I remember years ago( many years ago) some magazine doing a test with cables and one being an extension cord picked up at a local hardware store. I believe in that case the extension cord did not win, but didn’t do badly either. Too long ago to remember if that was a measurement based test, or one based on listening. Probably where I first felt that cables didn’t make much difference. I owned expensive equipment years ago, thought I had splurged when I bought a 100 dollar power cable. Didnt hear a difference and called it a day and hadn’t thought much about the subject again until recently, now that I’ve gotten back into the hobby after a decade of being out of it.
Who says cables don't make a difference?
Funny, after all these years, people still say things like "you wasted all that money on cables".
There are still those who believe cables don't make a difference.
I once did marketing for a cable line I consider to be about the best-Stealth Audio Cables.
One CES, I walked the rooms with the designer/owner, Serguei Timachev. He carried a pair of his then new Indra interconnects. Going from room to room he asked the room runners to replace their source to preamp IC with the Indra. There was not one that was not completely flabbergasted and said that the Indras blew away what they were using. That was the skyrocketing of Indra and Stealth. The Indra became one of the best reviewed cables ever.
Serguei now makes the Sakra-an IC that blows away the Indra!
I don't understand why some still do not value cables as much as I.
There are still those who believe cables don't make a difference.
I once did marketing for a cable line I consider to be about the best-Stealth Audio Cables.
One CES, I walked the rooms with the designer/owner, Serguei Timachev. He carried a pair of his then new Indra interconnects. Going from room to room he asked the room runners to replace their source to preamp IC with the Indra. There was not one that was not completely flabbergasted and said that the Indras blew away what they were using. That was the skyrocketing of Indra and Stealth. The Indra became one of the best reviewed cables ever.
Serguei now makes the Sakra-an IC that blows away the Indra!
I don't understand why some still do not value cables as much as I.
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@speedbump6, no worries. I was not picking on your test, I was just curious. I have resuscitated my system after a respite of raising 2 kids to college. I look forward to performing my own test now. I design such tests for a living. My first will be a SDE to determine if I can hear the difference between my fancy cables I got about 13 years ago and a coat hanger fitted with RCA plugs. I will post the results. |
Glupson, My audio system Is in a large room, with the equipment rack ideally situated at the far end of a 22 foot wall, whereas the power amp is 8 feet in along the further perpendicular wall. I understand that, unlike speaker cables, interconnects can easily perform without signal degradation a distance of 40 feet or even longer — particularly if they are balanced with good XLR terminations. |
Roberttdid, I’m NOT being sarcastic, but serious. With your engineering background, and my background building PC’s since college, and KNOWING how to solder, let’s meet up, make some pretty/shiny cables(in China of course!), and retire on some nice warm island!! LOVE to do that!! And we can build some stands for the speaker cables out of carbon fiber maybe, and sell them as well. Oh, I forgot the $30.00 caps for the extra/unused IC RCA jacks, don’t want any mojo to leak out of them! Gotta cap ‘em! Good business plan?? |
Lol, and I sense the first to try to pick apart the testing method, as I mentioned. Jd, the test was valid by any designation. No I have no desires to go into any more detail on it, i was doing it to prove anything to anyone other than myself. I do know a bit about conducting tests that would eliminate variables other than ending up with a valid conclusion either way, that the test was designed to determine. We are not talking subtle differences here, any more than if I subbed out a sweet sounding tube for an analytical Solid state set up. If you could detect that difference in a blind test, you could also detect the best of the cables compared to the worst. If you could not tell the difference in the amp/ preamp, then I might suggest that spending much on audio equipment would not improve your experience. |
Pfh again, you start with the assumption that not a single person has ever done a true blind test, and in fact many of you who deny there are audible differences claim any test I’ve ever seen mentioned, in invalid for one reason or another. Most of those who are in denial of this obviously would not accept any test that did not end with their expected results. My testing was a true blind test. I went in expecting a retain result, though unlike those who continually try to deny the differences, I did not go in with a closed mind on the subject. My goal was to prove to myself that there was, or wasn’t, so I could be done once and for all on the subject. I had no idea what cables where being used in each case, and we cycled through many. I had no idea what brands, or the costs of those products. I kept a list of my perceptions of each as a number one through x. I had someone in another thread try to tell me that the mind can’t remember what it heard for the time between changing cables. The cables were also out of sight on purpose. The results spoke for themselves. I can’t say that the nest person would hear them the same as me, though I would bet they for sure would hear a difference, and if not, then I don’t know how they could hear any differences in the equipment, or quality of the music source. Though to that point I have seen people who heard something much differently than I did, for good or bad, though at least they did hear a difference, so for sure personal preferences color all perceptions, no right or wrong in that. Yes, some cables I really could tell no difference from stock cables. Those were mostly value priced cables after the tests were done. The most expensive cables weren’t always the best sounding, and I suspect that boils down to synergy in components, and my own personal preferences. I listened to the same cables in two different sets of