Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

The irony in the cable game relative to Sean's post is in trying to get from his paragraph 4 to paragraph 5. (no intent to pick on Sean). It's the fact that cables do change from placement to placement that causes people to spend so much money buying, trying, then selling at half price. If there is any way around this trap, I'd be most interested in hearing it. With a lot of experience, you can characterize how your system reacts with a variety of cable designs, but reducing it to a set of rules that will actually help in avoiding making the same mistakes again is something that escapes me. In power cords, for example, I can take 4 similarly constructed cables used in the same position, and they all sound quite significantly different from one another.
So far, the best method I've found is listening to characterizations by other people. If enough people who are theoretically free of outside influence ... post opinions on a cable's character, you get a reasonable picture of how it usually performs across a fair spectrum of equipment.
Also, can we get a definition of what is electrically backwards in the cable world? Undoubtedly yes, but for starters, would anyone venture a guess as to whether any of the following are electrically forwards or backwards:
- networks and network boxes
- magnets
- padding with rice paper, cotton, ers cloth, etc.
- mechanical resonance controls
- wildly improbable conductor materials
- the need for amorphous non-crystalline metal structure, assuming the conductor is made out of metal
- dc current added to the shield
- water or other jackets for novel shielding

And that's just a start on the list of novel approaches to defeating a list of transmission line issues, real or theoretical or purely imaginary. So as a practical matter, how do you, the user, sort out what a cable will do without a lot of trying ($$$$) :^)

Sean -
A comment on your comment on mechanical resonance in cables. I don't argue the existence of microphonics at all. Though cables that can shake a component chassis have to be *really* big and heavy; it's much more common that a cable attached to a component at one or both ends will have vibration transferred to it by the component.

Anyway, I've experienced at least a dozen cables with various implementations of resonance damping. The common property I've heard is a lowered noise floor, so that more low level information is audible, but an annoying lack of clear focus in the imaging. There may, or may not, also be a damping of dynamics. In other words, what appears to be a loss of fine phasing and timing information. I can't provide the hardware analogy, but I'd characterize it as reducing an additive noise floor while convolving the signal with a broadening or smearing function. So there may well be a problem either at macro- or microlevels, but [some] solutions may be worse than the problem. And of course, this is all second hand conjecture as to causes. The sonic effects may be due to something else entirely. Cable issues could stand a large research budget.

Cables have been researched extensively in both aerospace and computer science, but I suppose you'd have to say, with different objectives. Not with respect to audible effects, and not for the highly 'experimental' geometries/materials tried out by audio cable designers. Some audio companies do use designers with this background and make extensive use of modelling (e.g. Nordost, according to their website). But it would cost serious money to study what the effects of, say, mechanical resonance do in physical and electrical terms, and there are no percentages in it unless it affects something besides audio.

I wonder also how many sonic effects are just due to poor construction and quality control in audio cable manufacture.

Sean,
You have prompted my curiosity on several occasions with these statements, so let me ask whether you have any real evidence or whether these are your hypotheses.
First, what exactly constitutes a well enough designed power supply that cables don't matter (much)? Can you cite any specific piece of digital gear in either the pro or consumer world that, from your experience, has a well enough designed power supply to make the gear impervious to power cords?

Second, have you got evidence that what you call a self-damping jacket material (do you mean dielectric?) will damp out the mechanical vibration of a rigid conductor? Say, a solid core or heavy flat ribbon. I have real doubts that much damping would occur over the length of a typical conductor when either end is subject to shaking. Even if the jacket does some damping, the vibration will occur over at least part of the cable until it damps out, so it depends whether the primary effect of vibration is to produce microphonics within the cable, or whether it is simply to transfer vibration between components. I'm curious because I've seen very little data -just a lot of handwaving or conjecture by a few manufacturers and/or audiophiles.

I agree wholeheartedly with the intent of Sean, Tommywall and others above. There is a huge need in my view to finally get some of this cable craziness over with and down to a set of rational scientific models that are testable and verifiable. $6000 power cords are simply an unsustainable bubble, and despite the audibility of differences, I start agreeing with the many who become disallusioned and contemptuous toward audiophiles.

There is enough knowledge and data to do a research program that would sort out many of the questions and assertions above. No theory will account for every case or describe all of the fine detail, but you should certainly be able to get the main points right - cables are not black boxes. That includes the contributions of line impurities, filters, and break in.

Any valid studies have to be done as peer-reviewed white papers; it is the ONLY way they will be respected or accepted. Further, given the true complexity of electromagnetic field theory and electron flow models, it is pretty certain that anyone doing such work needs to have academic help or have advanced background themselves.

Despite all of the arguments about the importance of ears and preferences, I predict that if a series of good papers came out documenting the best construction techniques and best approaches to power handling, most audio design would follow along quickly.

That's actually the purpose in getting research out of the hands of any company, Psychic.

Academic research is aimed at truth, not at what is going to sell a lot of radios or fit the consumer's desire for convenient and invisible.