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Episode: 805
Title: HPR0805: How Monster Cable got its name
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0805/hpr0805.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:48:53
---
Hope you enjoyed some of the lovely video and
have a nice day!
Thanks for watching!
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. This is Mr. Gadget's calling in once again.
And I guess what we'll talk about here is more audio related things.
But the real title of this one I suppose will be Monster Cable didn't start out being evil.
So there's a lot of talk about Monster Cable and whenever it comes up nowadays,
every time he talks about hallucinations, that Monster Cable gets you know,
tins or you know, sometimes $100 for the same kind of cable that everybody who knows
anything about anything, especially in terms of digital cable,
you can buy a cable that has exactly the same capabilities as the Monster Cable
that might cost you $30, $40, $50 US, admittedly and ever to $36,
that's not a money in the world stage.
But still, quite a bit of money and you can buy the equivalent from monoprise
or other especially online kinds of sources for five bucks or maybe even less for the equivalent kind of cable.
Now since most of you probably weren't even born yet,
when Monster Cable first came into existence,
and some of the things we're going to talk about here actually have to do with some basic audio kinds of things,
which may or may not be knowledgeable about.
So for instance, one of the things back in the day of Hi-Fi, you know,
Hi-Fidelity and Stereo's and things like that,
and that's when I went to, you know, university in the Dark Ages and being a music student,
I was very interested in Hi-Fidelity reproduction of music.
Yes, this was vinyl spinning discs.
The long play album was the media of the day,
and a lot of it was about the turntable,
and those of us who were more dedicated to this kind of thing,
didn't even buy integrated receiver that had the tuner and the amplifier together
because we wanted to be able to replace and ship those things in and out.
So if you were really dedicated, you would buy a tuner,
separate, and AMFM, or maybe FM tuner,
separate from the integrated amplifier.
That was, you can always replace the amplifier if the better one came along.
Really dedicated people would have a power amplifier on its own,
and then a pre-amplifier,
and one of the more inexpensive of those pre-amplifiers
that were available at that time,
was a diner kit,
and that pre-amplifier was an excellent pre-amplifier,
and you could build it from a kit,
and roughly say some money that way,
and it was a really good pre-amplifier to use with whatever power amplifier you had acquired.
One of my roommates back in my college days had a public address system,
and thus we had a really kicking kind of stereo in our apartment,
because we had his PA speakers that we would use when we,
one of the music groups I was in,
we had PA speakers in conjunction with that group, a smaller group,
and so we called those around to various gigs,
and he had a crown 300 watt amplifier,
and then the speakers,
and they were very efficient speakers.
Basically, there's two kinds of speakers systems in general.
There's all kinds of variations on this,
but there are closed enclosures,
and there are various types of open or ducted enclosures.
And in general, the horn speakers,
which are actually a variation on the open speaker system,
and the ducted speaker systems were more efficient.
The same amount of wattage in would get you a larger amount of decimal pressure coming out of the speaker.
One of the best and the sound that I still love to this day,
was a speaker system that were an example of the speaker design
with a duct that would enhance the bass
and provide part of the noise of that speaker system,
and the health was,
and these were actually used, you know, in theater systems,
and things like that.
One of them was Altec Lansing,
was one of the ones that were available in that time frame,
and there may be something, well, I know there are earbuds nowadays
that are reportedly from Altec Lansing,
but, you know, I have no idea if that's really the old Altec Lansing.
Another one that were ducted speakers
and were efficient were JBL speakers,
and a pair of those cost you quite a bit.
We already talked an previous episode about the whole aspect
of making your own speaker systems,
and what my boss at the time,
and according to you I said about that.
So, various types of speaker systems that were available,
and one of them was the Clipsch system.
Clipsch still does make speakers,
and as far as I know that is a continuous of the same company,
and there's a characteristic kind of Clipsch sound
of the big horn-loaded speakers with Clipsch,
and I really love that sound.
It has really good high frequencies,
and a nice mid-range,
a little bit of an accentuation.
If you looked at it on the spectrum analyzer of the middle kind of frequencies,
not as much bass from Clipsch speakers,
at least back in this time frame that we're talking about,
middle 70s and on into the 80s,
in more analog days, and not as much digital.
