeah, I know that it won't happen, but I can dream. LOL!!!

Yeah Tom, the main point is that the actual power and information is carried to a speaker in an electromagnetic wave traveling along the outside(i.e. not inside)of the wire at about 3/4ths the speed of light. The small part of the wave energy that penetrates into the wire and latches on to the electrons there to guide the wave along the wire is lost as heat and doesn't directly contribute to the sound reaching the speaker, so none of this junk about the inside of the wire is significant. The movement of the electrons in the wire is very slow and if that was what actually carried the sound it would take an hour or so to reach the speaker.

So that's why those cable elevators work. Since the signal travels along the outside of the wire, unelevated speaker wire allows the dust mites that live in your carpet to snack at will on passing electrons.

You got it, Peter, except that it's the electromagnetic energy that the dust mites are especially fond of. This is one of the reasons why many audiophiles have reported a definite improvement in sound quality as a result of having their carpets professionally cleaned.