Ready, set, comment! Speaker cables don’t make a difference?

Very revealing, @jperry ! It makes helps us all reach this state.

@millercarbon said,

There’s no controversy. There’s only people who know, and people with head stuck deep in sand. Look around, this is the case with everything. Situation normal.

Right. There are the illuminati and there is everyone else.

My point in posting this was not because I think this debate is a live controversy, but, as with all kinds of debates-that-shouldn’t-be-debates, there is a constant hunger on the part of some to share the truth. Happens on Agon all the time. (I’ve seen here, countlessly repeated as a lesson-to-educate-novitiates, that "everything matters," etc.) So, this post is for anyone who wants to wander over into another camp to throw down with folks over there. The Audioholics videos get referred to here quite a lot, so perhaps people might want to mix it up, soccer hooligan style, over there. Don’t care about doing that? Skip it. Free country, last time I checked.

@akg_ca I was certainly not starting yet another debate about cables. If you look at my original post you will see that I was alerting members that there was a video about cables on another channel about to happen. I presented that information in case anyone wanted to debate people on a different site. Many people here have a good arguments and good experience with cables and it is possible that they might inform people who might be misinformed by Gene. So if you think that is trolling then I really don’t think you understand why I posted what I did. Perhaps you think that what Gene does is trolling? If that is what you meant then I misunderstood what you said — and my apologies.

Some continue to think this is rehashing a topic done to death, here. That's not what this post is doing. The idea is not to convince the measure fanatics or the die-hard Gene acolytes -- no point in that -- but to put into a public forum some of the more salient facts that audiophiles believe with good justification. As likely as not, there's some young person, interested in audio but not knowing much, who is reading the comments and trying to learn. Dropping informed comment into Gene's thread is the same kind of act that writing a letter to the editor at a newspaper was -- a way of helping someone understand other perspectives out there. Obviously, if people have time to spend debating things here, they might have time to help someone over there. That's why this post is *not* clickbait and why it's not getting shut down.

@stevewharton  -- very clarifying and interesting post. Exactly the kind of post -- along with other good ones like this, here -- I was thinking could be dropped into Gene's YouTube comment thread. 

@jasonbourne52 

A tedious and boring subject!

Clearly untrue as you have decided to spend your time both reading this thread and taking time to comment about it.

@sgreg1 Great answer on the economics basically preventing any conclusion for home theater except the one he gives. I wonder how much of my brain attends to the sound during movies -- I listen differently and of course my attention is largely focused on plot, scene, visuals, etc. To the degree I focus closely on the sound, it's much more intermittent. That's another possible argument against putting $$ into home theater wire.

Wow, for a boring topic that’s been beat to death and certainly does not deserve a single word more or a second of anyone’s time -- there are a lot of responses here. Did anyone post a comment at Audioholics? What kind of response did you get? (Because that was THE point of this OP. Not whether speaker cables made a difference. I didn't raise that question.)

@stevewharton

what’s important here extends beyond the subject matter itself and more about the abundance of irresponsible misinformation....

We’ve got various paper tigers and YouTube alleged industry experts, that are somewhere between an audiophile and journalist, spewing their spin and shaping opinions and purchases of the uninformed with their misinformation

Thank you, thank you, thank you for seeing the point of my OP. However I feel about Gene or others on the internet spreading misinformation (intentionally or whatever), I feel some kinship with the novice hobbyist enthusiastic about the same hobby I’m into -- but has stumbled into a weird site like Gene’s. (And I’ve seen really good posts and videos there, so it really IS hard to sort wheat from chaff.) It doesn’t matter to me that they are over at Gene’s site -- if they’re being misinformed, it would be cool if somehow someone threw them a fact or two so they could see there is more to it. In the end, this is not about cable-haters vs. cable-converts; this is about adding signal to the noise and supporting the hobby (and other people) in an educative way.

@mahgister said:

My S.Q. is so good to me that any system at any cost does not give me the urge to upgrade.... Not so much the wrong way you claim it is is’n it?....

While I completely agree that the room and educating one's ears/listening is critical, this last claim of yours is where you go too far, in my opinion. You are right that many people believe that only gear matters -- or that they believe too much in gear and spending a lot of money for gear. If they don't pay attention to the whole sound environment, they are making a mistake. That is all true. But you are willing to take these very valid points to claim that "any system at any cost" doesn't give you the urge to upgrade? Are you saying something here only about your own feelings? Or are you saying that gear doesn't matter? In other words, are you claiming that if someone gave you much better gear than what you have -- and you did all your embedding and listening, etc. with it -- it would not sound better? If that is true, than I find your ears less trustworthy than if you simply admit that everything, properly integrated, makes a difference. So, what is your opinion, please? Could better gear -- for you -- make a difference?

Thanks. I see that the answer to my question about whether better equipment would make your system sound better is "yes."