equipment. As expected some cables performed differently in each system after reviewing the results. I paid for the rental time at the dealer, I insisted on that as I felt it only fair since I was making sole use of their space, and I had no intention on making a purchase. They felt I had bought enough equipment in the past, but I believe in paying for any services I receive. I also hired people outside of the industry to label and make the cable changes, not the dealers employees. This was before I spent much time on near reading these types of threads, but was just a few months ago. I might have actually made a video production of this had I realized all the controversy, it I’m sure the naysayers would have picked it apart and denied its authenticity or validity anyways. Peoples who’s minds are already made up won’t be swayed by any facts or proof, so would have been additional time and expense to do nothing but reaffirm what many already do know and hear for themselves, while doing nothing to quell the controversy in the minds of those whose bias is too deep to be moved on the subject. Even as someone who didn’t feel he heard differences in the past, I still believed others did, as stated in my previous post. I never felt once that anyone was imagining what they heard. |
Sometimes an “upgraded” interconnect cable can clearly make a sonic improvement. For years, I had been using 35 feet long Blue Jeans/Belden interconnects between my preamp and the power amp that is located between my main speakers. Deciding it might be worthwhile to finally replace those cables, I spent a lot of time researching name brand interconnects. Of chief concern to me was identifying characteristics of unique cable design that the manufacturer claimed provided performance superiority over its competitors’ product offerings and, within that manufacturer’s own product line, where and why were the greatest price increases. Based on all that, I purchased Wireworld Cable’s Equinox interconnects. Wow! Music simply sounded better -- much more real. For me, this was a costly investment ($2,400) not made casually. I have no buyer’s remorse, however. Moreover, I don’t know of another upgrade I could have made in my system for that amount of money which could have resulted in such a sonic improvement. |
Speed, I’m quite familiar with the work psychologists have done on these sorts of things. In fact, I just used a simple example above with wine tasting where similar testing has been done blind. There are tests with many other subjects as well, and is clearly generalizable to this particular scenario. My point quite simply is that psychological testing has already proven that your assertion that "is a not insignificant number of people who can hear differences" doesn’t mean a damn thing if you cannot demonstrate that there is a scientifically provable difference. It’s essentially a form of confirmation bias. People expect something that is more expensive to be better, and lots of tests have been done that prove this occurs in a wide range of areas. Certainly audio equipment and audiophiles aren’t immune (if anything we’re highly likely to be subject to these biases). Industries for years have grown up around this, so that too isn’t a meaningful statement. Marketing expressly leverages this to convince people to pay more for designer brands. The difference being that how something looks, feels, etc, is entirely subjective... whereas there are scientific ways to assess current passing through a cable to produce sound. I like cars, and I’m happy to buy a car that produces an emotional response, is fun to drive, etc. So, like I said, if you want to pay more for a cable because you THINK it sounds better, knock yourself out. But you’ve got exactly zero evidence that proves it’s anything other than what I stated above. Meanwhile I've got quite a bit of evidence that strongly suggests it is what I'm arguing (though it's entirely possible it could be proven wrong at some point). |
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pfhjvb08 posts ... the imperative is for those claiming that they can hear a difference (based on cabling) to actually be able to prove there is a difference ...Nonsense. There is no such "imperative" and your demands ring hollow. This is a hobbyist’s group, not a scientific forum. Users here are free to post their experiences free of demands and innuendo from others. You’re free to conduct your owns tests, of course, as others here have done. Feel free to report your results. |
Pfh, when you have a large amount of data avaible on a subject, that is the statistics and science to help to,prove it. Phycology is similar, we can’t measure human thoughts and feelings, but we can gather data and with enough data we can indeed prove something. We don’t yet have the ability to know whether doses of vaccines will have negative effects, without trials. Someday we might have the ability to crunch the proper data with computers and get those answers without all the effort to gather the results in other ways. There is a not insignificant number of people who can hear differences, enough that there is a thriving industry that caters to them. Where’s the measurements that show I will like a particular amp vs another, or that there is even a difference between amps, or any audio equipment, that measures very similar. No such thing exists, yet we all readily acknowledge that we can hear differences. Products that on paper may look similar, can sound very different. And there is no way to measure what I will find sounds good, vs what you will. |
Right. Exactly. We can hear the difference. Period. Why you then go on and on with all that rhetoric about objectivity and measurements is beyond me. Surely you see how it only weakens your case? Actually, you think you can hear the difference, but that doesn’t mean there’s actually a difference. Many psychological studies have investigated this. So, no, it doesn't weaken my case at all. You could perhaps think of it like a placebo effect. For example, there have been studies with wine tasting that people who are blind tasting will score a wine higher if they are told it is expensive, and lower if they are told it is inexpensive. Yet in both cases they were tasting the same wine. In short, the imperative is for those claiming that they can hear a difference (based on cabling) to actually be able to prove there is a difference... such as through instrumentation that can measure that difference or by being able to consistently identify the the supposed higher quality cabling in a blind test. |
