A friend of mine is an electrical engineer who also happens to know a bit of hi-fi. His wife once told him that "better" cables and interconnects did not sound any better when he got those expensive wires. His wife is not a dieshard; yet, I know she has good opinions about good sounds. So, he took all the cables to his work and did some measuring and experiments. I am not a true audiophile and am not interested in tech talks, so I do not remember all the details in precise terms. Nevertheless, the gist of his findings was that there was not a big difference between expensive cables and decent cables -- I won't name the brands. Then, he did a rudimentary blind test himself with a little help of his wife. Without the benefit of preconception, he failed to differentiate cables and interconnects, of which the price differential was huge. So, I borrowed the high end wires and experimented with them. Allowing myself to get aquainted with the wires for about several days, I did a rudimentary blind test with some help of my wife -- she was unhappy about it. I got 50% right out of 6 tries (3 with the better wires, another 3 with the mundane counterparts at reasonable volume level). Just fulfilling the law of average. My friend did even worse than I did defying the statistical odds -- less than 50%. Our equipments were reasonably good albeit not super. The friend of mine was trying to get deeper into the subject by making inquiries as to whether the signal difference he attained in his lab was sufficient enought for human brain to detect. He must have been told something about it, but I have not heard him about it. Nor am I interested in delving into the matter any more deeply. It is good if there truly is a difference we can appreciate between mundane and high end wires and shields. But, I obviously failed to appreciate it. So, the issue is simple for me now: save the money for the wife and the kids, or CD's and live entertainments. Unless you are rich enough to sniff at the amount. By the way, the interconnects and speaker cables that I am using for music listening did not cost me more than $200 (at max) altogether.
"The Audio Critic" B.S. or what?
Has anyone ever heard of this magazine? In a nutshell, their premise is that audiophiles are ridiculous. They claim that all high-end equipment is marketed to audio magazines and their foolish readers. One particular area they sounded off about was cable and interconnect theory. They claim that spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars for cables is a joke and is a total waste of money. They claim that companies like Kimber are selling us a bunch of "snake oil." I just breezed through a copy and now it's got me wondering if we audiophiles are just masturbating each other with our concepts and discussion of "high-end" equipment and cables. Please tell me this is a bunch of sh*t. I'd like to think that we're getting at least a bit of "high-end" for our hard-earned $$$$