hello everyone this is amir from audio science review i thought i
do a quick review of these premium um headphone cables uh i got a focal Elex
headphone to test the second sample and the owner was kind enough to send me these uh
add-on accessory cables from a company called norn audio n-o-r-n-e
audio he sent me three of them this one i think is the most expensive silver one
you can see it like this a very very soft supple cable um all three of them are
this is one i think this is could be as expensive as eight hundred dollars for this cable
um then there's one that i think is a mix of copper and silver uh braided somehow uh
and then uh he got a maybe thrown in there because it took a while to get his cables made
and the owner sent him this cable i think this one's probably about 250 or so he uh
says these cables aren't exactly what's on the company's website right now but
when i look they're very very close i actually found three models that were similar to these
and uh i've listed them i've listed the model numbers in here on the review that i did post
last night yeah i don't know how he pronounces the drug silver cable and uh and what have you um they
all use you know various types of cables in the lights configuration i know some people pronounce
lights cables as litz cables i grew up calling them lights cables i don't know what the proper
German pronunciation is or or whether there's variation of how people pronounce it in different
English speaking countries anyway these cables i don't know if you've messed with them they're
very lightweight and have a special twist and when i used to terminate them back in the day i used to
hate doing that because they're just they have this insulation you got burned off and then you
got a terminator maul and uh of course somebody sits there and weaves all these cables like this
so close like knitting or crocheting or something you gotta sit there and wrap these things and
then you terminate them together and they gotta sell them properly and hopefully with some kind
of strained relief in there to get them to work so um as expensive as they sound to me it's uh
you know for one-off type of things doesn't sound expensive i know i couldn't sell this
cable to you for two hundred dollars and be happy sitting there in my bedroom making these for you
so it's not a question of cost in here the question is does it do anything
uh electronically uh electrically or acoustically um since i recently measured the four calorie
likes uh uh it was not easy to just put it on and uh i was surprised how well i was able to hold
the headphones in the fixture while unplugging plugging these cables in because as you do that
the cups can move and just one millimeter movement can actually change the frequency response
and let me circle back to that so this is the frequency response of the stock cable
uh in green and then these three cables as you can see they all land on top of each other the stock
cable from focal is this awful stiff braided cable that you get maybe excuse me as a i don't know 10
usb cables come that way i have no idea why company like focal would sell premium k headphones
but comes up with this stiff nonsense so i can see people from a mechanical point of view wanting a
cable that's as soft and supple as these are and certainly something that looks better
than what's there but from frequency response point of view measured acoustically meaning
what was going to go to your ears there's not even a hair out of place over here
uh it's just incredible how repeatable the measurements are and despite the fact that
i had to mechanically plug and unplug things uh if the headphones had moved just a hair
it would have made more of a variation than these cables have so to give you a sense of how
unreasonable it is to assume that the frequency once changes every time you put this thing on your
head and take it off you know you're putting it on differently and you're actually causing frequent
response variations that are measurable but you're probably not even perceiving that here we can even
measure the effect on this test um the headphone measurement system automatically spits out
distortions as i show for the headphones and we can see the different distortion graphs again for
the star cable and blue and then the other three cables uh on that and these slide variations that
you see in here this is all uh just measurement differences there's noise in the environment and
and run to run variations actually this is exceptionally good for headphone measurements
uh the one difference i found was around 120 hertz which is a double domains frequency of 60hz in us
and it must be radiating from something around here that i have lots of electronics on my desk
and i was not paying attention to laying the cable identically so i just randomly measured
i'm not expecting a difference and i noticed that the stock cable does the best excuse me in this
regard and the three premium cables are actually slightly worse and picking up that hum and mains
noise um i set up a custom test for that where i take these cables and i have a
transformer that lets me induce uh electromagnetic field into the cables and uh i noticed that all of
them pick up some amount uh on that and uh it was not conclusive maybe the stock cable was a little
bit less but it just wasn't conclusive enough so i don't you know basically the orientation of the
cable and the source would make it enough more of a difference than the cable differences themselves
so this just may be a fluke that the other cables picked up more mains noise or not but it's bad
luck for the company that their cables are the ones that did worse at least in this one one test
now acoustic measurements are limited in their resolution because of the noise that exists in
the environment and also the limitation of the headphone itself the headphone is 1.7 distortion
so let's say these cables have a 0.01 difference it's not going to show up in here but it is what
we hear it is the application so this is a real application but to go out of our way and really
focus on the cable itself i bypass the headphone so i'm still using the top in a90 as the uh
source amplifier headphone amplifier but instead of connecting the other end of the cable
to a headphone i just hooked it up to my audio precision analyzer and just measured electrically
what the frequency response would look like and you can see in here there's just absolutely no
difference this display is extremely zoomed so only quarter of a db down and quarterly the alps