But that was true of most Clipsch systems
that people had in their homes.
Now, the larger-sized Clipsch horn-loaded speakers were designed
to actually fit in a corner,
and were used, as I said,
in many movie houses of the day,
either Alpha Clamping or Clipsch,
were used in a lot of movie houses back then,
and I remember going to a guy's apartment over in St. Louis,
when we were over there on a kind of musical tour kind of trip,
we were over there to do some performances in St. Louis,
and there was a friend of a friend kind of
that I got in contact with to get some electronic parts.
He apparently worked for,
I think it was McDonald Douglas,
and had access to a lot of electronic parts.
And so, like I said,
he was a brother of the other person that I knew
through another friend,
and we, you know,
ventured out three GPS,
found his little house,
a little classic kind of 1950s ranch-style houses,
people living in the US know what I mean,
and we knock on the door,
and he said,
from inside I can hear him yelling out and he says,
wait just a minute,
and I hear this sound,
that sounds like he's rolling something over the floor
or dragging something
as a sound of a rumbling sound,
like something zooming across the floor,
and then he opens up the front door.
Now, if you're from the United States of America,
you're familiar with this house.
It has a big picture window in the living room,
and you come into the front door on one side
or the other of that living room,
which is a large rectangle right here at the front of the house.
The kitchen is behind that,
two or three bedrooms,
off to one side,
and the garage,
off of the kitchen.
And, like I say,
the door is always in the corner of the bedroom.
Well, what he had actually been doing is he owned
two of the five-and-half or six-foot tall,
Clipchorn-loaded speakers
that you would typically see
at a large venue like a movie theater
or something that needed a lot of sound going out.
Very efficient,
but not very practical in the living room,
but this guy was a bachelor,
and he had mounted these things on castors,
and one of these,
he actually rolled into the corner
so it blocked his front door.
Like usually, right,
he would go in and out of the garage,
and he would use the entrance that went in and out of his kitchen,
so he didn't need to go in and out of his front door
on a regular basis.
But what this did do is give him perfect stereo reproduction
and lo and behold,
just as I imagine,
he had mounted right in the middle or not mounted,
but placed right in the middle of his rectangular living room there,
a sofa that was perfectly positioned
to listen to the stereo separation of his speaker system.
So the bachelor's life,
when you had a better income than a beer college student put it forward,
anyway,
and I bought some electronic parts from him and all that kind of stuff,
but I'll never forget that.
If you have a six foot clip speaker,
you know, you just mounted on castors
and moved around your living room to put it in the corner.
So those are very, very efficient.
The given amount of, as I say,
the given amount of power
that you delivered to those
will give you a much higher FBL.
Now, if worth mentioning,
I don't know that anybody knows
any more to listen to speakers,
but during this time frame,
you used to go and listen to speakers
and compare those speakers
and one thing that we learned
at this time,
if you do anything about this,
was you always want to listen to those speakers
at the same sound pressure level.
You do not want to listen to the speakers
where there's a marked difference
in the amount of sound coming out of the speaker
because the one that sounds louder
will inherently sound better to you.
And thusly, if it was a store
that was doing this correctly,
as I mentioned,
some of these were more efficient
and some were less efficient,
and so they would have,
in their speaker switch,
a system that would equalize
the amount of sound coming out of the speaker,
so you could compare those more directly
and not have one be a whole lot louder
than the other one,
which would then influence you by that speaker.
And you could always tell
that the place was trying to kind of,
you know, take advantage of people
who were buying things
because they didn't have that setup
and certain things with some louder
and lo and behold,
that would probably be the one
that they made the big markup on,
you know, if you know what I mean.
Anyway,
so now here's a little question here,
okay?
There you have a, you know,
I talk about sound pressure levels
and those are measured in decibels, right?
Which are tens of the bell.
Bell being the Alexander bell
of telephone things.
And the decibel
is a logarithmic kind of system.
So every ten decibels,
right, essentially one decibel
is the minimum
that one can hear a difference in sound.
