John Dunlavy On "Cable Nonsense"

I agree with Dunlavy that the snake oil peddled in cable claims only serves to detract from actual technological development and advances in audio quality, and tarnishes the audio industry in general.

Frap, Floyd Toole has done more to determine what audio quality means than all of us here put together plus the fine fellows at all of the hi-fi magazines.

Sean, the "blind test in less than familiar surroundings" is a red herring. What do you think of blind tests in familiar surroundings, with the listener's own gear (most of it, except for whatever different is being tested)? Are those invalid, too? The fact remains that ABX testing still is the most accurate and sensitive means of detecting audible differences between audio devices.

Jaykaypur: What would you think of a guy who puts in a new $1,000 power cord and actually gains no improvement whatsoever, but merely thinks he gained 1 dB somewhere? Would he be better off as he is, or would he be better off more knowledgeable and $1,000 richer?

Bmpnyc: The quality of the copper will have an effect on the resistance of the wire. However, the difference in resistivity between "pure" copper and standard commodity-grade Cu is infinitesimally small. Lamp cord, if the overall resistance is small enough, can be as acoustically transparent as any "single crystal" or other hyped-up wire. Some people will give you all sorts of baseless technobabble about the quality of the insulation or the wire geometry. Yeah, right. The characteristics of wire can be boiled down to three electrical parameters: resistance, inductance, and capacitance. In speaker wire, because it's part of a low-impedance circuit, the resistance is the most important factor, so short and fat rules the day. The capacitance of even zip cord is so low that it doesn't begin to affect signals until you get up into hundreds of kiloHertz.

Bear, someone might hear a difference if they separated the lamp cord as you suggest, but would they hear a difference if they didn't know if the lamp cord was separated or not?

Abe, I'll answer your question. No, using power cords as tone controls is silly. For that matter, I think using interconnects as a tone control is silly, too.

Good point, Jhunter.

Dr. Floyd Toole and Sean Olive published a report in the AES journal some years ago where they had a group of 40 listeners evaluate various speakers in various listening positions, both "blind" and "sighted" tests. Some listeners were inexperienced, while about 9 or 10 claimed to be audiophiles. Interestingly, the inexperienced listeners were more consistant in their scoring of the speakers between the "blind" and the "sighted" tests, which suggests that they were to some extent more reliant on the speakers' audible characteristics, while the "audiophile" listeners' score jumped more wildly going from "blind" to "sighted" tests, which seems to indicate that they were more heavily influenced by what they saw and less by what they heard.

Frap, you can discount ABX testing as a means of comparison if you like, but you offer nothing in its place except a method so highly susceptible to errors and misjudgment that it's really useless for true comparisons of audible differences.

Liguy: Brush up on your transmission line theory, particularly the 1/10 wavelength rule, and you'll find that audio cable would have to be close to 1.5 kilometers long to *start* exhibiting transmission line characteristics at even the highest audio frequencies.

Sean, electrical PROPERTIES dictate the electrical behavior of wire, and audio signals are electrical.

Of course what you said doesn't work, and I never said that it would. I just said that speaker cables should have as little resistance as possible. They should also have minimal shunt capacitance and series inductance, but being in a low impedance circuit, the capacitance and inductance are fairly unimportant, especially for the run lengths you find in homes and studios. Velocity factor has totally negligible effect on audio.

I don't want my speaker cables to have "sonic characteristics." I just want it to deliver the signal from the amp to the speaker without alteration. You might be interested to know that 12 gauge zip cord at 30 cents a foot makes excellent speaker cable for runs less than, say, 40 or 50 feet. For longer runs I'd go to at least 10 gauge.