Why Do Cables Matter?

Cables may or may not make a difference depending on what they connect.

Even when they do make a difference, some cannot detect it.

And far, far too many audiophools hear with their wallets!

See ieLogical CableSnakeOil

Ignore ALL recommendations for interconnect from anyone who does not have an identical system, musical tastes and room!!!

Cost has ZERO to do with sonics. Pricier cables may have better mechanical longevity, but I’m still using some cables from the ’80’s

@jasonbourne71 

Cables have electrical properties LC&R, the building blocks of filters.

If one use a cable with a very high reactance such that it rolled the amplifier output beginning @ 500Hz and 2KHz, it would be audible.

ALL cables modify the signal passed through them. If they didn't, we could use zip cord for everything. The fact that we have 75Ω, 50Ω, 300Ω, ad infinitum cables for specific purposes gives lie to the assertion only transducers have a sound.

Whether the changes are audible depends on many things, beginning with the CBLF.

Reductio ad absurdum, transducers can have no sound because all they do is move air.

audiophiles should know that no recording studio uses boutique expensive cable

There are many studios that use other than 'standard' cables. My company, Studio City Sound Corp, wired many in Los Angeles in the 80's & 90's

It could be a significant investment. No bookings for up to a month, wire, labor mounted quickly for a large installation.

Many freelance engineers carried their favorite cables, mics, pre's and EQ to sessions. All might be changed for a ballad vs a rocker.

Has anybody ever heard a really bad effect from a cable or connector?

Absolutely. Back in the early noughts, we tried a sampling of cables.

One cable sounded like we had a whole new CD collection. Pass.

The missus opined of another "That's the only wire where the clarinet sounds like a clarinet." She has perfect pitch and played clarinet.

And for the 10^10th time, some people can't tell the difference between Petrus and Plonk. Ditto HiFi...

^^^

The above is utterly pointless. Any deltas are specific to that system and room and unlikely to translate to an entirely different system.

There are plenty of expensive cables that are demonstrably designed to be 'tone controls' and are by no means an improvement on any but a small subset of equipment.

Blame it on Noel Lee!

Some of us were experimenting with cables & connectors long before 1976.

Ieales needs a graphic equalizer- much easier for adjusting the tone of his system.

@tonywinga

Ever viewed the phase response of a graphic? It’s horrendous.

For longer than I care to remember, I’ve said "It’s not the frequency response. It’s the Time!!" Asynchronous harmonic arrival causes a musically educated brain to work overtime trying to rearrange the harmonic structure. Good time and phase response is why the Quad electrostat still sounds amazing and something like the Tekton Moab and its ilk are initially impressive but ultimately extremely fatiguing.

Many systems can be vastly improved with the minimal EQ with a ’tilt’ of ±1 or 2 dB around a mid frequency. In the studio, we used to fake it with two band really low Q parametric EQ, especially when disc mastering. Today it’s a doddle to implement in the digital domain.

Completely baseless claim...

More than 50 years ago, pals and I began experimenting with listening to cables and electronics in our various systems. Initially we tried A/B testing, but found that what we had was C/D.

We all had separates. Some examples: Mitch Cottter, Apt, SAE, Ampzilla, Marantz, HK, db, Dayton-Wright, KEF, Celestion, Tannoy, AR, etc. No Bose, API or Japanese speakers.

We schlepped everything but turntables and speakers to one another’s homes. We mostly agreed that systems were better with the familiar than interlopers. About the same time we agreed that specs were so much twaddle.

Have you ever tried it? What were there [sic] results? "Unlikely" how, share more?

Tried it more times than I can count.

I remember when I first tried Kimber speaker cable which sounded outstanding in the store. I don't recall my system at the time, but I returned them the next day. I think the cable may have been Oracle which I used until Monster came out with a superior 'pro' product in the 80's.

At that point, I had biamped Tympani [III? IV?] with a custom 70wpc tube amp, & 350wpc SS for the woofers with short cables right behind the speakers. AR SP[?] pre reworked by Michael Fraser, Conrad Johnson MC amp, MC cartridge, Goldmund TT in another room on a stand bolted to the concrete and connected to the power amps with 20[?] feet of Mark Levinson silver [litz?]. The Monster Cable was the first that improved over the Oracle in my system after other cable positive speaker cable store demos.

