@8th-note+1! When I wanted to add some new ICs to my system I too bought the AQ Silver Extremes (5 pairs). They look nicely made and the price was right ($90 each discounted from $450). Like buying jewelry sonic quality was not a factor in my choice. In use the AQ Silver Extremes sound fine! I am not so neurotic to lose sleep worrying if some other brand of interconnects sounds better!
Why Do Cables Matter?
To me, all you need is low L, C, and R. I run Mogami W3104 bi-wire from my McIntosh MAC7200 to my Martin Logan Theos. We all know that a chain is only as strong as its' weakest link - so I am honestly confused by all this cable discussion.
What kind of wiring goes from the transistor or tube to the amplifier speaker binding post inside the amplifier? It is usually plain old 16 ga or 14 ga copper. Then we are supposed to install 5 - 10' or so of wallet-emptying, pipe-sized pure CU or AG with "special configurations" to the speaker terminals?
What kind of wiring is inside the speaker from the terminals to the crossover, and from the crossover to the drivers? Usually plain old 16 ga or 14 ga copper.
So you have "weak links" inside the amplifier, and inside the speaker, so why bother with mega expensive cabling between the two? It doesn't make logical sense to me. It makes more sense to match the quality of your speaker wires with the existing wires in the signal path [inside the amplifier and inside the speaker].
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Only transducers have a "sound". What's a transducer inquiring minds want to know? It is a device that converts one form of energy into another form of energy. Speakers and phono cartridges are examples of transducers. Speakers convert electrical energy into sound waves - a different form of energy. Phono cartridges convert vinyl vibrations into electrical energy. Speakers and phono cartridges use mechanical parts to affect the energy conversion. It is these mechanical parts that affect the sound of each device/transducer. | ||
Wire - having no moving mechanical parts - cannot have a "sound". Ah, inquiring minds will say, what about musical instrument strings/wire? Yes, those do have a " sound" due to length/diameter and material construction. The factor here is "vibration" of the string/wire connected to a sound board. Audio interconnects/speaker wires are fixed in place and not attached to a sound board. Whatever minute vibrations they experience certainly does not affect the electronic components or speakers they are connected to. | ||
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For those that will skip the first page: I'll hit the REPLAY button:
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To the local, OCD, imaginary, "intelligence" operative (snort of derision)- I have three years of college level Physics (Major) and Psychology (Minor). What are your creds, out of curiosity? | ||
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Feynman was and will remain, my favorite lecturer (yeah: I'm that old). He mentioned often (and: I took to heart) his favorite Rule of Life: "Never stop learning!" For all his genius, he never grew overly confident in his beliefs. The perfect obverse to the Dunning-Kruger sufferer. ie: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.” and: “I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.” Tesla is probably my favorite innovator, who (despite the incessant, projectile vomit, from his day's naysayers), took the World, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, with his inventions. His thoughts: “Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.” | ||
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." (Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse , 1872) "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon," (Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873) "The super computer is technologically impossible. It would take all of the water that flows over Niagara Falls to cool the heat generated by the number of vacuum tubes required." (Professor of Electrical Engineering, New York University) "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." (Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923) "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." (Dr. Lee DeForest, Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television) "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible!" (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895) "The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." (Admiral William Leahy, re: US Atomic Bomb Project) When the steam locomotive came on the scene; the best (scientific) minds proclaimed, "The human body cannot survive speeds in excess of 35MPH." Until recently (21st Century); and the advent of the relatively new science of Fluid Dynamics, the best (scientific) minds involved in Aerodynamics, could not fathom how a bumblebee stays aloft. Often; Science has to catch up with the facts/phenomena of Nature and/or, "reality" (our universe). I haven't been in school since the 60's, but- at Case Institute of Technology; the Physics Prof always emphasized what we were studying was, "Electrical THEORY." He strongly made a point of the fact that no one had yet actually observed electrons (how they behave on the quantum level) and that only some things can really be called, "LAWS." (ie: Ohm, Kirchoff, Faraday) PERHAPS: that's changed in recent years and I missed it? | ||
I have never seen viruses no matter how hard I squint 🙄
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There you go, a nice cable that you like. That’s what matters most. Many have compared this cable to others since 2010 and like it too, and no lost sleep 👍
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If you understand the principle that the original recording can't be made any better (you can't add information) to the signal then audiophiles should know that no recording studio uses boutique expensive cable. So cables that are more expensive than the original recording studio or production cables are illogical. Where am I wrong? | ||
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. | ||
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. | ||
@audphile1 sure as heck has been pummeled and pulverized. +1 To each their own on this subject. Move along little doggies. | ||
