Hard to believe, harder to ignore…
By Roy Gregory
The audio industry has never been short of products and accessories that produce inexplicable results. The people making those products have rarely felt the need to explain them. It’s such a common occurrence that it’s attracted its own vocabulary, from the flexible implications of “tweak” through to the unashamedly dismissive “snake-oil”. But just because we can’t explain something doesn’t make the result any less real or relevant. Sure, in some cases these products are a cynical attempt to trade on the credulity of customers, the audio equivalent of a travelling medicine show, with its patent tonics. But in many cases, it’s more a situation where we can’t explain what’s happening – yet: not helped by the inertia imposed by the commercial status quo. Those with time and money invested in established, accepted approaches that accord with and often generated accepted wisdom, have no interest in seeing that dogma upset or challenged.
While examples of the latest hot gadget that’s subsequently been abandoned, or the latest guru who is subsequently debunked are legion, some ideas refuse to die. They might get discarded or ignored when they first emerge, only to re-emerge down the road, sometimes multiple times, before gaining traction and acceptance. Along the way, they generally get refined and at least a grain of understanding often emerges. Which is exactly where I find myself right now, looking at a pair of nondescript black boxes, complete with flying-leads with spades on the end, which go by the clumsy title of SoundStrip BlackHole NoiseTraps and which can be yours for a mere €2,500 the pair. Hardly surprising I can hear you think: The first rule of any confidence trick is to make it so expensive that your mark has to take it seriously. Except that, in this case, the results are such that they’re hard to ignore. If you also think that for something so outwardly prosaic to produce such an emphatic, repeatable and demonstrable impact on system performance is surprising, or questionable, you need to look at the history…
The law of unexpected consequences…
People have been playing with the issue of microphony in cables for years, ever since Enid Lumley started hanging her speaker cables on strings from the ceiling. We’ve seen devices to support or suspend cables, we’ve seen cables with suspension, we’ve seen damping devices that can be added to cables and clamps to hold cables in place. In many cases, the impact of these ‘solutions’ and the reasons for their musical effects were far from simple – or even as targeted. A classic case in point is Nordost’s Micro Mono-filament construction, which wraps each conductor in a loosely wound spiral formed from a Teflon ‘thread’ – massively reducing contact between the conductor and its insulation, in turn significantly reducing dielectric effects. Along the way, that spiral thread also acts as a suspension – a suspension system that became even more effective with the introduction of the Dual Micro Mono-filament in later cables. While the electrical advantages of this construction are clear – and much imitated – the mechanical benefits are a freebie – and seriously underestimated. Whilst we can generally hear what’s happening, we often don’t know why – or at least, don’t know the whole story.