Any measurements will NOT change the mind of these guys. We saw that first hand here with the posts on Iconoclast cables. Even when those measurements are shown, they say: they don’t matter, irrelevant, not audible, beyond human hearing threshold, very small to worry about, blah, blah, 😑 So why even bother? Nothing will do. These folks are firmly entrenched in their bunkers. |
But until we have the ability to prove otherwise, the fact is that your position that one can "hear the difference" is fundamentally where this position starts and ends. Right. Exactly. We can hear the difference. Period. Why you then go on and on with all that rhetoric about objectivity and measurements is beyond me. Surely you see how it only weakens your case? |
Speedbump, there’s plenty of objective evidence supporting the other point of view but, certainly it’s possible that there are things we simply cannot measure yet. So...as I said, if your perception is that one cable sounds better to your ear than another, by all means buy it. But until we have the ability to prove otherwise, the fact is that your position that one can "hear the difference" is fundamentally where this position starts and ends. Pages of elaborate rhetoric may be persuasive to some, without supporting scientifically verifiable evidence, the argument that someone can "hear the difference" can easily be chalked up to confirmation and other cognitive biases (these biases are the issue, and are not consider "hallucination" btw). |
@speedbump6 +1 for sure - so long we talk ICs and SCs. As for power cables my jury is still out - since a LONG time, and more so since I use a PS Audio power regenerator for all my source components. Tried, though not the mega $$$$ items, and found absolutely no impact. Zilch. Maybe Levinson power supply designs 'are to blame'? 🤔 Michélle 🇿🇦 |
Pfh, and yet there’s zero proof from the opposite camp. Measurements that detect other things get posted as proof. Those measurements are good for what they do actually show, but as with any sort of statistic, it gets twisted and explained as something else entirely different. It’s ok to say you do or don’t hear any difference if you do or don’t, but to so desperately try to convince the other side that they’re incorrect and with no proof yourself, just defies logic. I’m sure some people don’t hear any differences, I’m also just as that some will deny they do no matter what, because they’re entrenched in their position. I used to be one who didn’t notice a difference, but also never took the time to really do a comprehensive test, and all during that time I never once tried to convince anyone that they were hearing things and it was all hogwash. I never once believed that so many people were totally fooled in that way, I just assumed that my hearing just wasn’t that trained, and the differences were rather subtle. Then one day I decided to put the discussion, for me, to bed once and for all, and went in assuming I would hear nothing and never have to think about the subject again. Turns out I was wrong, not going to say it was the difference between listening to an eight track in my car in the 70s vs a top tier audio system today, but it was most definitely at the point where I’ve spent thousands to upgrade a component for that level of difference. Also, not all expensive cables sound great with all setups. And I’m quite sure cables have outrageous profit levels and not truly justified by their cost, at the higher levels. Having said that you haBe to pay to play at those levels. If you deem they make a difference to you. No one is trying to force anyone to spend as so many claim. Sure cable manufactures make claims, they’re selling a product, every manufacturer does that, I don’t hear complaints about audio equipments advertising. Why do the naysayers feel the need to try to demean those who are willing to spend on cables. Most who don’t spend, don’t waste their time with that, I’m sure it’s just a small, but vocal group that do. It is mildly amusing I suppose to see the same ones keep doing it over and over. So why do you care so much if other spend, when you chose not to. It’s their money, their choice. It’s not a matter of just saying you don’t see the value, so you don’t, it’s more that they’re out to prove that those who hear, are hallucinating. That points to a deeper issue within themselves. |
thyname, "Back then when he was posting under @atdavid fake account." Why exactly are you calling someone’s account fake? Did she/he impersonate you? "...he is probably busy fighting his holy war somewhere else, in other Audio forums and Facebook. I am 100% sure." Do you also walk on water? Aside from that, is he probably (<100%) fighting or he is certainly (100%) fighting? |
Nonsense because they use their ears instead of measurements that aren’t able to properly tell the differences? Science is great, when properly understood. If someone believes we already know everything there is to know, better to keep them to the task of writing the history, so those who believe we still have much to discover can do the discovering. You won’t ever learn anything new with the first type. |
For giggles I read through 6 pages of this thread (slightly more than halfway). After that six pages I really saw only two posters who could competently describe / explain the physics of electricity and electrical engineering: roberttdid and georgemgraves. Everything else was simply empty rhetoric. Are there any posts from someone else on pages 7-11 that fall into the realm of actual informed knowledge (versus empty rhetoric) that would justify reading further? |
I did get a nice thick, oxygen-free copper PC for my amp, the PC that came with it was like a lamp PC, if you know what I mean. Speaker cables? So much craziness!! They have to be off the floor! They have to be EXPENSIVE!! I honestly think going all battery power, no AC power, would make a difference. But as said before, the HIGHEST PROFIT ITEM: speaker cables! |
I can't argue with that if you want an expensive cable as statement pieces and want to splurge on them it's not my money.
