Does raising speaker cables off the floor really make a big difference?

Cable risers are just more snake oil. 

That is why I think blind testing should be used more often. Can the dielectric effect of the floor on a cable induce a large enough fraction of a micro-volt to hear in the speakers? I do not claim some things could never make a difference one can hear but let the claims be reasonable.

I understand where you’re coming from. The proof is in the pudding. And that’s what you’re hearing and that’s where the buck stops.

Why cables are so expensive? I don’t understand the cable manufacturing process so I don’t understand why myself. I suspect it has something to do with mass production (or lack of) - that is they probably don’t sell enough so they have to increase the price to make a profit.

Although I am not in the cable business, I do know a bit into high end test equipment such as those costing close to $70K per unit such as those coming from KeySight (formerly known as Agilent which formerly known as Hewlett Packard). Each unit is hand calibrated before it is shipped to the customer. If every single $300 dollar receiver from Best Buy has to be hand-calibrated, they probably won’t be in the business for long (I’ve heard that YBA designer Yves Bernard André listened to (or used to) to every single amp personally before they were shipped to the customer).

Having said all that, I don’t understand why some cables are so expensive. Is it all BS? Maybe some days I find out - BS or not lols.

I'll end with this quote:

"Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence" by Carl Sagan

drbarney
Has anyone calculated what difference such things done to make cables unreasonably expensive makes? Let us take an example. Many cable manufacturers warn us of high frequency rolloff caused by skin effect. They make cables like ribbons or bundle them in litz configuration where each strand of wire in individually insulated so every conductor is too thin to be affected by skin effect. But here is some physical calculation of how much rolloff can be expected with 8 gauge speaker wires in series with a 4 Ohm speaker. (I use magnetic planar speakers which do not vary in their reactance the way dynamic drivers do.) Skin effect will cause 4 meters of 8 gauge wire to have a resistance of 0.0164 Ohms at 20 kHz compared to a DC resistance of 0.00842 Ohms where more current can go through the center of the wire. Put this in series with 4 Ohms and calculate the difference between 4.0164 and 4.00842. Take the ratio and the log of this ratio times 20 and the skin effect attenuates the signal less than 1/200 dB.

That is why I am a little suspicious of over-priced cables and the questionable physics describing why you need them. The placebo effect is another matter which does not help.
That is why I think blind testing should be used more often. Can the dielectric effect of the floor on a cable induce a large enough fraction of a micro-volt to hear in the speakers? I do not claim some things could never make a difference one can hear but let the claims be reasonable.

>>>>While those are interesting points no one is saying that skin effect OR a change to dielectric characteristics is responsible for the degradation of the signal when cables are lying directly on the carpet or floor. The consensus is that the degradation is caused by static electric charges and/or structureborne vibration.