Why Do Cables Matter?

I won’t even bother reading this ridiculous thread.  I’ll only say just put crap tires on a Ferrari or Porsche and see what that gets you. Chain only as strong as the cheapest link.  Underspend on cables at your own peril.  They’re a necessary evil, so just deal with it.

"It doesn't make logical sense to me."

Unless you know everything, it really doesn't matter. And none of us knows everything. 

In some ways audio is like witnessing a UFO. Sometimes we can explain a phenomenon, but sometimes not. I stopped trying to find reason and logic after I listened to audio quality fuses. Yes, they made a difference. I don't have the faintest clue how or why they would. I've never heard an explanation that is even remotely adequate. 

Do what works for you, don't do what doesn't. Ignore the little people who delude themselves into thinking it's their place to ridicule you. 

@kinarow1 

If you can't hear a difference between cables, why worry about this?

@ieales. I am a recording engineer.

@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!

@donavabdear @nonoise @yoyoyaya 

Great points which I failed to understand about the equipment and about a good engineer creating things which project beyond what their equipment literally reports to them. Thanks.

@nonoise : +2

+1 Nonoise.

@donavabdear. I agree with a lot of what you say about Al Schmitt’s recordings - which are superb. However, I disagree with your "bottleneck" comment. You miss the point that the engineer doesn’t just listen to what’s being recorded via monitors. They listen to the actual sound of the instruments themselves. In addition, good engineers know exactly what every piece of equipment in the recording chain does in terms of the sound which is finally committed to the recording medium. Furthermore, in multitrack recording, the engineer has the opportunity to listen to each track solo and, actually, has access to a lot more information than anyone who only hears the final two track mix.

To conclude, as nonoise says arguments about any piece of equipment in the recording chain setting a limit on what can be used for reproduction are just red herrings.

That’s the end of my contribution on this topic.

Recording sound is a different process than playing back the sound. Microphones are not same as speakers. What you are playing back from is a finished product. You're starting all over again when playing back so getting the best out of it is a new game. 

The using the same cabling used in recording during playback argument is no more valid than the one about all that cabling that comes before your outlet, or the ones in your amp. They're all red herrings. 

An old and talented sound engineer with lousy hearing, crappy speakers and whatever limitations he's under knows what to do to get the best sound just like some deaf composer can write a symphony and know how great it will sound. 

All the best,
Nonoise

Why do cables matter?

Because they sound different.

@hilde45 

There are exceptions to the "can't add information" rule such as speakers. There are very few studios that use speakers over $50k there are good reasons for that but as far as audiophiles that commonly use speakers over 50k they may be hearing things that the original recording and mixing engineers never heard. I've mentioned before I was in the studio with Al Schmitt (the greatest recording engineer ever) and his personal speakers at Capitol Studio A sounded pretty bad. I of course never mentioned that but the reason why he had more gold records over the years than anyone was because he knew the system in which the recordings worked, he didn't use much EQ he used mic placement to change the sound so there was no signal limitation. It didn't matter that he didn't have very good hearing anymore before he died. That's to say the bottleneck in his system was very large he didn't fuss with EQ, compression and limiting he left the signal as open as possible. Speakers can reproduce a signal that is larger than the bottle neck that the recording engineer ever heard but those frequencies and dynamics are not part of the mix they are  flavors that the engineer hopes don't detract from the music. As far as interconnects and speaker cables they are bottlenecks if the current audiophile ideas are correct and since they are supposedly limiting the original signal path they limit everything. That's why I say using cable more expensive than the original recording is silly. Hope that made sense. 

@yoyoyaya

Thank you for your informed reply.

Since there are some situations where adding information (harmonics) is pleasing or taking away information is pleasing (equalization), then there is nothing sacrosanct about "reproducing the original information," at least at the end of the process. Because the goal is not literal reproduction but aesthetic reproduction. This is where the analogy with cooking raw ingredients holds up.

On the other hand, I can imagine the response - "Yes, ok — we need to flavor to taste. Still, at the start of the process, we want to start with the real thing -- 100%, Grade A meat. After that, you can do as you wish, but don’t compromise it before you get a chance to start cooking."

These two responses are consistent with one another. But the notion that the "original signal" should not be adjusted (adding or subtracting information) mistakes literal reproduction for aesthetic reproduction. As you say, tastes vary, and (of course), so do ears and rooms. A lot!

At the end of the day, I don't seek "faithful" or "accurate" but good sounding. It's also the case that I probably don't own the same speakers the recording was mixed on, nor the same acoustic room. Given that I cannot hope for "faithful" I will settle for "good sounding," however I can get there.

@hilde45, being involved in the hi fi industry business as well as the recording,

The term High Fidelity from my perspective means being faithful to the original recording i.e. being able to reproduce it as accurately as possible. I have to say that in the thousands of recordings in my collection there are actually very few that sound "bad". By bad I mean nasty peaky treble or obvious distortion. However, if that is what on the recording, so be it. I also have to say that in my experience of listening to quite a few audio systems, very high quality systems make less good recordings more listenable than vice versa because they present more of the music and make it easier to listen through poor recording quality.

The question of people using equalisation etc as presented in your post is complex as there could be subtractive or additive elements involved. For example if an amplifier with high levels of harmonic distortion was used, it will add harmonics to the final signal that are not present (or certainly not to the same degree) in the recording. On the other hand if someone uses a tone control to dial down a peak in the frequency range they are removing part of the signal. Or they could be using a loudness control to boost low frequencies. In that case they are not adding information, but they are making part of the signal more prominent than it is on the actual recording.

