A New Believer

Rok2id,

As you seem to be one of those philosophers, I urge you to open the horse's mouth yourself.

Personally, I have heard the difference between cables on more than one occasion by experimenting, sometimes to my chagrin, once to my dismay. All kinds of materials carry current. Not all sound great doing it. If you were just worried about getting the signal from one end to the other, you'd use bare wire bought by the foot. I have seen speaker jumpers made of copper, silver, tinned brass, and aluminum alloy. I have replaced cheapo jumpers with cheapo wire with good effect in the past. I have had people in my apartment A/B-ing wire, and leave in a huff when their particular concoction got completely showed up by someone else's recipe, and I assure you the differences were not because of lack of ability of the lesser cable's ability to conduct electricity.

Otherwise, I think that the debate about how well wires carry signal is to some extent kind of silly before people know what two electrical loads/drivers are being connected with the wire. There isn't much we can do in a system full of wire... Tires is tires according to the "wire is wire" theory. But the best tires for my Ferrari are not the best tires for my 10yr old Pajero when I am rambo-ing around in the snow. Oops. Don't have a Ferrari. Well, if I did, they still wouldn't be the best for my 10yr old Pajero (which I do have).

Rok2ID,
I have done that test over the short term, in my apartment, with multiple people present, and noone able to know whether I had changed something or not (I had a screen in front of the pre/CDP to allow me to switch cables (or pretend to) and not let anyone see what I had done. I have done multi-hour test a few times. It has been enlightening each time. I can let you know results if you want but people clearly heard differences between cables used.

HOWEVER, what it brought to me was that a certain chain of products sounded different, not that the cables themselves sounded different. I have no way of testing the wires by themselves without attaching such mundane test equipment as pres, CDPs, phono stages, amps and speakers into the mix. Some of the wires obviously had different electrical properties (resistance, capacitance, inductance). I am pretty sure that they all carried music. Some did not do the details as well. I have no idea whether that was "time domain issues", an electrical issue, a resonance issue, or what it was. Everyone heard it very clearly. But what everyone took away was that everyone could hear it clearly on that setup, not another.

If you think that all cables have equal electrical properties, then you obviously have not done enough testing yourself. I have not done the tests with scientific equipment to say that the signal can be changed (which is not the same thing), but I expect that given the way you have presented your ideas (or rather, your attack on others' comments), neither have you. Personally, I am unwilling to believe that the electrical properties of the carrier have zero effect on how the piece at one end of the wire perceives the electrical signal

The nice thing about the 'wire is wire' argument for people like you is that it is easy to be satisfied. You can simply buy the cheapest CDPs and amps which look good. You don't need to worry about tubes vs transistors (it's just wire vs wire) and you don't need to worry about Class A vs Class B vs Class D (it's also just wire vs wire). CDPs are simple - bits is bits. Jitter is a figment of people's imagination or an artifact of the CD manufacturing process. Speakers and phono cartridges you might be able to claim are key, because they are not electronic signal carriers but physical transducers. But everything between tonearm output to speaker input can be garage sale castoffs linked with lamp cord.

But somehow I don't think that's the way you found yourself on Audiogon...

Rok2id,
Your position on 'wire' leads to the comment about amps and CDPs because all electronic components are effectively 'wire' - i.e. conductors or components which conduct signal. In a CDP, there is a laser reading a distance off a spinning disc. The signal propagated is either a 1 or a 0 for every portion of the signal. That signal is then turned into an analog electrical signal in the DAC and then is output. There should be no difference between DACs because the function of a DAC is to produce in analog form that which enters the DAC. They all do their job adequately. Your comment about tubes is a throwaway. Transistors are nothing but small tubes. Get over it. My comment about phono carts and speakers is that one starting from your position that wire is wire COULD say that speakers and carts involve a transformation from the physical to the electronic, and vice versa, and the physical/electronic interface may be faulty.

I would disagree about your point regarding the cost of high-end amps. Most high-end amps cost what they cost because of the need for various people in the chain of design/manufacturing/distribution/sales to get paid. The cosmetics are there to make sure the buyer gets a warm fuzzy feeling about laying out what would still be a large amount of money for a high-end amp. But... that's only when you care about the circuit and the quality of parts inside the amp and think those aspects could have some impact on what you are listening to. If you are only worried about whether the signal comes out the other end, you only need buy the cheapest thing which plays.

Some of us are quite sure that wire is not just wire. However, just because it is not does not mean the most expensive wire is the best, or that there is not more bang for buck in doing other things to improve your sound. For me, best bang for buck in a high-end audio system is not cables or equipment but room tuning.

As to the cable shootouts mentioned, only a few commerically available cables were used (TG Audio HSR, Jade Audio Hybrids, Wireworld Gold Eclipse, a Japanese brand I forget, and some form of Coincident interconnects). The others were various homebrew recipes of different materials, geometries, dialectrics, and connectors. Among the commercial cables, I liked the TG and the Jade. Among the homebrews, I liked a super thin solid core silver with cotton tubing which a friend had made - very nice. I want to try to make a pair. Wish I had when silver was $10/oz not $40...