Who thinks $5K speaker cable really better than generic 14AWG cable?

To the original poster’s question, I say "yes". I have never owned speaker cable that costs $5000, but have heard them in demos and they certainly didn’t seem to detract from the overall experience.

Over 10 years ago I replaced a very long run of lamp cord with $5.00 a foot solid core copper wire in a generally poor system and I was hard pressed to immediately hear any difference. After a long break in period the sound of the wire changed, but not necessarily for the better, just better exposing fatal flaws in my amp and speakers, providing a clearer window on generally crappy sound. Needless to say, that system is long gone.

I very recently replaced decent $1 per foot and $2 per foot multistranded copper cables in two different systems with some solid core copper cables with more exotic metallurgy and construction that cost more than 10x the cables they replaced. One system is a solid home theater/two channel digital and analog set up in a purpose built media room with 21’ cable runs. The other is a computer based office system for near field listening that cost less than $1K. In both cases, the difference was shocking, especially in the office system in that I was not prepared for it to be capable of sounding that good. Tone, timing, lack of sibilants, and spatial information are all improved. In both cases, the cables are completely out of view, so the only satisfaction of owning them is what I hear coming out of my speakers. But what I hear coming out of the speakers in both systems is a problem now because I want to listen to music all the time, LOL.

Based on admittedly limited past personal experience I put the hierarchy of impact of cables as power cords first, then interconnects, and finally speaker cables. My recent experience challenges my previous assumptions about this. Perhaps because I had the upstream cabling sorted out, the speaker cables showed more effect than I had noticed in the past.

My recent experience with power, interconnects and speaker cables tells me metallurgy makes a big difference and that grain and surface structure are both important, perhaps as or more important than the metal purity. I will say silver wires generally sound completely different than the copper wires I have heard. In my current systems, I prefer Silver digital cables and copper analog cables, YMMV.

If this all sounds crazy or doesn’t match your experience, then that is great - you will save money and can use the cables you got in the box with your gear or at the hardware store and be perfectly happy. I am just reporting some of my own experiences here, not itching for a fight.

kn

Dynaquest4

I will not attempt to change your mind about, well, anything. But I will use one of your statements to make a theoretical case for several ways cabling interacts with your whole system, and how that can be more rewarding with more accurate or revealing gear.

"Assuming that exotic cables do, in fact, cancel out or mitigate external influences that distort or otherwise modify pure audio signal transmission, it would seem that the more expensive your system, the less you would need cables and other interconnects to assuage these issues. But, no...it seems otherwise. The more you spend on your system components the more you need to spend on wire to cancel out these external influences. Interesting."

Assuming the quest of many audiophiles at one level is to come as close to faithful reproduction of the original recording as possible, then doing everything within budget and set up as possible would seem like an obvious goal. Cabling affects this pursuit in at least three ways.

1. Keep bad things away from the original signal. Bad "things" in the environment around your cables can come from several sources, devices in your home, building or neighborhood that emit electrical fields or interference, your systems own electronics, and its other cables that all come together behind your rack. Effectively keeping desired signals in their lane and interference out of their lane so the original signal arrives at its destination relatively unscathed is the goal here. This is one way good power cables can help, even though they are not purpose built to transmit any of your processed data. The better the original signal, the more rewarding the effective treatment of this problem.

2. Keep the cable itself from differentialy absorbing or only preserving some portion of the audible spectrum in your signal, or smearing the time signature of different elements in the audio signal. This is where the tone control idea comes in, and "better" cables keep this from happening to the greatest degree, I.E. they do not act as tone controls at all, allowing you for better or worse to hear what your electronics and speakers are trying to do. When you start hearing differences in room acoustics, production and the sound engineers choices, you are getting "the rest of the story".

3. Because different electronics and speakers have different output and input impedances, resistive loads, efficiencies, etc. not every cable will match well with every piece of gear, and so "bad" cable/gear match can reduce how effectively the above cable attributes are revealed in practice, so some thought and trial and error are in order to get the best results in cable choice.

OK, so why would expensive, well designed gear benefit at all from well designed cables? Well for starters, assume that better gear is generally producing more accurate signals out of the gate, and protecting these signals enhances the value, investment in, and enjoyment of better gear.

Also, your top end gear only reduces the need to address issues one and three above to the extent that each piece is not a significant source of electrical interference to the room or area where your cables are concentrated, or back into the power grid, and that your gear is not presenting odd loads or other electrical properties to the cabling, so protecting signals from intereference resulting from other sources in your listening room is still a valid goal, even if your gear is completely begnign in this regard (which it very likely is not).

And, regardless of how good the signal is when it leaves your gear, it has to get to the next piece of gear for processing intact. If the cabling absorbs any of the very expensive and accurate signal you are generating, I am going to go out on a limb and say that’s BAD.

So in summary, the better the gear, the better and more information rich the signal (analog or digital), and the better you should be able to notice when some of it is left behind of suffers some artifact in transit, or when such problem is corrected. To the extent that a user wants certain artifacts because they find that pleasing, then cables can be a part of "tuning" any system to the extent that they may be better at passing one or more signal elements relative some other cable.