Ya know, good miney will get you a good car = Mercedes Benz,,,,,,as for Interconnects,,, big money on interconnects,,might result in a drain on your audiophile budget I've found my Gold Standard with the ebayer DIY geek , navships. I hada hunch, his cables might help me out..and wow, after cking dozens of cables online, (most prices scared me off)) my intuition piad off. |
somewhere in this thread,,I may have posted such and such, saying stuff like yeah ~~snakeoil~~, But like the old Monkeys song **I'm a believer,, yeah yeah** High Fidelity,,in sucha humble looking interconnect,,,no bells, whistles, just straight shooting musicality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5yfgu627MA |
I tell you the truth @speedbumb6. The reason why these characters spend their time in all cable forums, their entire life. They are here to save the poor souls from the evil of cable makers 😂. Like good Samaritans, or missionaries. Robert told me this. Back then when he was posting under @atdavid fake account. He specifically told me that I cannot be saved. He was there to save the others, according to him hundreds of newbies who he believes are out there, silently reading these forums. And that’s the truth my friend. That’s why they are in all cable forums. The crusade runs very deep! And @andy2 don’t worry, he is probably busy fighting his holy war somewhere else, in other Audio forums and Facebook. I am 100% sure. He is a full time missionary. Or crusader. And if he is indeed banned (I don’t blame Audiogon for banning him, he never buys or sell anything here to make them a single dime), he will eventually resurface under a different fake account. Which again, I will easily spot, like this time with AtDavid becoming “Robert” |
This is true thyname, it does seem strange. To me it seems that they’re not so much trying to convince us, but trying to convince themselves. It’s like they guy driving the Chevy posting in every rolls forum that there is no difference between a rolls and a Chevy, or pick any brand of car. There’s die hard Ford fans who would tell him there’s no comparison to the fords. There’s probably merit in them all, at their respective price points, and some people will never like certain ones. If you can’t afford a rolls, it’s a moot point, but I certainly do t begrudge those who can and do. I’m happy they’re happy. |
“Continue to beat the drum... why?” To paraphrase. It is, obviously, a controversy. The prejudice surely goes both ways. However, those who are opposed to expensive cables ignore the fact that cables are an established part of our Industry. A direct analogy escapes me but, loosely, is a Chevy just as good as a Rolls Royce. Yes, they both transport and do a good job but, obviously, the Roller does so in a considerably more sophisticated manner. Is it worth the money? Quality and value is in the ear of the beholder. |
Here’s a perfect example of someone who is an expert in his field, knows and understands measurements, but in the end his ears told him the story, Paul McGowan Synergy between components is not just a series of compromises made to elicit great results. Sometimes the mixing and matching of equipment has a magic to it that simply cannot be reproduced any other way. Take for example Octave Record’s Studer 32 track analog mixing board. When we first bought this Neil Young-owned board, Gus and I were determined to rebuild it. The circuitry is all based on the venerable NE 5532 op-amps that I have written about before. This warhorse amplifier circuit has been around as long as I can remember. We first used it in the early 1980s when we launched our first CD player. In the meantime, many fine modern op-amps have been designed and released, some revered by audio aficionados as being light years better than the old 5532. Surely, it was time to refresh this beauty of a mixing board. Since the Studer’s op-amps are socketed, it was an easy task to swap out the 5532s for newer op-amps with far better specs. Then the listening tests began. We had about five choices of op-amps installed in different channels and Gus played for me a series of great recordings we were both familiar with through each. The test was totally blind as I had no idea of what versions of amplification we were listening to, but one by one we went through all the choices. In the end, the 5532 won, hands down. Clearly, it was the synergy between all the components in the chain the engineers at Studer had achieved that made the magic. If one were to have looked at specs alone, this amp would have been last on the list. It can be difficult at times to accept what we hear, but it’s always best to trust our ears. |
Here is a review of QED Signature Revelation which is not that much more expensive than Belden but better in every aspect. They use a very unique geometry that can’t be found from Home Depot. https://www.qed.co.uk/qed-revelation-cable.html#tab1 |
