A non confrontational cable thread? We will see...

Love all these War & Peace, novel length essays when its as simple as: EXPENSIVE CABLE- GOOD (usually)
CHEAP CABLE-NOT SO GOOD (usually).

None of us are fond of some of the high end prices but most of us are not cry babies about it either, and we know that the ultimate decision on whether to go that much money or not, rests with our own self. The audio industry has an infinite number of both economical and expensive choices. The choice is yours. I personal have never met an expensive cable whose sound I did not think was commensurate with its price. Plus most of them give 30 day money back, in home trials. Cable manufacturers know that we know, that their cables do not cost a thousand, or thousands of dollars to make. Their product is priced according to what degree of sonic improvement they think it makes. We can agree or not agree with our wallets. It is the same thing with amps and speakers. If you buy a $2,000 retail price speaker, you may be getting $200 in drivers inside, (if you are lucky). A 4x8 sheet of MDF plywood at Lowes Hardware or somewhere costs about $22.

One of the best selling expensive speakers of all time is the AR3. It's retail cost back then in 1960 was $300; the equivalent of nearly $2,900 today. It was all the rage. It was a speaker that was a real name dropper. I remember reading a Travis McGee detective mystery novel from back then and the book starts out mentioning someone relaxing with a drink on their yacht "listening to some music through their new AR 3 speakers". With inflation taken into account, for the same equivalent price $2,900 you could buy 4 or 5 pairs of speakers that would seriously outperform the AR 3's. I should know. Or a single pair that would easily make AR 3 speakers sound like they are totally broke.

A lot of people on here are convinced that they know it all. The notion that all we know about cables was known 100 years ago is something ridiculous. It would have people in cable manufacturers research and development labs pulling their hair out, if anyone saying that had any influence at all. A music signal going through cables is a very complex process. It involves electrons moving through metal and is influenced by dozens of factors. These people who have never spent an evening listening to expensive cables in their home on familiar music, who review with their "theories" are sheer nonsense. Maybe they should start an audio review magazine where every review, is a piece of equipment they have never even been in the same building with. I would not expect too many advertisers or subscribers. Even the dumbest person I've ever met, knows the worthlessness of making statements about things they have no experience or knowledge about; be it a total strangers finances, what equipment they use, or cables infinitely more expensive than any they have ever personally used. These people obviously harbor deep resentment toward high end cable manufacturers. Maybe someting traumatic happened to them in their past like plugging in a removable power cord into their amp without remembering to unplug it from the AC wall outlet first. Their common theme is to make it seem like people are delusional and "imagining" the improvements they hear in expensive cables.

The main people who buy such expensive cables are doctors and other professionals who are almost always smart people. Maybe if they are so delusional as the others put forth, maybe the next time we go in for a physical we should be scared to death. Even though your average doctor makes a lot of money, they still respect a $50 bill. They do not just throw away 20 to 50 thousand dollars on an audio system without careful auditioning to determine if what they are hearing warrants that kind of an expenditure. As far as delusions; the naysayers vs. people like doctors, I know which group I am picking. The real delusion I think, is people who have convinced themselves that their own systems are pushing the state of the art and nothing is better, when in reality their systems sound quality is closer to the bottom of the heap than the top. In life, no matter how good you are at something or what you have, there is always someone out there who is better or who has something better. This obviously bothers people like them, but that's the way it is. No matter how good my system is, I know there are people that probably have even better sound, but that does not bother me at all. I just try to tend my own garden and get my sound more and more to my own liking.

The nearly $6,000 Spectral cable I auditioned for over a month is a cable way beyond the cables most people have used. A lot of people who buy $400 cables can hear a nice improvement. I think you can multiply that improvent many times with cables like the one I tried based on my experience. Just remember to pick a good one by careful auditioning first.

 

Here is a link to an interesting article on a cable listening test.
The Audio Society of Minnesota Conducts Cable Comparison Tests

 

Moving a music signal through a cable really is not really a very complex process. It's dynamic in terms of the signal and the source/load interaction and the variability of the signal, but making it work doesn't make the short list of the world's complex engineering challenges.

Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon, and he thinks the great pyramids of Egypt were built as grain silos and the earth is 6,000 years old. You can't argue with someone's faith, and that's no less true for an audiophile's faith. Anyway, there's no particular reason to think that a urologist or an oncologist would be a better listener, more knowledgeable about audio, or, less susceptible to marketing (I mean, big pharma spends billions marketing to them) than anyone else in a different profession.

 

A urologist or any kind of doctor is probably many cuts above, intelligence wise, than many of the doubting ones about cables. That was my point. They know to examine a patient first, and not just go by their concocted theories or preconceived notions. As I said, even the dumbest person I've ever met knows that making statements about things they no not much about is worthless. Doctors who are real audiophiles are just like the best of us. Usually very knowledgeable & rational and capable of grasping and understanding things more completely than most . Electrons moving through cable is not hard to achieve, but getting electrons to move and behave in the "most favorable" fashion is, and that's what cable technology is all about; most of which is beyond an "I know everything" one like yourself, with all due respect. I doubt if any people working in cable R&D are going to take off their lab jackets and retire over your self concocted theories. They learn more every day in the lab than all that you believe you know. Some guy somewhere who thinks wrong things about the pyramids and the age of the Earth, is a guesser like yourself. Perhaps he should go to Egypt and you should try to arrange a field trip to a cable manufacturing factory. There is a lot of bad science out there and for every paper or test that says one thing, there is another one that concludes the opposite. If it was not for my own direct experience with cables, that virtually every top audio designer, reviewer, dealership and "serious" audiophile ever, believing that there are significant sound quality differences in cables, would have been enough for me. Why not wait till spring if you insist on swimming upstream ?

The comment on here about people who Don't believe in the importance of cables always seeming to have bad sound is right, but it is not a case of "seeming". They "do" have bad sound. A lot of people believe their sound is as high up as the clouds, when it really has trouble clearing the telephone poles.

 

Okay. So that's doctors sorted.
What about accountants?

 

Not a chance. I don't know how many doctors you know. But I'm sure like a lot of people on this board, I have family and friends in all walks of life -- doctors, lawyers, accountants, film directors, actors, musicians, academics, clergy, chefs, retailers, journalists, hedge fund managers, home makers, political activists, even former audio engineers. The doctors aren't, as a class particularly, more intelligent than any of the folks in the other professions (and no one is as intelligent as some of the hedge fund guys THINK they are). They're also no less fallible than anyone else I know in any of these other professions.

 

You’re confusing intelligence with an education in a specific field or specialty. It’s a simplistic argument and grossly inaccurate. Expertise in one field does not necessarily confer knowledge or expertise in another. Being a successful GP or dentist doesn’t make someone an expert in audio speaker cables. The notion is simply wrong.

You’re also making an assumption that there aren’t any of your vaunted professionals actually taking part in this thread who are asserting their absolute disagreement with you.

 

I have to believe this is satire.

 

About the analogue cable OK, the well designed, protected and expensive cable add less noise than cheap, unprotected and poor designed cable.

But about digital cable, someone can put even Swarovski Crystals on his 40 GBit/s $500/foot digital cable if his internet connection it's a 20 KB/s antique dial-up. It's a stupid thing to buy 40GBit/s digital cable for home if the internet connection deliver only 1 GBit/s. A home is not a data center with servers and thousands clients. Big scam this industry of overpriced digital cable. Created for ignorant snobs.

 

Except that SPDIF digital audio is very different from ethernet. SPDIF is a stream of bits with the clock embedded in the signal and the timing (jitter) of the bits matters, while ethernet is a packet based format with buffering on each end. As digital audio data formats they couldn't be more different. Comparing SPDIF to ethernet as being the same means that you don't understand either format.