I hear a difference as a result of all these processes operating in each of my systems. And my better gear sounds better to me with different and often but not always more expensive and sophisticated wires in between. But what is really remarkable is how good some very inexpensive gear can sound with better designed and implemented cables (not always... in some cases it just sounds... really inexpensive). While this does not pencil out for the average user, the results can be quit shocking, and can demonstrate just how universal the the properties above apply, and how well-designed some inexpensive equipment really is. Just my experience here, YMMV a lot.

kn

Dynaquest4

Thanks for your reply, similarly busy.  I first started experimenting with cables in a serious way over 10 years ago in an attempt to improve a crappy system with out changing any of the boxes that I wanted to like.  We are not talking high end wires here, and a lot of it was home brew, but right off the bat I heard differences.  These wire related differences were not always for the better, and some cables just highlighted deficiencies in some element of the electronics they were connecting.

Fast forward to today and I now have a purpose designed and built listening room with its own dedicated power line, so a lot of factors are controlled.  In my decidedly midfi system I find wire differences to be on par with changing out DACs, with descending effect of PCs, SCs, analog ICs then digital ICs, but all show noticeable changes to my ears in my system.

I am a trained scientist, but in earth sciences, not electrical engineering. In my immediate family I have two electrical emgineers working in bleeding edge aerospace and two mechanical engineers. All either musicians and/or audiophiles.  Of the four engineers, one of the mechanical engineers is a complete wire skeptic.  The others are more willing to accept that there are attributes of materials, design and application that can result in better perceived performance that is difficult to measure with typically available measurement equipment.  Perhaps derived from designing electronic guidance systems to operate to spec in dirty emf environments, dunno cause they don't talk about it.

I think there are two areas where measurement and specs may not relate to real world experience with hifi cables.  1) things we hear like tone, soundstage and "speed" may be hard to measure, and 2) wire specifications and performance may not be conservative in dirty complicated applications behind your gear.

Bottom line, you either hear a difference or you don't, and if you don't, you have more $$ left for source material.

randy-11, yes you can "measure" tone, but those measurements often fail to identify perceived differences in "tonality" at the listening end for pretty much every form of audio gear, including cables.  This is why two amplifiers that have impeccable measurements, at least according to John Atkinson, can sound distinctly different to the ear of a listener.

And as for "speed" how do you measure that?

I would generalize to say that the experience of many people involved in hifi is that our stereo ear-brain systems are measuring, analyzing and integrating sonic information in ways that are very difficult for even sophisticated combinations of bench equipment to model effectively or completely.

We are not talking about engineering challenges like, will a bridge hold up a particular load or will a particular battery design accept a certain rate of charging before overheating.  Those are simple case specific engineering challenges where nearly all the parameters are known.

Ignoring for the moment the very real influence of expectation and psychological condition of the individual listener, there are a tremendous number of physical variables that affect how any gear, including cables, will sound in a particular listening environment.  These variables include at least the room, the quality of power to the room, the source material and format, the combination of gear used, the physical layout of the gear adjacent to each other and to the room, the type, lengths and physical layout of cabling connecting the gear, vibration management, the seating position and finally the best-day capacity of the listener's ear brain system to detect differences.  That is a lot of variables to sort through, and probably why many audiophiles take subjective gear and cable reviews with a cup of salt.

Given all this, it is not surprising that some people hear no differences from different cable applications.  But it is also not surprising that many people do experience real differences in their listening environment. My own experience and the experience of others that report big and noticable changes due to changing speaker and other cabling in their systems tells me this is likely a real phenomenon.  And given the list of variables above would indicate that your mileage may vary considerably from others reported experience.

It also says to me that measurements of gear or wires on the test bench and in an idealized listening environment can be a starting place to identify "fatal flaws" in design, but might have very little relevance beyond that to how something will sound to your ear with your system in your room. You just have to try the bloody things out for yourself.

@randy-11 thanks for your reply.  I think you are talking about this: http://www.analog.com/media/en/analog-dialogue/volume-41/number-1/articles/hgh-speed-time-domain-mea...

I am talking about the speed of audio signal rise and decay as experienced by our ears in our listening rooms. Perhaps better termed "attack", more like is described here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Sound/timbre.html

While you could conceivably use sensitive instruments to measure this in your listening room, it would be interesting to see if such devices can be parameterized to show subtle differences in attack, decay and timbre across a full spectrum of instruments and sounds presented by a jazz or classical orchestra simultaneously. Taken to the extreme, can an automated system be set up to evaluate gear more productively for auditioning and decision making on a possible purchase than humans with trained and acute hearing?

And assuming you could measure some of these characteristics with electronics more effectively than our ears, most of us (except one of my in-laws) don't currently have highly portable acoustic measuring systems we can take to the brick and mortar or set up in the sweet spot on the couch at home to tell us what sounds best and what we should buy or pass up, and therefore most of us must rely on our ears to make these decisions.  I know that sounds like heresy to some, but there you have it, stuck with our ears to sort out all this controversy about what sounds good to us and what doesn't.  

And speaking of bad ears, the link from @willemj is a hoot.  Did most of the participants have crappy hearing.  Had they all been in the artilary division in the military?  Were there synergy problems with the higher end gear chosen, with the higher end amp-speaker-cable combination compared with the budget amp?  Did all the participants run out to dump their multi-thousand dollar rigs for a Beringer amp and an old Sony DVD player based on the results?  A hifi dealer's worst nightmare!

Instead of fancy measuring devices or old men's clubs, How about a double blind cable test where only one parameter is changed and done with all adolescent female acoustic musicians who have yet to attend a rock concert?  I might believe those results...