Virtual Salon

Fighting for Consumers - Virtual Dynamics, and Who We Are

As our company grows, and becomes talked about more, I am brought back to remember how I started and what motivated me to bring my product to market.

These days we're trying pretty hard to get our message out, and I'd like to think we are doing an okay job at that, but the reality is we haven't been telling a message publicly loud and clear for way too long.  So, what is our message?  Well, that's why I titled this thread "Fighting for consumers."  For the first 10 or 15 years of being an audiophile I struggled to know really anything at all about audio.  I missed the fact that it was an electronic device just like a computer, and either you knew how they operated or you didn't.

I bought parts for mine on a regular basis.  For me it was a true addiction.  One of those types of addictions that you put before everything else.  I so desperately wanted to know how things worked.  I find myself in my advertising, this blog, and everywhere else, hoping to communicate to people, and show them, and tell them, what I ended up finally learning.  What did I learn?  Well, audio does come at a price, it is just not the price that i thought it would be.  It is not monetary, you can't buy it.

The only way that you can truly get to know how audio works is to learn the science behind how the machines themselves operate.  If an electric motor is a machine, then so is your amplifier.  They are too closely related of brothers to not fall into the same category.  In fact, your audio system is not so unlike your microwave, your coffee pot, your computer... you get it, electronics. 

For six years I have been answering questions and the question I think I get most often is "What would sound best?"  I think it sums up what everybody really wants, well, let me share just a small story with you, I'll keep it brief.  I recently set together a system, maybe not so recent, it's been gone for about a year now, but this system was something that you couldn't buy.  I mean it wasn't about the fact that nobody has enough money it's just there was only one like this.

It had been taken from the very best equipment that I could find and everything was torn down and rebuilt using everything that I had come to know for high end upgraded caps, to technologies like dynamics filtering and our speed of light built right inside.

It represented hundreds and hundreds of hours of my personal man hours of labor, and I would guess close to 300,000 dollars of cash investment, and I realize that that was all "at cost".  I say one night after getting to the point that I knew what to do well enough that I could get up anytime that I wanted to and make my audio system significantly better with a few minutes, usually with a soldering iron in hand and a couple of inventions that I learned that I could rely on. My amps at this point were a special design, one only, and the circuit was from Steve Keiser.  Each amp was fed by a farad of capacitance.  I had custom built stands for my speakers and every driver was customized by myself.  Machine shop time stopped being calculated pretty soon after I started, and I seemed to live there for a while.  With all of this time and all of this investment here's the one thing that I have learned.  It will always get better.

I mean that.  You cannot hit utopia.

If you think you have, and you don't believe what I'm saying contact me and with a few minutes and soldering iron, I will ruin it for you.  So why is there no pinnacle? Well, because gents, ladies, it's a moving bar.  Recently, I have been trying pretty hard to explain some fairly basic stuff.  I remember one conversation with a very intelligent and kind I person who was almost hurt as I started to explain the basics.  He had an engineering background, and in part, I think a little distraught that a guy like myself, with no secondary education or real electronics background could provide such explanations and experimentations that he could do for himself that challenged what he had been taught to believe.

It was almost a "Who are you to be challenging me?" type of feel.  I would  explain how something worked , like how no two conductors would be the same , and then he would argue that they could be, so we broke it down, and we looked at the likelihood of "could they be?"  and the answer from he, himself was , no, I guess not.  If no two particles are the same, then no two conductors can be the same.  He went from believing as an educated person that they had to be, to knowing, from simple understanding, that they couldn't be.

See, my problem is, I want to help consumers, but even the most basic or arguments that should be so easily won, to help consumers understand better, are taking such a tremendous fight.  I have been asked, "why don't we do more testing?" and, we are, but I guess this is the point, isn't it?  For the basic design of a conductor, what makes it special,  and what cables really do, we seem to have no collective clue, as an industry.

What I have seen, learned, and come to understand that, just like I had to go through it, the only hope I have of helping you, as a consumer, is to encourage you, hope for you, help you, do the best you can to understand what it is you are buying, how and why it works, and how much impact it will make on your system for the amount of dollars you have to put towards it.  My hope is that prestige in High-End audio shifts from what is most expensive to what can be explained by simple, easy to understand science the best.

It's not to say that cool inventions should be excluded, even if they are not easy to explain, but without the basics most audiophiles will never assemble a system like the one they dream of having.

New Speakers or properly designed cables?

What happens if the new speakers you are looking for are no better than what you have?  Consumers understand that cables can dramatically change the sound of an audio system.  Speaker cables soar in prices into the tens of thousands, but as a consumer how can we justify these products and these prices?

I urge you as an audiophile and an audio manufacturer to learn about the products that you buy.  Do you know and understand how loudspeaker works?  Do you know and understand exactly why cables change the sound?  The truth can be a somewhat scary adventure but as a consumer, you are the one at risk….

Do you remember a few years ago when we lost the ability to control Bass and treble through the twist of a knob?  We were informed as consumer s that this could create distortion.  The resistive pathway that was created by these devices would lead us astray from the purity that we seek after as audiophiles.  Unanimously the industry agreed that purity is possible and likely to be achieved if we just omitted this device.

Out of this the multi-million dollar cabling industry was born virtually overnight.

For those of you who have been around for a while, you will remember that the speaker cables and interconnects that were starting to be promoted could work to replace these devices.  In fact all you have to do is scan the forums and the millions of conversations to see what bass and treble controls have been replaced with.