And the wattage
that is required to take place
and the decibels that you hear
out of the system
that is necessary to take place
are all related to what another,
how efficient the system is,
depending upon the wattage
of the, you know,
the amplifier driving the speaker system.
But it's related to this logarithmic scale
for the decibel.
Now, as I mentioned,
the one decibel is being
does the minimum
that, you know,
one can hear a difference in sound
at whatever level.
And in order to provide
a difference in sound
that sounds twice as loud
does not require you
to just double the decibels.
In fact,
to double the perceived amount of sound
out of the system,
you need ten times
power
for something along that line.
And so,
the amount of power that you need
from your amplifier
to be louder
and not be distorted
would grow, as I said,
logarithmically.
You could have a one watt amplifier
and you could
build your own one watt amplifier
that was a transistor based.
And it could be a fairly clean amplifier
with a low distortion
for the sound and all that type of thing.
And use that amplifier
with any speaker system that you wish.
But if you were using a ported system,
that was more efficient,
then you got more decibels out
for the equivalent amount of wattage.
And in order to make that seem twice as loud,
you needed to have ten watts of power.
And then twice as loud as that,
a hundred watts of power.
And then you needed a thousand watts of power.
And so, it goes up,
I said exponentially,
logarithmically here.
And so, efficiency of the speakers
was very important.
And to this day,
your analog line,
your speaker line,
that goes from your amplifier,
your stereo amplifier
to the speakers,
that's usually not a digital signal, right?
That is usually still analog,
going from the amplifier to the speakers.
Now,
where this goes back to monster cable,
not starting up being able,
is there's actually a spec
that takes place
with speaker wire
and the frequencies involved with sound reproduction.
When you get into radio waves,
this is much more profound.
And in fact, there's
an impedance that gives associated with
the wire that transfers
your radio signal to your tower.
And in fact,
there's also a effect
of how much that wire
is going to
diminish the sound,
how much that
of the signal you're going to lose
when you are transferring
a radio signal,
because your transmitter
is at the bottom of the tower,
and you've got a long wire
going to your top of the radio tower
because you want that.
And can it very high in the air
in order to get the best signal out?
And that actually
is a relationship to
what the frequency is
that you're actually
broadcasting on.
You want a certain
length of
minimum length
above the ground.
And the impedance
of the wire itself
is very important.
There's coaxial wire
like you might see
with a citizen fan radio
or various center types of two-way radios.
There's also
what the radio guys would call
a ladder line,
which is literally two
strands of wire
separated
and
coaxial
low,
evenly
along the entire length of the wire,
and the reason
it's called ladder line
is because they're
inflators that hold a
part,
and it looks like
a little miniature ladder.
And even that has
an impedance.
Typically coaxial
cable is 300
ohms.
The coaxial cable you might
use to connect
your T receiver
to an antenna,
which is typically
75 ohms.
And then
the various ladder lines
are either
300 or 600 ohms.
And there is
a attenuation
of the signal,
any of the coaxes
that are more
resistant to
outside influence
of
magnetism and
electromagnetic
forces like
hum and other
kinds of things
that degrade your radio signal.
Well,
the ladder line
is a very resistant at all
with the two
inflators,
but it has the
least loss.
And then
any of the coaxial
which
are more resistant
to that,
you lose
part of your signal
and since we're talking
maybe hundreds of
teeth up to the top
of your tower,
this is an important aspect.
So you want to
get the best balance
of not losing
your signal,
but
and maximizing
not a power
that you're delivering
to the antenna.
And antenna is
a very similar
to speakers
that we have
four
ohms or
eight ohms are
the typical
kind of thing.
Typical
speakers eight ohms
and four ohm
or eight ohm
loads are
typically what
amplifiers are
rated
to deliver to.
And it's not like
you lose a whole lot of
power in your
distribution line
to the speaker.
And the
frequencies are low enough
that you don't have to
worry about how to get the
ladder line where
they're
even spaces apart.
But if
it is still an
area
that is
dangerous for you to
use.
There is some
degradation of that power.
You're not
delivering
much power to the
speaker.
And part of that is
something that
is called
the skin effect.
