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

The fact that cables can make some small differences, which some will describe as huge differences, does not erase the fact that in audio it is the other factors that matter.

This reveal why cables obsession reflect ignorance. Not because cables dont matter but because their impact is completely secondary.

Cables thread are pathetic threads opposing two deluded groups  for opposite reason. 😁

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!

Bad cables make a bigger difference than good cables, and beyond a certain level of build and materials quality, good cable make very little relative difference compared to other huge factors like the quality of the source component and the acoustic qualities of the room itself.

Correcting room acoustic deficiencies yields vastly superior sonic benefits that anyone can usually hear right away. So if you purchase a well made pair of cables and spend a few hundred dollars on them, or a few thousand dollars on them, you won’t hear "better" or "worse" sound, you’ll hear subtle differences.

There is a huge placebo effect with things like cables (assuming the cables are appropriate for the gear you’re connecting them to), and another huge potential for good old confirmation bias. If you like what you hear, then great, keep them and move on, but if you think that more money equals better sonics, you’re most likely just fooling yourself. Beyond good build and materials quality there is no correlation between price and sound quality.

I once placed a bet that no one could rank a series of cables by price in a controlled setting where they had no idea which set they were actually listening to. This has been tried before-- can’t be done once you eliminate the confirmation bias. So buy what you want and like what you like, but the wild claims made by cablemakers are about as reliable as those made by any other industry loaded with snake-oil salesmen-- vitamins and supplements come to mind-- huge claims constantly made, and a growing body of hard scientific evidence that almost all of those claims just do not hold up when tested with any degree of scientific rigour.

There are usually better ways to make your system sound better than fussing endlessly with cables-- unless you’re using some really bad quality or outright defective cables-- the differences will be akin to trying two really good cabernets -- you go with what tastes the best to you, hopefully, and not just blindly assume the more expensive one is necessarily the better one. "Better" is subjective, NOT objective.

I should also footnote this comment by mentioning the laughably obscene profit margins enjoyed by many cable makers that sell their products in the four and five figure price ranges. P.T. Barnum personified. 

Well this thread sure ran longer than a few mic cables 😅

Main discrepancy is revealed by the term belief. Belief is best applied to things that can’t be experimentally assessed. While it’s obvious for some pursuits, it doesn’t need to apply to comparing electronic playthings in lieu of properly controlled analyses.

If a person declines applicability of scientific methodology over an assemblage of anecdotal opinions based on invisible perceptions, and that person is an adult, a change of mindset might be less likely. This in no way is limited to audio stuff.

There seems to be high correlation between folks who think audible difference between cables is predictable and folks who do not prioritize properly controlled assessment to demonstrate said predictability being reality. Those folks may think they have a firm grasp on the scientific method, however, which can be a complication for level exchange of ideas moving forward.

There also seems to be correlation between folks who understand scientific methodology, and folks who get flustered over the aforementioned mindset saying audible differences in cables is definitely predictable.

Adults can be challenging to educate (convert?) on the scientific method (including experimental design and statistical analysis; never mind the psychology element behind preference studies…) if they already… believe… they have a firm grasp on how it is supposed to work.

That is the process - not just the pattern - why cables and all other discrepancies about predictable difference in audible sound - can’t be sorted in one short exchange of thread back-and-forth’s. It really should be that easy, and that neutral.* 😬

*neutral in the emotional denotation of the word, and not the array of ways in which it’s applied to audiophilia 😜