The reason that bass and treble controls have been replaced by exotic audio cables is because they create the same basic effect for the same basic reason!

The problem is we can no longer, as an industry, easily understand what happens, because the explanation is a little more difficult to understand, however, consumers are buying in to maybe one of the greatest tragedies in audio history.  One that we are sure to look back at and say, “How did we get there?”

What makes a cable better?   I mean truly better, cleaner, clearer and more accurate?  Well, look at all the different designs being touted as the absolute best.  They range in design from conductors the size of a human hair to ones goliath couldn’t bend.  They are made from aluminum, gold, copper, silver and almost any metal, and even non-metal that you can think of, and in as many different shapes and configurations as there are companies.

The one consistent thing about them, if they are really really good, is that they are extremely expensive!

It has become a growing industry where cable prices are the single largest determining factor that many consumers are consulting to assure themselves that this cable is, indeed, better. 

In any other industry such diversity would likely be laughable.  Why? Well, let’s look at this.  What if tires were made from rubber, or nylon, or ceramic, or copper, or Teflon…  what if they were square and rectangle and oblong and hexagonal? Would we be so easily convinced by a huge price tag that the new ceramic, square tire priced at 50,00 dollars was actually better for our car?

Well, I am here to tell you as a manufacturer, as an audiophile, and as a friend, that is exactly where we have found ourselves.

This ad was created to promote and encourage change to build a more sensible and competitive marketplace driven by consumers just like you who have taken the time and the energy to become informed about what you buy.

As you know, we have a speaker cable, the virtual dynamics Genesis, that in a 6 foot Bi-Wire pair has been touted as “The Best.”  At a mere cost of 30, 344 dollars these cables will compete with anything at any price.

Consumers, audiophile friends, brothers of the industry, we need to change.

This ad brings change.  I want to sell you my 30, 000 dollar cables, although slightly used, in a 6 ft bi-wire pair for 9000 dollars.  Do you know why?  Because I can afford to.  Why?

One of the reasons we have returned to direct marketing at Audiogon is because we could no longer pretend to compete and play both sides of the fence.  Dealer margins on audio cables can grow beyond your imagination.  Let’s consider that if there is any truth to a cable’s quality being dependant on price and not manufacturing costs but retail as prestige, what could happen to a cable costing only a few dollars to make each when an ingenious, or even a realistic marketer looks at this industry?

Cable prices have become an elitist who’s-who that woos even the very finest of us.

I put this cable together based on several different elements.  Let me explain to you the simple fact of why it is better.

First, a conductor is more conductive because of  how much larger it is, and conductive conductors are quite likely the single most important thing you should look for.  Smaller conductors, regardless of their purity have higher resistance, dramatically higher resistance that simply creates signal loss.

I am saying that there is no other way in science to make a metal cable pass more signal than to increase signal flow through increasing the gauge size of the conductor and thus lowering the resistance to the signal.

Let’s look at what we have been taught recently.  We have been taught to look for the purity of the copper.  A common occurrence has seen the placement of repeated numerals such as 99.9999999… what does it mean?  Well, what I can tell you is that it is not directly related with conductivity.  In fact, electrolytic though pitch and our new Linipur, which is 99.99 percent pure copper what has been annealed are both 101% conductive.  What do I mean by 101%, well simply, base don the standards that were formed years ago on what perfect could be for conductivity, we have now exceeded that in the metal industry with these two common conductors.  Common?  Yes!  Often found in typical, high quality conductors at your neighborhood electrical store.

So, let’s look at what we have not been taught.  Cables of the same gauge size and even the same material can also be different sounding one from another based on design.  The greatest influence of design of an audio cable that creates sonic differences between cables is explained technically as intermodulation distortion.  This distortion is what is responsible for the greatest influence in sound that an audio system can have.  It is today’s bass and treble control that we spoke about. 

How does it work?

Well, I’ll sum it up quite simply, and you could certainly do an experiment like this at home.  Take a 12 gauge, or any gauge size you prefer, but have both a solid core single conductor in that gauge size, as well as a stranded conductor.  A stranded conductor, by definition, would have 2 different conductive pathways, or more.  Typical audio cable is made of fine strands woven together, as many as a hundred or so, all serving as a single conductor.  That particular thought is where science deviates from what we, as consumers, would normally believe.

What we did is we took out a constant fixed resistor that we knew the value of and we replaced it with a floating variable resistive value that would be simply impossible to calculate because it is simply ever-changing with every track of music that you play.

Imagine having replaced bass and treble controls with maybe a million band EQ and hiring thousands of people to constantly turn the knobs for you, just for fun.  That is the scope of what we have traded bass and treble controls for.

As a consumer I realize that it is difficult to understand this very non-technical explanation.  Much more technical, and who would possibly want to read it, assuming you do now… but friends this is where your 30 000 dollars could be going if you are not aware of what you are buying, how it works and why.  You may be purchasing a beautiful set of square ceramic tires if we were to build an analogy for you.

The cable that we are offering is, in our understanding, simply the most innovative and technically advanced product that you can purchase to obtain cleaner, clearer and better sound.  There is not a competitive product because there is nothing like this cable being manufactured by anyone else.  Nothing even close.

So, if you are looking to make a big improvement in your audio system, maybe we need to talk.  Give us a call and let us help you understand your purchase and make a better more educated buying decision.

Keep your ears tuned,

Rick Schultz