Cable Costs Relative to System

This work is being done at frequencies many orders of magnitude higher than audio where certain effects become important. It is irrelevent at audio frequencies - just like the skin effect.

Indeed - I have a £20K system in which I spent less than 5% on cables - all custom made. I compared with cables cost 100 times 25 times as much and there was no advantage

I think you could have spent 10% of that and bought custom cbales and not been able to tell the difference. Active components are far more important IMHO

Filters on my speaker cables??? No no no! Only on the MAINS cables. Your comment is a bit absurd ;)

I would be interested to hear this huge difference demonstrated - so far noone has been able to meet this challenge. And indeed rigourous scientific double blind tests have also yet to reveal a difference - anecdotal evidence is not sufficient.

Your final comment is very revealing - the belief in cables is indeed on a par with religious belief. The only differences between cables are those due to LCR, connection and insulation etc - well understood engineering principles. that dont justify outrageous costs.

Allot $100 per interconnect, $200 for your speaker cable and $100 per filtered mains cable and get the whole lot custom made. Solidly enginered cables from any reasonably competent engineer will match anything out there at even a 100 times the price. The whole cable issue is vastly overrated IMHO. The concept of "bad wires" is fallacious - wires just have varying LCR that may make some SLIGHT difference to your system. Of far more importance is the earthing and connection arragements - the rest is voodoo. I have a $60k system and I spent less than $1k on all my filtered mains cables, interconnects and speaker cable. I tried nordost valhalla, kimber etc and they were all worse, or at best no better.

Jade - if it is fact then please provide the scientific proof of those "facts". Lets see you tell the difference between these cables in a blind test for a start. The results I feel will be very instructive. As for doubting my honesty - you have no basis for doing so except in your imagination where you have concoted a rationale for my viewpoint being currect without actually having to address my arguements. The reason for this being that you have apparently bought heavily into the expensive cable philosophy and wish to defend your expenditure. People used to state with absolute certainty that the world was flat and doubted the honesty of sea farers that had circumnavigated the globe... The truth is a local high end shop lent me a load of cables to tempt me into a purchase after I bought the turntable from them - having bought the rest of the system from another source. This explains what you observed in about not fitting my system philosophy without having to invoke your explanation. Dont be so quick to judge! I actually also spent several months with blue heaven nordost as they were provided with the system. I would have said the amps were more independent of hype than any other component!

As for my system you havent actually heard it so again its pure supposition on your behalf. You assume that because I dont hear the huge difference then there is something wrong with my system so I do not hear the difference which is a circular argument whereby you start by assumming the outcome. Please consider the alternative whereby my system is so revealing that it reveals beyond any doubt that cable effect are exaggerated. In fact I have paid great attention and time to both isolation and cabling - including the provision of lab grade filters on the mains cables. No skimping was involved - in each case I aimed for the very best that could be achieved. It just so happens that this can be achieved with cables very cheaply, if $1k canbe said to be "cheap" (and the townshend rack is hardly cheap!) The next step for me is to upgrade to active, swap the pre and phono and use something like an active SEM bench for isolation. I also purchased a custom built wally tractor to optimise the alignment of the cartridge.

I can assure you I have heard the very best of which the
deck is capable and I also assure that I have taken great pains over every aspect of the system - I come from a technical engineering background and apply sound scientific principles in every instance to good effect. Wires are not complicated - I am used to working at rf where wire problems are very much more severe and still nothing like the cable manufacturers claim. I refer you to Selfs work on difference amplifiers in cable comparisons.

BTW the $60k system would be the UK price in £ converted to $ - doubtless Bryston amps would be much cheaper in the USA.

I appreciate you are not attacking and that you have firm belief nonetheless I feel I must stand up for plausible science in this debate. There is no scientific justification for cable claims and no study has ever substantiated the presence of subjective effects. I suggest that the gentleman here get a custom cable built and compare with nordost et al and decide for himself if it is worth paying $5000 instead of $50 ;). Power however is another matter and there is sound technical basis for some claims in this area.

Maple - you have hit the nail entirely on the head. People just want to throw money away. I recently saw a nordost "dem" at a hsow - except it wasnt a dem, they just talked about how their cable was a bargain even at 1000s per metre. A comparison with a $100 cable would have been very instructive if they have faith in their product.

Nanotech? This sounds distictly pseudo scientific to me. Are you proposing nano tech cables will make a big difference? :S