I think we should just keep kicking this horse. It’s dead so it don’t mind. Has anybody ever heard a really bad effect from a cable or connector? I have! I tried some passive line attenuators on the output of a pro level dac to lower it’s output for a consumer grade pre-amp. That sounded truly awful. It was much better to digitally attenuate. I also got pretty bad sound from some 30 foot RCA interconnects. I can’t even remember why I needed those at one time, but I’ve still got them! - You know, I think those cables had a stereo phono plug on one end and RCA outputs on another, and I was using the headphone out of an iPod into a pre-amp from across the room. A lot of problems there. Another truly terrible sound came from trying to use y-splitters on the dac output in an attempt to mix channels. Dac didn’t like that. So, if I can hear the effect of RCA interconnects when they are 30 feet long, maybe some people can still hear the effects at only 3 feet long. I’m really glad that I don’t hear anything that bothers me with decent 3 foot single ended interconnects. This assumes there’s nothing wacky about the impedance matching between the two devices being connected. If that’s the case, then all sorts of mayhem and cable effects may revealed. | ||
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... | ||
A story - A friend of mine was super particular about this. One time I brought him over to a 55-year audio dealer with the best AudioNote systems playing. This pair of AN speakers were corner positioned, rotated inward and crossed about 1.5 foot in front of the listening position. Something neither of us had ever tried before. We listened to some old Elvis and Beatles tracks. It was quite an engaging and enjoyable listening experience. One of those times you walk away perplexed and never forget. | ||
Naysayers.. stupid childish term, moving wires on a home sound system absolutely stupid. I’ve available 4500 A/B watts at 4 Ohms .003 thd, you can rattle glass and pound your chest but wires don’t move. S..t my 230 volt Lincoln welder at 130 amp and 20 volts won’t move wires !! Hay Maybe after my wires ‘burn in’ things will move… more laughable 💩 Cheers
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If you understand the principle that the original recording can't be made any better (you can't add information) to the signal then audiophiles should know that no recording studio uses boutique expensive cable. So cables that are more expensive than the original recording studio or production cables are illogical. Where am I wrong? "
Where are you wrong? You are wrong as follows. You start what would generally be considered as statement of fact i.e. you cannot add information to the original recording. You then follow this with a statement that is a combination of a conjecture and an argument from authority fallacy viz "then audiophiles should know that no recording studio uses boutique or expensive cables. You then attempt to conjoin these two statements to suggest that (the use of) cables more expensive than the cables used for the original recording is illogical. This is a non sequitur fallacy because there is no causal relation between your two statements.
The reproduction of recorded music is an entirely different act to the recording of the music. While one may not be able to add information to the original recording one can take many steps to retrieve the information that is there. This is the whole premise of hi fi.
Your argument implies that because recordings are made with components of a particular level of quality, then using better quality components to reproduce them is pointless. That argument is specious for the reasons set out above.
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Lot of words that mean nothing, sort of debate garbage. If you have the right size pure copper wire with well made conductive ends that’s as good as it gets. Adding boutique C..p, rolling it flat, making it pretty on and on does nothing except teach others to spell placebo. Measurable tests don’t show an actual difference, A/B testing totally subjective, inconsistent, what’s left bragging rights and depleted resources. Let’s find consistent proof, measurable / infallible crowd approval, again this thread does nothing for either. | ||
So many opinions here based on little to no life experiences. Learning comes from listening and thinking, never from talking. You can read a book about swimming but until you watch someone swim and jump into a lake yourself, you have no idea what swimming is. I’ve seen cables move. When hundreds of amps going through a wire it wants to standup straight. That wire gets rigid. Wires heat up as current passes through them. As the wires heat up they move. It’s called thermal expansion. Go read about that. Many of the audiophile wires on the market look pretty and that is all they are good for. You may or may not hear an improvement. I bought some bi-wire speaker cables for my HT setup years ago to replace my old Monster Cable speaker wires. I didn’t hear a difference. I was out a couple of hundred dollars but at least the new speaker wires look cool with 4 banana plugs in the back of each speaker. For HT purposes I have great sound. For some reason I do not obsess with the sound like I do with my stereo system. I’m more concerned about the picture. Maybe that’s because I grew up with a 19” B&W TV. So I don’t see myself as someone who wants to hear a difference because I spent some money on a wire with two connectors attached. I typically audition with the mindset that I could use that money to buy a sports car or a boat (well down payment is all really) rather than on a cable. I don’t tell people what I spend on cables. I think it is nuts myself but at some point you are either all in or you are out. Don’t buy an expensive preamp and then leave a $5 power cord on it and expect it to perform at its best. I have watched some tear downs of “high grade” cables on video. Not surprising that many brands are just fluff. They might really be OCC copper, who knows? But the dielectrics and terminations matter as much as the wire and many of these wires are not well engineered. The good brands and the well engineered cables are expensive. People come across some good deals in cables here and there. But as always it is caveat emptor. We don’t have gov’t oversight of the cable industry so it is up to all of us audiophiles as a community to find those gold nuggets in cables. | ||
Find a reputable and experienced audio dealer with a great listening room. Bring a few friends, and a few others with ears to do a real listening session for two hours. Bring your highly praised and affordable Mogami interconnect cables people like to rave about for recording studios. Arrange to have some other good cables on hand. Listen for at least an hour. Swap, listen again. Ask the group to report differences. If you can’t hear a difference, live on with your cables, save $. Watch out for those who can hear a difference with a properly designed set of cables. They are not cheap.
