A-B testing of cables

Cable questions of the profound "what is the meaning of cable" are always entertaining by right of how many clueless people are going to give you their profoundly ignorant and useless advice. Unfortunately far too many dealers and "experts" will give you advice that is almost as useless.

The advice you got about starting from the source to preamp had an element of validity due to the fact that this is the key interconnect. The catch 22 here is that unless the rest of the cable in the system is neutral regardless of how transparent it is, each colored cable adds another layer of coloration or veils detail in the case of inferior cable resolution. So you are in theory revealing more detail at the front but it won't be heard because other cables are acting as a filter.

So... while the first i/c is the one that will reveal the most detail, your other cables have to be able to allow you to hear both the detail and a lack of added coloration or distortion.

The price of cables means nothing, what is important is that you pick a company that knows what neutrality is and the importance of it. When a cable is neutral their $150 cable does what their $450, $800, and $3000 models do, just with extra levels of detail resolution. The entry level neutral cables are better than many manufacturers mid grade $3500 cables because those have coloration that cause the tonal balance to be out of kilter.

Once every cable in your system is neutral you can start doing single cable upgrades from the front back and you will see staggering differences.

In closing the reason you didn't hear differences is likely because the other cables in your system aren't letting you hear them.

I was a dealer several years ago and have tried the majority of big name cables, and by that I mean the manufacturer would send me full sets of every cable in their lines, I spent months properly breaking them in before doing tedious comparisons.

One last thing, most cables have break in periods of at least three weeks of nearly full time running. During that break in time they can sound so bad it's hard to listen to them, then they start coming around and the magic starts coming around. My guess is that many people have given up on great cables due to that.

Good luck

BDP you hit it on the head, the upstream i/c is the critical one, but it's improvements can't go much beyond the downstream cables which will have a cummulative degradation of what would have been possible had all the cables been upgraded.

labyrinth, you overstated your case on neutrality, there is neutrality, it's just hard to find. By definition neutral cable would be an absence of coloration, distortion, or imbalance of the complete tonal range. Anything that affects any tonal element differently than it does the rest is going to throw off the tonal balance. The fact is cable manufacturers put a lot of engineering into "doing" specific things coloration wise so as to make cable that "does" something different with specific systems like tube or solid state. Neutral as heard in a few cables made by companies that put all their focus toward neutrality has a couple of distinct strengths. First thing noticed is that all the frequencies are in a more natural relationship as they were recorded. The cable that emphasizes highs so as to make high frequencies pop out of the sound stage like Nordost Valhalla loses mids as they get lost behind the high detail popping out louder. The other thing is that unnatural emphasis is harder and edgier and hurts your ears after half an hour or so. Neutral is smoother and easier on the ears, and can be listened to for hours on end without the same degree of listener fatigue. Your ears get very acclimated and used to neutral very quickly to where cables that are not neutral are objectionable.

Believe it or not women tend to have better hearing for higher frequencies. My wife, while she was clueless as to what she was listening for as pertains to critical listening, could hear edgy hardness in friend's systems and would remark that they were "nasty and hard to listen to". She'd tell me I needed to fix their systems.

I had a couple of lines of neutral cables, and they cost a fraction of many that they outperformed at different price points. I call a $2500 speaker cable that sounds way better than a $10,000 one or an $800 interconnect that goes up against $3500 ones while maintaining equal or better resolution a bargain.