Finally, an important factor that bears mentioning is that, at the risk of stating the obvious, people's perceptions differ. Some people aren't that sensitive to frequency response errors for example and other's aren't that sensitive to timing errors. And sometimes, people's sonic values are just plain different, which is why there is such diversity in hi fi equipment.

It’s all about waves. Sound waves are locked into electromagnetic waves in recording studios. At home, that same electromagnetic waves are converted back into sound waves by our electronics and speakers. The objective of our home system is to replicate that recorded electromagnetic waves. But since we’re not in a perfect world, there is no way that electromagnetic waves can exactly be reproduced. We’re dealing with degree of degradation to the original waves by the home equipment. The better the equipment, the closer we get to the original waves. So, everything in the chain matters. Electromagnetic waves are created by electrons. Cable manufacturers strive to get the electrons vibrating to perfection in order to re-create that recorded electromagnetic waves. But there is no such thing as a perfectly pure material or a perfectly shielded cable so the exact reproduction is not going to happen. We have cable makers going for OCC, high purity materials, cryro and sophisticated construction in their attempt to get as close as possible to reproducing the original signals. The closer they get the more expensive the cables becomes. At the end of the day, it’s all about you get what you pay for.

@yoyoyaya earnest question for you.

You said,

the point is that one is aiming to retrieve the information which is already there and not to add information which is not present in the recording.

Original recordings vary a lot (as you know). When an original recording was something made for car radios or some other mass listening application, they sometimes exhibit qualities which, on a good stereo, sound bad. When audiophiles seeks ways of dealing with that -- say with a tube DAC or EQ or certain cables, etc. -- are they trying to remove information in the original recording in order to make it sound better?

I really don’t know the answer to this, so I would appreciate anyone with experience explaining what is happening to the "information" in the original recording when we try to make it sound better.

Also, consider this analogy: when we take raw steak and cook it and add garlic salt, are we obscuring or reducing the original flavor information in the meat?

You see the analogy I’m trying to make, but perhaps it is not a good analogy? Feel free to attack it!

@donavabdear. At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the point is that one is aiming to retrieve the information which is already there and not to add information which is not present in the recording.

Thanks for re-presenting your propositions. There is no connection of any kind between statement numbers one and two. They are just two different statements and so no conclusion can be drawn from them.

Your concluding "try arguing" statement is a prime example of a straw man distraction fallacy.

You are missing the point that the average stereo system extracts just a fraction of the information from the recording.  More resolving systems extract more information.  I hear footfalls, whispers, movements in recordings.  It was very distracting at first but I have learned to tune that out.  Still, I’m not crazy about listening to my system in the dark.  It often feels like people are moving around in the room.

@yoyoyaya thanks for your response. 
#1 You can't add information to a recording.

#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.

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.

@tonywinga ..I’m saying that generalizations about cables are inaccurate. Cables have progressed over the decades as much as any other stereo component,

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.

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).

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.

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.

I hear what I hear. Everything in my system is relative and has made an improvement or it goes out the door.  

Any deltas are specific to that system and room and unlikely to translate to an entirely different system.

Completely baseless claim that offers neither scientific nor experiential justification. This kind of claim is, however, a good argument against selling keyboards to just anyone who can type.

@ieales ^^^

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.

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.

I've never weighed in on this but am in the "I can hear a difference" column. 

As a musician (75 yrs old) I've played in a lot of different groups with a lot of different musicians at all levels. The really good players have a subtlety to their playing - no matter the instrument. What I've noticed is that many of the musicians I've played with who have been playing for many years  "think" they play as well as the exceptional musicians and I've come to believe that they simply do not hear the nuance and subtlety of the top musicians. The top musicians DO hear it and learn to apply that sensitivity to their playing. In other words, some people hear nuance and subtlety that others don't. For me that is one explanation for this continued discussion.

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.

Back in the eighties, I replaced the pair of thin black ic’s that came with a CD player,  from my preamp to my amp with Monsters. I think I paid $160 a pair for them and the difference was more than night and day! It was huge!  

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

^^^

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.

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.  

@elrod

+1

tonywinga

You are absolutely correct! There are many, many Gold nuggets in cables/cords. I have enjoyed watching your Audio journey over the years. Enjoy the fruits of your Labor.

Happy Listening!

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.

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. 

     I have one word, to express my personal view as regards the Church of Denyin'tology and it's obfuscating, classically (possibly: willfully) obtuse adherents (you know, the NAYSAYERS):

                                        floccinaucinihilipilification

                                              Happy listening!

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

@audphile1 I’ll add as I’d missed in my first post here a critical element - speaker positioning and distance to listening chair. This is something that I continue to be amazed with how a slight change in speaker placement can break it or make it. This of course comes together with room acoustics right after your components and before cables.

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.

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...

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.

@audphile1 sure as heck has been pummeled and pulverized. +1 To each their own on this subject. Move along little doggies.

Dead horse. Kicked, beaten, mutilate and FUBAR. This was what this thread was destined for and it reached its destination 3 pages ago. 

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.

@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.

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? 
 

The ones who can’t hear the difference wage the most ferocious fight. 

I respectfully disagree. From my experience, the most ferocious keyboard warriors / fighters in audio forums are those who don't even listen to music in ANY decent home stereo. Audio forum trolling and fighting IS their hobby

Imagine a military parade, the whole column marching in sync. Imagine the same column marching into obstacles, what happens? Imagine each man is an electron in the cable. See it?

@jasonbourne71... "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!"

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 👍