hello everyone this is amir from audio science review a few people had requested
that i do some uh cable reviews and uh fortunately i've done some so i thought i
covered this interesting high-end cable um by audioquest called the audioquest wind uh got it
over here um this unusual cable it actually has a battery 72 volts a bunch of little cells in series
generates 72 volts and that voltage then goes to one side of the connector and then the wire
goes through the cable but doesn't connect to anything at the other end what it generates
is uh unknown because you need to complete a circuit for current to flow and if you have a
battery where one end isn't connected to the other end no current flows and no electricity flows and
you know they've got a patent on this so it is unique but whether it does something or
not we'll have to measure at any rate the reviews online yeah but let's go through it uh in detail
uh references always have free cable uh you just grabbed in my box of 3b cables i've gotten
over the years and plug one in and i'll call the generic free cable somebody asked what it was and
i looked at it it actually was made by hitachi and apparently it got a cult following oxygen-free and
what have you but i think it's only cost like 30 or something you can still buy it in japan
so maybe it's a good generic cable but 30 dollars i forgot to say that uh tell you the cost of this
cable this cable for a pair at one meter is 2 300 no that's not a typo 2 300 for two of these
by the way the owner donated this to me that's why i still have it so let's go down we want to
compare to see if this cable does something better than a generic cable so let's go ahead and do that
i've got my audio precision generating a 2 volt sine wave at 1 kilohertz roughly 1 Kilohertz
audio precision has a sine wave generator that's world class it is extremely low distortion and
you can see this on the right where it only has a tiny tiny tiny little blip in here at
2 kilohertz that's down 100 minus 155 db or so remember threshold of hearing is minus 115
115. so on the left over here this is where the best case hearing or you're in a dead silent room
at one kilohertz or two Kilohertz you can hear so we're way down here we do see a little blip
in here which is 60 hertz mains uh interference hum if you will uh not an issue not audible
because it's well below our threshold here i'll come back to this little little layer
a little later so this is our one meter generic cable let's plug in the audioquest wind
what do we see nothing's changed on the right hand side of this graph on the left side some
little change in here we actually have a new spike but didn't have kind of curious uh supposed to
make things better seems to have made it worse and this 60 hertz maintenance has actually uh gone up
gotten worse let's ignore that for now everything else is the same voltage is the same distortion's
the same same frequency down to i don't know six decimal five decimal places is still the same so
it absolutely positively did not do anything so i thought that i play a cruel joke on this dbs thing
if the design is is around and this is directional obviously because as i said the cable connects to
one end and not the other to this battery thing so it would reason that if it does something in
that direction if you reversed it it should do the be worse or it loses benefit well it does nothing
same 2.0 1 volts same distortion same everything same new spikes we didn't have before same
distortion everything no difference whatsoever so at this point you can be confident that this
dbs thing does nothing useful whatsoever with respect to noise floor with respect to distortion
with respect to amplitude frequency nothing's changed in in that regard with respect to dbs now
tonality is determined by frequency response if a cable has a filter on it that rolls off the highs
some cables do have passive components in there um that would change tonality so let's measure
that and when i say measure i mean really really really measure we go up to 200 kilohertz this is
10 times harder than our best case more or less best case high frequency most of us in my age are
way down here well below 20 kilohertz but let's go up to 200 kilohertz let's figure that these
uh wealthy audiophiles that probably are later in age and to have money to buy this kind of thing
maybe they have preserved their hearing and they can hear up to
20 kHz here we see that the audio precision when it's in its loopback mode which means just a relay
turns on with no cable essentially and a generic cable and autoquest when all three of them land
on top of each other in a very zoomed vertical scale of only one db above one dv below so these
are really tiny tiny variations in here threshold of audibility is probably half a db here but still
there's just no difference so we have proven beyond the shadow doubt that this thing cannot
improve increase base or lower base or increase treble or increase mid-range it cannot change
the tonality of any tone between 10 hertz and 200 Kilohertz it absolutely cannot it is impossible
for it to do that because if it can do it it would show up in this test very sensitive test
but let's go back on this noise issue that bothered me um let's plug in the generic
cable and then also the audioquest wind cable but turn off our generator sine wave generator
so the analyzer now is just reading the noise that's from the analyzer itself and whatever
maybe generated by the cable and we see curiously that the generic cable
has lower noise in here um around 60 hertz and around 180 hertz now 180 hertz is not a random
thing it's three times the frequency of 60 hertz and it could be odd harmonic of of that 60 hertz
so i wanted to figure out what the source of this was and as i was testing i noticed if i moved this