Well,
if you look
at what you
see skin effect in
what you see
is the surface
effect of a skin
effect.
And what it's actually refers to is depending on the conductor, but typically with speaker
where we're talking, you know, copper conductor, right?
And now it's worth mentioning when I talk about speaker wire, I'm not talking about specialized
connectors that one uses in modern public address system.
So if you set up for a band, if you're a roadie, there's literally a speaker connector.
It's kind of like an XLR connector with three, you know, contacts on it, and it you
plug it in and you rotate it to lock it into the speaker system.
And that liberal connector and the female that it walks into is called a speaker connector.
But I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about the regular speaker wire that goes, you know, just the wire that transfers
from your amplifier to your speakers.
And this is true for stereos and this is true for your 5.1, you know, stereo system when you're
for satellite speakers around the room and your bass speaker, right, for your subwoofer here.
So that wire, the skin effect is related to the frequency and the higher the frequency,
the less actual area of the cross-diagonal of the wire is used to transfer the electrons,
right?
The current going through the wire is electrons passing from atoms to atoms and copper is very good
about that.
If it's not very easy for those atoms to go from place to place.
For low frequencies, it'll use that transfer of the electrons will happen very deep into the wire.
So if you were to look at that cross-section of the wire, you would, and you were to be able
to measure that in their ways to do this, the electrons will be transferring in atoms that are
quite down deep beyond just the surface.
But the higher your frequencies go, the less and the less of the atoms are involved with the
transfer of the electrons, okay, it's called the skin effect because it's closer to the skin,
closer to the outside.
And in that particular regard, a lot of people at the time would use just a standard
zip cord that's called, it's got two conductors, and it's called zip cord that has you can pull
in the part and plastic or rubber kinds of, you know, of insulator around, and it does hold the
wire's parallel, but that's not really important here, right, at these frequencies.
But you can just zip it apart, it comes apart kind of like a zipper, right?
And then you can separate the wires and then, you know, cut off the insulators and twist
them around and poke them into your conductors or your fingers, okay, and typically the
cheapest stuff like that that you can buy was a solid cord, it was one wire inside of there.
Now some people had already started using the stranded wire, right, multiple, you know,
little strands of wire twisted together because the problem with the solid core wire at whatever
gauge was the fact that it was too easy to bend it too often and it would break even inside
the inflator.
So sometimes you do stranded cord, but typically a lot of stereos, and to this day I see a lot of
stereos or multi-channel, you know, kind of set up to have very thin wire that is going to that
and partially that's too high to wire, right, because there's spread around your house,
there's spread around your roof.
But the stranded aspect of things use your work conductors and each of the individual
conductors has a fun skin effect.
So you're losing less power with the same gauge wire, if it's a bunch of little wires that are
stranded and are, you know, together as opposed to just the one single wire and by going to
larger finds of wire, which gauge of wire is kind of funny because it's similar to gauge of
shotgun cells, right, so an 18 gauge wire is thinner than a 16 gauge wire, which is thusly thinner
than a 14 gauge wire.
So the lower the number, the thicker of the wire, okay, and so a lot of people would use
18 gauge wire, and that's what it looks like a lot of these five, one, you know, movie times
of things use is probably about 18 gauge wire, and you've got a certain number of strands
that made up that 18 gauge total that was the size of the wire.
Well, people started using 16, there was even 22 gauge wire, you get little teeny tiny wires,
and it's just little teeny tiny stranded versions of them.
Well, stop using 22 gauge and use 18 gauge instead, and for some reason there's not
much 20 gauge wire around, right? But stop using 22 gauge and use 18 gauge, and all of a sudden
you've got more strands of wire, and thusly you have less skin effect and you lose less power
between your amplifier and your speakers, right? And sometimes we're talking about very small
lottings of amplifiers here, but it's still true to the say, you're, you know, 200 watt
amplifier, it's not delivery, it's maximum 200 watts, if you're using little skinny wires,
as opposed to thicker wires, that have more strands of wire, and thusly have the skin effect
spread out across multiple wires, and more power is delivered to your speakers.
