Well hung

By John Groom

August 2004

Psychobabble is a column to explore the twilight zone of hi-fi. That strange place where the improbable meets the impossible, the fussy meets the obsessional, and the physical meets the psychological.

Dear Craig,

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you through the Psychobabble column. It is just that you have raised some issues through the AudioEnz forum that have probably been asked by all of us audiophiles at times. While I know that you are being tongue in cheek, I think it maybe useful to take you seriously for a moment.

The central question you are asking is whether you are going crazy? Specifically you are asking about your impression of the sound of your system improving significantly when you raised the speaker cables off the floor.

You certainly have gone to some trouble to raise your cables off the floor, with a creation of wood and nylon. I don’t think that in itself makes you crazy. To put it another way if the product was marketable, then you would simply be part of a boutique industry that seems to make quite a lot of money out of those of us who seek the Holy Grail of perfect sound. People who do not seek this Holy Grail think we are crazy in the sense of being odd, obsessional and some kind of geek.

This is just a matter of perspective. For example if, like Ed Hilary, you have felt it necessary to have risked your life climbing the tallest rock in the world, we don’t suggest you are crazy. It could be argued that it is the same driven qualities that we bring out our own hobby.

More importantly, you seem to be asking whether you can trust your own perception that the sound has changed, your surprise that it has changed so much, and why it has happened? It seems to be a comfort to you that your wife can also hear the changes. The last argument is a dangerous one in that just because we can find someone who agrees with us does not make it right. The internet is living proof that the world is full of people with some strange perspectives! There was a time of course when it was self evident that the world was flat.

To take you out of your misery, I think you are one hundred percent correct about the changes. I do wonder if it is to do with microphany, ie, the vibration set-up around electrical circuits that is the curse of so many amplifiers and CD players. This is one of the reasons that a decent stand is important. All you have done is to create a ‘stand’ for the cables. I do not think that this is an obscure high-end phenomenon either.

My own experiments suggest that the lifting process benefits interconnects, speaker cables, mains cords and even the power supply coming into the house! I have replicated the process all the way down from my main system to the kitchen’s Pioneer stereo, on the satellite computer speakers and even improved the sound of the bedroom ghetto blaster by lifting its mains cable off the carpet.

What have I heard from this process? A lightening of the sound that gives more ambiance, truer tonal accuracy, clearer bass lines and a greater sense of life to the music. The magnitude of this change is not subtle and can even be compared with the impact of the Naim Fraim stand. It is simply one of the best free upgrades available.

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John Groom is a psychologist working in private practice on Auckland's North Shore. John has over three decades experience in both hi-fi and psychology.