cable around that this measurement changed so i thought well i wonder if it's picking up noise
from the rest of the equipment that's in here a lot of sources of interference these cables are
supposed to be shielded but you know there's no you know 100% shielding so i thought i'd make a
test case for a more exaggerated case where we can see the difference and what i did was that i took
an ac transformer these are little adapters that come with some of your audio gear and
i plugged in an extension cord to the end of this so i could then move this around as a wand
and i brought this next to the generic cable and i brought it then next to the uh
autoquest wind cable to see whether they pick up noise interference inductively magnetically
through the air so i'm not making any physical connection to anything i'm literally just bringing
that plastic case near a cable that transformer in there is generating a magnetic field
so it can induce if you will the mains uh spectrum onto the cable if it's not perfectly shielded
so i've got the previous two graphs there in dashed lines
but when i bring in that cable obviously let's focus on a generic cable in blue
we do induce more noise as i said there's no such thing as a perfect isolation if you will from
that kind of magnetic field that's quite strong and so we go from this dashed line at the bottom
to you know 10 or 15 db higher noise for the generic cable and blue but look at what happens
with audioquest wind which is the dash red just by itself sitting in the air to want to hook up bring
the transformer close to it he shoots way the heck up there look at how much higher the amplitude is
we're not talking we've gone up to 100 db from original which was around minus 145 or so so some
50 to 60 decibels worth of mains has been picked up by this 2400 cable supposed to be shielded
shielded properly you shouldn't do this at all it should be as good as the generic cable and uh
you might say why are all these other things in there well the the power company sends you a
sine wave 60 hertz but that sine wave actually has distortion and those distortions have harmonics in
them and those harmonics show up as this series of peaks that you see now any power supply that you
use in your audio equipment first thing it does filters all this stuff once it converts to the dc
so don't worry about this uh being an issue with your equipment um but in here for this cable it
is it's picking up noise i mean it's simple test so the question is you know why is the company
you know making this claim down here that it has a six layer noise dissipation system a six layer you
think wow it should be much better than my generic cable yet we're finding the exact opposite thing
i said whoa you know maybe they're right well if they're right they should make a measurement
like this and post it it's not hard it's not it what was difficult about making this measurement
anybody could make this measurement show do they show this absolutely not we can go to
their website and you see all the claims in here you see any measurements in here
you do not you see any graphs you do not you don't see any specs you do not nothing in here
other than 14 paragraphs about wind and what role wind has played in ancient Greek and what have you
spare me the story i want to know if you said lower noise where's where's the lowered noise
it doesn't exist but people say well there's a trivial test you're only testing with one tone
music has many tones and so fine let's measure that nice thing about testing cables is that the
volume doesn't change so we don't have to level match anything and i used a very high performance
system for testing i use the my rme ada2 fs stack which is a thousand dollar professional deck
people say somebody wants to say that's not good rme equipment is used to produce the
music you listen to so if you think that's no good your music no good and i hooked it up to a
topping a 90 for as a audio amplifier which is a world-class instrument-grade headphone amplifier
and then i hooked it up to a thousand dollar massdrop ether cx headphone and i did an A/B test
there was absolutely no difference whatsoever that i could detect and i went back and forth
now somebody buys the 2400 cable takes it home as i've explained in previous videos when you hook it
up and you listen and pay attention to what you're hearing you will hear new detail but i guarantee
you that new detail was not new it was always there and once that placebo effect wears off and
it will sound just like it always did and that's one of the reason you find high-end audio files
constantly is searching for one tweak after the other they that initial effect wears off and
then they go get some new and that false set of ah it sounds better lasts a while and then
that goes away and then the next week and next week but that's the plan of the topic so anyway
our conclusion here simple objectively this cable is worse it's got one simple job to do
take a signal from this point take it to the other point and don't pick up noise while you do that
we need a shielded cable because this distance is relatively long as circuits go and it could
pick up act like an antenna and pick things up uh and indeed this one is a mains antenna
so or whatever is around it it is happy to pick those up now fortunately threshold of hearing is
very high in low frequencies that's why you're not going to hear harm or noise with this in practice
but it is generated objectively and that's bad that's bad in a 10 cable
and certainly bad at this price point okay so hope you like this video uh in the comments tell me if
you want more of these controversial videos or you want me go back to doing uh some more
uh plane reviews and i've got a bunch of new products to test and
i could be doing those as well as these okay see you in the next video bye