Off Topic Rant...well, somewhat: this month's tape op

[casey]

is it just me or was this issue of tape op with the review of Pink Floyd's
engineer ridiculous in regards to the Astoria and running all of their cables "directionally."  He even went on to say that they noticed a difference in how they ran their ground cable, and all of their patch bay wire was tested to see which direction the cables sounded better ...

with that aside, tape op is a great recording magazine...

[Samuel]

i don't know man, that's alot of potential crosstalk...

[GFR]

.. and all of their patch bay wire was tested to see which direction the cables sounded better ...

Eric Johnson does the same  :lol:

I'll try to find this interview (no I was not joking!)

[inverseroom]

I posted a similar thread on the TO board.  It was interesting but would have been a lot more interesting if it had focused more on the music & its relationship to the gear... I wish Gilmour had been in on the interview.

[CS Jones]

I'd like to know the answer too. I had a similar thing happen to me just last night. I was asked which speaker cables I liked to use and how they effected the tone and should they be oriented a certain way.

I didn't really know what was being asked of me. I never thought it mattered. In fact, I never even thought about it. I wasn't sure I even understood the question. I asked if they were talking about the wire you use from the OT straight into the speakers. Yes, they said. Apparently someone sells "special" cables to hook your speakers up with. What that means I have no idea. These guys were preparing to lay down a lot of money for new, improved speaker wire.
I said I don't know man...do what you want but I just grab two lengths of different colored heavy guage solid wire which you find down one of the aisles in Lowe's and go home and plug them in.

Maybe with Pink Floyd and miles and miles worth of cable routing it matters. At the level we're at though there were plenty of other things to concern ourselves with I thought. The discussion carried itself over to guitar cable too...
"What brand do you use?"
"I don't know" I said..."all of them are pretty short - there's a blue colored jack covering on one side and a red colored jack covering on the other side so that when 3 or 4 cords get jumbled up I can tell the different ends apart".

Yeah, I know...no Mr. Wizard here.

I know I've seen this covered here in the past but I never even bothered to read the posts.  Maybe I will now.
Clay

[casey]

I'd like to know the answer too. I had a similar thing happen to me just last night. I was asked which speaker cables I liked to use and how they effected the tone and should they be oriented a certain way.

I didn't really know what was being asked of me. I never thought it mattered. In fact, I never even thought about it. I wasn't sure I even understood the question. I asked if they were talking about the wire you use from the OT straight into the speakers. Yes, they said. Apparently someone sells "special" cables to hook your speakers up with. What that means I have no idea. These guys were preparing to lay down a lot of money for new, improved speaker wire.
I said I don't know man...do what you want but I just grab two lengths of different colored heavy guage solid wire which you find down one of the aisles in Lowe's and go home and plug them in.

Maybe with Pink Floyd and miles and miles worth of cable routing it matters. At the level we're at though there were plenty of other things to concern ourselves with I thought. The discussion carried itself over to guitar cable too...
"What brand do you use?"
"I don't know" I said..."all of them are pretty short - there's a blue colored jack covering on one side and a red colored jack covering on the other side so that when 3 or 4 cords get jumbled up I can tell the different ends apart".

Yeah, I know...no Mr. Wizard here.

I know I've seen this covered here in the past but I never even bothered to read the posts.  Maybe I will now.
Clay

for speaker wire, i would just use a 12 gauge or heavier (depending on how far you have to run) 2 conductor stranded copper wire.  

for someone to say that a speaker cable sounds better ran one way than the other is ludicrous....

[casey]

I posted a similar thread on the TO board.  It was interesting but would have been a lot more interesting if it had focused more on the music & its relationship to the gear... I wish Gilmour had been in on the interview.

my sentiments exactly.  gear is always fun, i felt as if they spent too much time on how they oriented the cables.  too funny.

[Johan]

all of this sounds great..if you can ignore the fact that audiosignals are AC.wich means they move back and forth...have anyone ever seen a speaker that only moves forward?...that would be an indication that the amp has had a catastrofic failure and the speaker will fry in a few second...
...and regarding E.J. ..in an interwiev in swedish guitarmag FUZZ about four years ago, he said he had just realized that puting his stompboxes in different order made them sound completely different  :shock:  ...so I kind of lost the respect to his claims about what cables and batterys sound the best...I made that "discovery" myself about two months after I picked up the guitar...amazing player thou...

Johan

[mojotron]

If anything, the whole "polarity of cables" claim would indicate to me that one of the connectors was going bad, and made a better connection if stressed in a different direction... or had a different plug on one end....

And this is totally proven by the gear that I play live with - the cables get beat - and in a pinch I will put the "weak" end on the ground tucked under my effects board.

Im guessing that it's when EJ moves the cable in the reversal process that the perceved "change" in tone happens....

There are lots of kinds of people in the world and if an artist knows nothing about how their gear works - that's fine with me... they can believe what they want.... I just wish guys like EJ... would put out more CDs with new/live material... Obviously, making music is what they are best at...