Yes, cables do make a difference -- regardless of price...

@cleeds

I have the newspaper article with the quote in it. I clipped it. I moved and I’m still unpacking. I’ll be happy to show it it you when I get my hands on it.

i believe it’s The NY Times or WaPo debunking the absurd amounts spent on audio gear. And this was 15 or 20 years ago. It’s much worse now. 

I take careful note of the way that the word “belief” always enters discussion on this topic.

I’m agnostic. Beliefs are for theists and atheists.

@cleeds

And likewise, no one is obliged to follow your belief system.

ugh, I can’t believe that these cable arguments come up time and time again. 
 

The guy who founded Monster Cable himself said that the whole notion of high end cables was a marketing hoax designed to exploit gullible audiophiles. 

I just got off the phone with my audio engineer. He has 40+ years experience in the industry. Besides building and repairing audio gear and guitar amps, he is also a recording engineer. He is also a guitarist and in the blues hall of fame.

We were talking about other issues but at the end I asked him about The Cable Wars.

it was a good 10-15 minute discussion but the Cliff Note version of his response is this: it’s all about the Benjamins. Make people believe, and you make more money. At the end, he said at best, cables may - may - make 1% difference, if that. The money is better spent elsewhere.

He agreed that far more attention should be put into room acoustics, that is where there is still a relative dearth of knowledge: witness how many times concert halls are redesigned and they still get it wrong.

I will conclude by posing the following question.

Suppose for the sake of argument - pun not intended - that it is absolutely true that cable interconnects make a big difference. Why then, is this philosophy not applied to all the internal wiring through all the components in an audio system: turntables, CD players, amps, preamps, speakers … and I am thinking in particular about those two skinny little braided wires that connect the spider to the cone.

I anxiously await the informed responses.

@atmasphere

BTW, a few years ago I said that I was disappointed in the sound of the recording that you did of the Mikis Theodorakis / Pablo Neruda “Canto General”.

I played it for the first time since I got my amps back from being away for months for refurbishing. My engineer said that due to the 40 year age of the amps, many parts - not just the tubes, which were running at only 60% of full strength - were at the end of their useful life. Without going into details at the moment, other than to say that he discovered an error that Julius Futterman made in his design over 50 years ago that for some reason everyone missed all of these years and that he corrected - it appears that the problem was with my aging - and ailing - amps and not your recording. My bad!

@stereo_buff

Thank you for that. There’s at least some science in there, and it’s science I can understand and choose to agree or disagree with. It neither confirms nor disproves my view: it can make a difference, but is it an improvement and most importantly is it an improvement sufficiently worth mortgaging the house over? My engineer says at best, a 1% difference, and the difference can simply be … different but one of taste, not necessarily an improvement.

I have a question for you:

- my amps have no output transformer

- my speakers are 16 ohm, not 8 or 4, with 101db efficiency.

So….?

And here is a question that I asked in another post that no one has touched:

- So let’s say you got a thick, heavy speaker cable at $300 a foot. You hook it up to the cabinet terminals but from there, smaller, cheaper wires lead to the crossover, from there smaller wires go to the driver terminals, and from there really skinny stranded wires go from the driver terminals to the spider.

Ummmm…?

Thank you.

For the record, I am in no need of rationalisms masquerading as a public service.

Let me elaborate.

As many here know, I have been at this hobby for 55 years, since I built my Dynakit Stereo 70 when I was 14.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to go through over a dozen brand name cables, some costing thousands of dollars. Imho, they do not justify the fetishistic faith placed in them, and certainly do not come close to justifying the amount of $$$$$s charged for them. It is at best a subjective experience.

See the link below for a description of my system. Notice nowhere do I mention the inexpensive - at best what you might call entry level - cables.

Now please leave the cable agnostics alone! If you want to break your piggy bank on this stuff and have your wife tear you a second one when she finds out, be my guest. I won’t stop you.

“Peace”.

theaudioatticvinylsundays.com/about