And thusly the monster cable, and I'm doing your quotes here, was more. It was literally a
monster cable, it was a big, a cable that had a whole good trillion stranded wires,
that would then go down to a, you know, a point that was small, not to fit into the little,
you know, push the clip and stick the wire in that you would have on the, the stereo side,
and the amplifier side, and the speaker side. And that's, thusly monster cables were born.
Now, it being that I was in college, I couldn't even afford the monster cables, you know,
back then, and this was $19.50 compared to, you know, present-day dollars, and no matter what
somebody tells you about inflation, not me around. Yeah, there's been a lot of, of inflation,
and thusly, the same amount of money now is not the same as that, the equivalent amount of money was in,
you know, the 70s and 80s. But I couldn't afford the monster cable, but I came across a cable that
was actually used for some digital transfer and data, and I came across it cheaply enough,
that I just took that, and it was a venture-stranded wire, and it was multiple pairs of stranded
wire. And so I created my own monster cables, right? I stripped off the wire and then twisted them
together to form my, you know, two connectors that I needed to provide a better transference of the
power from the amplifier to the speakers. And this was actually measurable when you talked about,
you know, some of these things. I mean, you could actually measure the difference of the sound pressure
level you would get out, and it was more important if you were using closed speakers because
they were less efficient, and we're talking about smaller scale amplifiers. Now, what did we learn
from this, right? When it comes time to talk about other types of cables, I guess monster could
kind of make some claim for other types of cables that were analog, but when we move into the
digital age, there's no need for a monster cable, right? There's no appreciable difference between
the overrised monster cable and the equivalent four or five dollar cable you can buy off of various
sites on the internet. It's a digital signal. It's ones and zeros. You don't have to worry about the
signal degrading over time and less and less analog, you know, voltage swing because all the
voltage swing has to do on any given line of the digital cable is be of about a certain voltage
and be below a certain voltage, and then you've got a cutoff voltage that means the one or a zero
and you're done. So, obviously, there's no real reason why you should pay extra for that,
but their entire company was based upon this. Hard cables are better than any other cable that
you can use from the very beginning, and they literally haven't figured out a way to have any
other advantage. Gold connectors kind of get into this, but that's a whole data subject, and there's
a whole lot of things that have little connectors, okay? That's better because they don't oxidize,
and, you know, the connection doesn't, you know, reduce any transference of the electrical
signal and all those kinds of things, and that, you know, but there's a lot of cables that have that.
So, they started out with a dim and straightable advantage that justified a higher price,
but when they moved on to other things, they never came up with other reasons why their cables
were better, and there really isn't much of a reason why their cables are better,
but people don't know the difference, and thusly, well, this must be better because it, you know,
costs more. But they didn't start out being evil. It's just that they're stuck in this rut. We
make cables, and our cables are better than everybody else, and it ends up being there isn't any,
especially for digital ones. There isn't any way to prove that they're better than anybody else.
That's the only thing they have that is a small one. Now, what do we learn from this, as I said?
One thing we learn is, when things change, you either need to adapt, or eventually somebody's
going to see through and figure out that the emperor has no clothes on, right? If you're a
buggy manufacturer, you better start figuring out what you can manufacture with the same tool and
that doesn't involve a horse drawing at any more, right? You better get into this auto-mobile
kind of manufacturing of auto-mobile chassis, or you're going to be out of business soon, right?
If you're a stable boy, and your father was a stable boy, and your grandfather was a stable boy,
and it gets to be the early 1900s, you better find another way to make a living, because you
aren't going to be a stable boy for that much longer, because the stables aren't going to be
necessary for that much longer, because horses are going away, and cars are coming in.
And what do we learn about this for other companies, okay? One that I can think of is Microsoft.
Now, Microsoft is built upon the fact that they came up with an operating system to actually win
out and bought an operating system from another company there in Seattle, so that they could say to
IBM when they came up to them and asked about an operating system for the new PC, which the PC,
you know, had its birthday just last week when I'm recording this, and they said, yeah, we've
done an operating system for that, and they rushed around and bought this operating system that
became the operating system that every PC had with it, and then they came out with windows,
once the graphical things started becoming popular that kind of sat on top of windows,
and it's been included with your computer all the way along. It's hard to buy a computer without
the operating system that comes from Redmond, Washington, right? It's just the natural thing.
