Cable auditions - Hard Work?


Does anyone find it to be "hard work" to audition cables? I find that I have to be 'fresh' before I can begin to listen to cables. After I begin, I can only listen, with the intensity needed, for a period of about an hour.

As I do A/B comparisons, it sometimes seems, my impressions change as I listen. Sometimes the differences are so small or subtle, that I question if I'm hearing a difference at all. Have I lost it?

How do you folks do your cable auditions? I'd really like to know.

Thanks
paul
oldpet

Showing 1 response by teajay

Oldpet, I find doing amp and speaker auditions much harder work for obvious reasons. My process for audtioning cables is a threefold process: 1) Put one cable at a time in my system and do no serious listening untill the amount of time for burn-in that the company suggests is reached. 2) Use the same 6 to 8 recordings that I have been using for the last 30 years to measure differences/changes such as timbres, soundstage, imaging, air around players, liquidity, bass/prat, high end extentsion, and details. Normally, anything new in your system will sound striking at first, but no necessarly an improvement. 3) Finally, and I think it might be the most important step, after about three days of serious listening, go back to your reference and decide if new cable really is an improvement over your older cable. I have auditioned some cables that were so unpleasant I did not wait for the three days because I knew that I did not like them, so why bother. Other times, some cables were so right that I knew that they were superior to my reference, which turned out to be valid, but I always go back and put the original cable back in, just to validate my first impression.