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^^^ 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. | ||
I've never weighed in on this but am in the "I can hear a difference" column.
I listen exclusively to headphones so listening room is not part of the equation. I also have certain tracks I've listened to for many years and when upgrading anything I always notice a change in different parts of the recording. Some I like, others I don't. I've purchased expensive cables that I didn't like and returned. Others brought a level of sensitivity I hadn't heard before. | ||
Have you ever tried it? What were there results? "Unlikely" how, share more? The same tests can be repeated at home too with similar results. Tests like these are pointless to those who’ve never tried it, or shared results in a group of peers. Having worked for a speaker company, where blind listening tests were executed with groups of 30-50 university students in different room settings; The speakers were designed and developed with access to an isoberic chamber. Cables were swapped too. One could argue none of this translates either once the speakers are brought home for use. None of it was pointless. A lot can be learned in tests. Sure, one can argue all cables are passive tone controls, and poor designs impacting sound more than others. | ||
Some of us were experimenting with cables & connectors long before 1976.
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.
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.
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Ieales, I love the sound of Quads. My first encounter with them was in the late 1980’s pared with an ARC SP-8 and Quicksilver amp. A Sota Star was generating the magical music emanating from those modified Quad ESLs. That was where my true hi end journey began. I had planars too but eventually moved on to Thiel speakers. To me they were fast like planars but with stronger bass. Agreed, time coherence is critical but I’m not convinced cables can alter that- at least they shouldn’t. I even had MIT cables with the LCR networks for a long time. I have since moved back to non-networked cables. I’m saying that generalizations about cables are inaccurate. Cables have progressed over the decades as much as any other stereo component, ie. DACs, amps, preamps, etc. The disappointing part, as I have said is that it is not a regulated industry and finding true and legitimate technology can be a challenge. And I have also found, just as with any other stereo component- some bargains exist that make great sound for the money but mostly the good stuff tends to be more expensive. Expensive or cheap what we are all looking for is something genuine. It is not easy to make the OCC copper wire which sounds the best. And how many people have their own metallurgical lab to verify they are getting what they paid for. It comes down to how it sounds and for sure, we can get fooled into thinking something sounds better only later to discover it doesn’t. It’s happened to me. | ||
OCC copper wire wasn’t created for audio. It was created for Aerospace- same with silver plated copper wire. The goal is resistance to fatigue and corrosion. Back in the day I would spec MIL-W-16878 wire, if I remember correctly for LVDTs used in aerospace. Similar wire is used these days in automotive too in order to help meet OBD-II and durability requirements. (Not so much the OCC in automotive. It is too expensive). | ||
Agree, 100%. Yes they have. Along with other cable providers, i.e, i’ve been testing and evaluating with Cardas Audio cables for 30+ years. Today’s designs, products, and results are different from 10, 20, 30 years ago. Anyone who’s tested them knows, like them or not, in any case they are different. Preference is a personal choice. Also similar exp with your comments on OCC, silver-over copper too. | ||
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.
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@yoyoyaya thanks for your response. #2 Recording studios don't use very expensive interconnects and speaker cable. #3 Since #1 and #2 are true it is illogical to use cables that are more expensive than the recording studio is using. Please don't be silly and point to an exception in which a studio uses very expensive cables i'm speaking in general terms with nearly 40 years of recording experience at the highest levels. You didn't think statement 1 and 2 went together, they do because of the agreed upon idea that there is entropy in information you can't do better than the original. Try arguing that cables or any piece of hyper expensive playback equipment can add information / fidelity to the original. It's going to be tough without AI. |