You buy a PC, they come up with that operating system. But I do believe we really are getting
into a quote unquote post PC world. There's going to be more and more devices that do not run windows,
at least the windows that we think of traditionally, on the desktop. There's going to be more and more
devices that run other kind of operating systems. Now, Redmond would love that to be mobile windows,
but a lot of those devices like the phone that is, you know, in your pocket or in your bag,
and tablets that are coming out, and the set of laptops that you have will those aren't running
a windows based operating system, and Microsoft doesn't get a little bit of every single one of those devices.
I've long said that in Bill Gates' perfect world, right, everything you own without a Microsoft
operating system on it, and they get a little chunk of change, right? For every single thing you buy,
everything should be a Microsoft operating system. But that's not how it's turned out to be.
We got a lot of things that are running Linux, and other kinds of Xs, right? You know, WebOS is kind
of based on a unit kind of variant. We got Linux, a very install out there. Androi has really kind
of soloco, running on top of a Linux kernel. Even the black version, if it manages to survive,
is a, you know, a unique kind of variant, right? Unix compatible kind of operating system,
that's a real time operating system, but you can type Unix stock advance if you get to a terminal
in there. And the world is a change in, and what is that going to mean to the Microsoft?
Are they going to react to that and change? Or are they going to just keep on doing what they've
always done, and the world's going to pass them by? And you know, it seems like that couldn't
possibly be, but I got another story to tell you. When I did this, I traveled in the 80s for the
small computer company that I, the computer software company that I worked for, and they got
bought out by the database company from California. I was on a trip to Boston, and this is the
high life in Boston. This is back in the days when the, the housing in the Boston area, at
least, was really going up, up, up. I mean, the reason why Bob Vila and this old house
had so many old houses that you could redo and get alone to be able to do, you know, upgrades
on that house is because if you just waited a couple of years, your house was worth that much
more and you could get alone against it, right, and do improvements on your house.
And I remember reading a story about that, and also then, in that same newspaper,
I read another story and it was talking about Novel. Not this time, in the 80s, Novel owned
networking. Novel was networking. Microsoft usually, like I say, they buy their way into a market,
they don't write it themselves. Okay, they did continue to develop, you know, DOS, and they
developed Windows internally. The lots of other things they bought that. And Microsoft tried to
break Novel's stranglehold on networking. Three times, as I remember, it was finally the third
one that started making the inroads. But at this time, Novel was networking, right? There
was Banyan and a couple of other, you know, minor kinds of things. So basically, if you were talking
about micro computers, you were a Novel shop for your networking. And at this particular time,
in this newspaper story, I noticed that the person said that there were more resellers of
Novel software. Now, not certified professionals or, you know, people who couldn't support other
things, but just people who sold Novel software. There were more resellers of Novel software.
Then there were Southland Industries locations in the United States of America. And I don't know
who owns them now, but at this particular time, Southland Industries, I think I if posted that,
if I'm not exactly right on that. Basically, what Southland Industries was known for was they own
7-Eleven stores. So there were more resellers of Novel in the United States of America,
in the middle eighties here. Then there were 7-Eleven convenience stores in the United States of America.
And yet, where is Novel today? Basically, they don't exist anymore, do they?
And ironically, part of what was Novel has been bought out by Microsoft.
So what you think of now as the great ones, there are other things that in the middle eighties,
people would laugh at you. They would scoff at you when you suggested that it was possible that Novel
would no longer own the networking market. And yet, it happened because they let Microsoft chip away
and chip away and finally come up with something that could compete with them and they didn't innovate
to stay ahead and they're gone. And it's the same way with Monster. Monster is eventually going to
be gone because eventually people are going to see through this. It's not really that much different
than going to a big box store. If you go to any retailer and you buy a cable there,
it's going to cost you not as much as a monster cable. It must, of course, it is a monster cable.