In the 80's I was a recording engineer. I became an unpaid Monster Cable consultant after Noel Lee loaned me a prototype of a new professional mic cable. On Neumann and Telefunken tube microphones, it blew us away.

We had different microphones, EQ, mic pre, compressors, limiters, to adjust the sound. We now had cables that allowed us to use less of the preceding.

I'd sometimes accompany the sales rep to studios and explain what we experienced. Taking the same sets of cables from studio to studio as demos, results varied from meh to none to stunning depending on what gear was on either end.

A valid determination can only be made in situ as everything else there contributes.

@yoyoyaya

It makes me laugh as audiophiles prattle on about recording unless they were recording engineers themselves.

Engineers may attempt to get what’s on the other side of the glass into the recording. And almost always certainly must fail. And as often as not the recording is a creation in its own right assembled from tracks recorded on different days, often in different rooms, possibly on different continents.

No engineer anywhere ever heard in the booth what was actually playing in the studio. Not even when nothing is playing. The studio has an ambience which is masked by booth equipment self-noise and air-con. Acoustically they can be worlds apart due to volume, shape, contents and surface treatment.

One of Al Schmidt’s masterpieces is Toto IV. The iconic track ’Africa’ began as a four bar drum segment cut from hours of recordings, spliced end to end and then looped. Everything else is layered on top over many months. I still get goosebumps today when I recall when Jeff brought a cassette of the finished song to a date and played it for the cats. We were speechless. Drum perfection!

Just a wild guess, less than $2,000 a pair? If so, who in the right mind would spend $2,000 on speaker wire for speakers costing a few hundred bucks? 

I once had $3k cables on speakers that cost me ≈$400 forty years ago.

Kimber BiFocal and bi-wired, XO recapped Spica TC-50. Scarily musical.

I laugh when I hear $50k speakers. Mostly because they are badly designed wrt to time coherence.

Nice people post links. WBF* search is hopeless.

* Wife's Best Friend?

What does WBF stand for? (abbreviations.com)

MasterBuilt are probably fine cables. Like all cables, they interact with the source and load. There is no Magic Bullet.

Their spiel and its ilk are repeated ad nauseum on most every audiophool product page. 😵

Shame some people just come to these threads to throw stones.

Stating provable facts isn't throwing stones.

"my system sounds fantastic" and could be made not so with a single cable mismatch.

Sometimes you have to wake a sleepwalker so they don't fall down the stairs.

Cables make a difference. I’ve said that for over 50 years.

What is not guaranteed is that any particular cable in any particular system will effect a change or be an improvement to all. Regardless of all the marketing claims.

Advising someone to try what you own has an even chance of being bad advice. AND I NEVER do it.

...we only have marketing hype to evaluate products

Truer words were never spoken.

The only thing I ever bought in a HiFi shop that I didn’t evaluate in my system were Spica TC-50... about forty years ago.

At least some designers of high end cables have obtained patents for their products and designs.

Patent examiners by and large are overworked, underpaid and not expert.

Michael Jackson was able to patent his ’moonwalk’ shoes ... something used since the 1880’s music halls.

Just for laughs, when I see a patent on HiFi gear these days, I read it...

... if I can while ROTFLMFAO 🤣

Applying for and receiving a US patent requires that the product designer provide some plausible engineering principles to support the patent application

I know... I gots one and was involved in others.

As Reagan opined, "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."

Last time I checked, which was a long time back, US examiners started @ $35k and I was paying $125k for engineers.

“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
― W.C. Fields

So I don’t understand how someone would be rolling on the floor with laughter reading patent claims.

@tonywinga 

Because the claims defy physics, particularly in HiFi.

I read plenty of claims for products on which something we made could possibly infringe - at least in a lawyer's mind - and had to write arguments invalidating the claims from prior art.

United States Issues Patent Number 10,000,000 in 2018. The twenty-five years from 1993 to 2018 double the number of patents of the previous TWO HUNDRED years. 

Many, many times I dissuaded our teams from applying because although the product might be clever and unique, it was based on fundamentals that would not survive a knowledgeable examiner. Perhaps I should have relented and 'collected' some more... 😏