of the entire range is only half a db even if we had variations that would fill this graph
it's doubtful that you know you could hear according to b difference in frequency response
but we don't even have that we have nothing really it's just as flat as you can get there's a slight
error in here in low frequencies that's just a measurement artifact and having to average things
out to get rid of noise but essentially what you're looking at is the frequency response of the
uh headphone amplifier not the cable the all cables have wider bandwidth than the amplifier
itself and the amplifier itself is great by the way it's quarter of db down at 60 kilohertz
uh on this thing at 20 kilohertz is it's not even you know measurable 0.01 db or something like that
so objectively as the physics would say as everything about electronics would say
they're just you know coming out of two different ways with a headphone without the headphone
load it just absolutely there's nothing in here to put put your finger on or hang your head on
and say hey you know this cable can change the sound frequency response is what dictates tonality
how bright something is how much the mids you're hearing the bass the impact all that stuff is in
there and non-linearities show up in in distortion graphs and there's just nothing there at all
now i know better than to finish the review at this point because the other camp immediately says
wow he didn't listen well okay well listen but how do you do an a b test of cables you've got to
put the headphone on then you can't even plug them in blind
really speaking gotta take them off to be able to see the holes to plug in the cable and put
it back on and then plug it in and play the same music again by then a minute has gone by and uh
and you put the headphone on differently every time anyway so no way to from an objective and
proper way of doing control testing can this be valid because there's just too much interruption
there and but we did the test anyway when i said we my son is in his 20s and it's got a
much better sensitivity his first level than that i do and neither one of us could hear a difference
uh on that thing uh now obviously people say they hear night and day difference or they hear
i don't know some level of difference it's the standard explanation i've given in the past
and that your brain listens differently you change cables and you listen differently you may think
it sounds better you may think it sounds worse you absolutely hear a difference because you're
focusing differently on music you're not a machine you're not like my measurement gear and every time
you apply yourself you apply yourself differently that's why we do the test blind um when you don't
know something's changed or not and then we can see statistically whether you were just
coming up with these things and the same thing would apply to both cables if we did it blind
but when you do the test cited then you know what you're switching and what have you
and you just can't arrive at any kind of reliable conclusion that there is a difference your brain's
ability to manufacture differences is probably a hundred to a thousand times more than this
cable possibly could even if it had a difference and but there isn't it's just uh you know they
they just sounded the same i mean there's i don't know what else to tell you the physics say
that the electronics say the theory says that the research says that measurements say that
every arrow points to any statement of audible difference to be wrong or at best hugely unlikely
the fact that somebody ad hoc says oh i can hear it it's like great go ahead and do a blind test
where you have somebody put the headphones on you without you seeing them and have them change the
cables behind you and do that 10 times see if you get at least 8 out of 10 right until you do that
then you're just letting your eyes and your state of mind and and perception guide you as opposed to
real truth on these things now there's no denying that these cables feel better i didn't try to wear
them long term but just touching them you want to sort of play with them and wrap up they feel
nice and they seem well built uh because you're braiding so many cables uh on this thing and if
they give you joy in having them and you can get them custom lengths and what have you get it as
i said at the outset i don't think this person's you know gouging people on this thing i don't know
how much silver cables cost and what have you but i know that sitting there in your home and
putting up at the misery of making cables is not fun and then dealing with customers
and selling them and taking returns and building and shipping all that stuff so personally i don't
have an issue with the cost or the business model and i understand my understanding that
this person lives in silicon valley hugely expensive place to live and and try to pay
mortgage payments and get some food so uh it's not a religion i have against companies like this and
in case of focal if i own those headphones the standard stock cord would drive me nuts and i
would get something else but you know if you want to go with this company's cables i would
get the cheapest ones you can and 200 ones are you know same connectors at each end and
they look fine too although i don't know if i like this color but otherwise they're fine so
um just you know objectively we test this stuff so that when somebody says how do you know they
don't sound different well we've we've tried you know we've tried it our way we tried it their way
with listening tests and there's no difference now if you want to say that i don't hear as well
i'm happy to pass a challenge that for both of us to take on what your ability is to hear the
differences and that starts with you first showing blind that you can tell the difference is that
easy and that obvious just don't look when you uh tell us which is which and see where you are
you know it's a good opportunity to get educated on these things and if you're on the fence and
you know you haven't dived into this topic i highly encourage you to look at results like this
and know that everything we know about science and engineering points to the results that i have to
be true but we still spend the energy and time and expense of shipping these cables back and forth
just to have some hard data behind our opinion so that we don't just have you
know my word we have my word then we have data we have research the other side wants
to counter this then they need to go beyond their work they gotta have their research
okay hope you found some of this useful and i'll see you in a future video bye