But it's not going to be as cheap as you can buy an equivalent cable that electrically will accomplish
exactly the same task online. So you have to think about this and you have to innovate
and you have to progress. You can't rest on your laurels and if there's anything anywhere
that's more true, it's in the technological world here. Now the other thing that we've learned about
this is there is a loss of that. And so this is a why is it we're still doing this? Okay. So
example of why is it we're still doing this is why do we build houses, at least in the US,
and I'm assuming this way at a lot of places still? Why do we still build houses, the way we did
to build houses 100 years ago? We bring a bunch of lumber to a location and we build it by cutting
the lumber up into pieces and nailing it and screwing it and various other fasteners together to build
the house. It's like saying you bought a new car and they deliver a bunch of pieces and parts
to your driveway and they build the car in your driveway. Okay. So why are we delivering the sound
to the speakers? The same way we've been delivering sound to speakers ever since they
invented amplifiers. There are certain power speakers that I know are available and a lot of
people use in studios for their home recording studios and things like that. Why aren't there more
because I can build a nice amplifier with a good amount of wattage and with this whole
way that the decibels work, you know, you can get a good amount of nice clean sound especially
with some of the new designs of amplifiers that are available now in a very small space with very
small amounts of power and you don't need 200 watts of power, right? Because really 200
watts of power is just, you know, somewhat louder than 20 watts. If you had a more efficient speaker
and if you had a nice clean high-power amplifier directly on the speaker and we delivered a
digital cable signal to that amplifier and then had a digital analog converter or even if we
delivered an analog signal to that power amplifier but your centralized system looked more of a pre-amplifier
that you don't have to worry about this kind of thing at line levels, right? At line levels that come
out of the amplifier, you could deliver that analog signal even over there without losing much
and then you could amplify it at the speaker and deliver it more efficiently that way.
I don't really see more of that. Why don't we see some innovation in these things? Because a lot
of things having to do with sound have radically changed, right? Nobody uses LPs anymore unless they're
way into sound and like the sound of LPs and are basically way the exception rather than the rules,
right? It's a real kind of nerdy specialist geeky thing to be into LPs.
And we totally, totally rearranged how we deliver the sound out there in terms of the medium
but that medium then goes into an analog signal and gets delivered to the speakers basically exactly
the same way it did in the 1950s and 1940s when the basics of, you know, those kinds of amplifiers
came into their peak of development. The only difference between that and now is we went from tubes
which I'd also like to say, real electronics glow. And I would love to have the money to own
a really nice crown tube amplifier or, you know, a Macintosh which is the ultimate, and this is not
the computer, this is the stereo equipment, a Macintosh amp with real tubes that glow but that's not
as clean and amplifier. It affects the sound, okay? If not as clean as some of these new,
you know, designs that are available at all of the state amplifiers but we still have them
centralized and we still have little teeny tiny thin wires delivering it out through the speakers
and that's not a profession. So we fixed that by just up in the amplifier of the wattage
but that's really not an equivalent kind of thing. I mean, I could use less wattage, I could
be more efficient, I could use less power if I had more efficient speakers and if I outsource,
if I move those amplifiers out to the speaker systems rather than centrally. A lot of large-scale
PA's that I saw coming in in concert venues, a lot of those are that way. The amplifier is in
the PA speaker and it delivers a line-level signal of what that speaker's supposed to be reproducing
and the speaker has power and if the amplifier and the speaker all integrate it together
but not in the home, at least not that much. Powered subwoofers are the only time when you see
typically a powered speaker, not anything above those base speaker frequencies. Why not?
Here's an opportunity there. There's always an opportunity and are you going to be the one
who sees that opportunity and does something to make something do something in this particular
regard because if you do, you can have then that capability of making a lot of money. Maybe you
win as much money as Bill Gates, right? So you can have a lot there and this is Mr. Gadget. It's
hoping to see you. I found out I'm going to be at the Ohio Linux SESC. So let's see if the
Ohio Linux SESC, which by the time this comes out, it will be closer to that.
And if not, be careful and I'll be out here on a technological frontier and you know
so we'll talk about it next time. But be careful and we'll talk to you later. Bye now.
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