 

I never came anywhere close to saying doctors knowledge or intelligence would translate to knowledge about audio. Where did someone pull that out of ? I don't think you can say that part on here. I just used that as an example that as a group, doctors are more intelligent than the average person and are trained to not make bonehead mistakes in their logic, otherwise the undertaker would be the busiest man in town. It doesn't matter, nor is it relevant how smart, on average, doctors are. It doesn't matter if there is one looking at this right now. What is important is the way things really are. Virtually all audio experts including top audio designers, audio magazine reviewers, audio salon owners, and the most serious audiophiles believe it is not hard to hear the superior sound quality of superior cables. I am not out to change any doubters. Those with sorry enough evaluation to not hear differences; simply take your wrong belief with you to your final resting place, when your time comes, for all I care. It's only important to me that I know it's not snake oil. I like my purchases. All I did was share my experiences about a cable that I knew was very special and one that most people will not get to hear because of the very high cost, (and now unavailability). I simply propose to budding audiophiles and long time ones alike, that at the level of quality of that cable, you can expect as big an improvement as you would expect from serious upgrades of amps and speakers. If you want sound well beyond the doubters sound, simply try to audition cables like this and at lesser prices and you will have better sound by far, if the cables jibe with your system.

I enjoy floor to ceiling imaging, silky smooth, airy textures, absolutely stunning tonal beauty and an overall effortlessness and ease of sound that is something really special & rarely encountered. I have achieved this sound with the help of cables that cost a small fraction of the Spectral Ultralinear II, which I only auditioned for about a month. They don't do everything quite as well, but are good enough for me to be thrilled. I once knew a guy whose job was recordeing a major symphony orchestra and he said his ears couldn't stand the sound of cheap cables either. I asked him what would happen if you used cheap cables to make a recording? He said when hearing the finished product, he'd be laughed out of there by his superiors. They are very astute listeners he said. The acceptance within the audio community of the superiority of sound that better cables offer is starting to show up more and more on the inside liner notes of compact discs, and re-mastered LP's where they list the equipment used in the making of the recording. The first time I noticed this was about 8 years ago on a RCA Living Stereo SACD classical reissue, where it said in the liner notes that the disc was made using top of the line Siltech cables. Not only are the doubters losing their debate, but the debate was pretty much over years ago. It is of no importance at all what some naysayers on a forum like this think about it. It is a generally accepted fact within the audio industry, and has been for quite some time, that cables make big differences. High end cable companies are springing up like hotels during the gold rush in a boom town, and flourishing. How many high end cable companies are there? I can name a hundred and ten.

Did any of the naysayers really believe they could get audiophiles to doubt there own perceptions, when stuff on the coffee table starts rattling all of a sudden, and there's such a beautiful huge soundscape of sound, nearly enveloping them ? Those who tried to make a contest out of this. Sorry. Too late; the battle is already won. High end cables are in, and here to stay!

 

My mistake, I mean Ethernet cable not SPDIF. I have TOSLINK from PC to speakers and I replaced the cheap optical cable (full of distortion and spikes) with a quality one and the sound quality improved dramatically.

 

So the ones and zeros were better quality ones and zeros?

 

Yes. Because better timing (less jitter) with SPDIF makes for better quality ones and zeros. Along with some other potential factors like grounding and interference with an electrically conductive connection like SPDIF coax.

 

SPDIF is a format where the cable and the interfaces at each end and how the receiver and transceiver handle things can matter. It's not just bits are bits. It's bits with timing, because SPDIF has an embedded clock. When my ears told me that they were hearing a difference between optical and coax SPDIF and between SPDIF and USB I had to change my world view about digital and come around to the realization that bits aren't bits with digital audio.

Ethernet is different. I haven't tried hearing a difference with ethernet cables. But with ethernet there are also different protocols. Most DACs doing ethernet are doing DLNA style streaming. But there is also other ethernet audio formats like Ravenna and Dante that are different from DLNA in the way they do clock syncing and multicast and other things. So could Ravenna or Dante sound different than DLNA even though all are using the same ethernet streamed to the same DAC? Maybe. And could different networking setups sound different with protocols like Ravenna or Dante? Maybe. And with Ravenna or Dante you can also complicate things by having an external world clock. Does adding a very high quality external world clock improve the sound quality with those ethernet audio protocols? And what about the Ravenna or Dante gear that can be powered by POE (Power Over Ethernet)? Does a better quality POE power supply improve the sound?

 

You still haven't answered my previous objection to your jitter argument: serious cases of jitter present themselves as a wow and flutter-like effect, which no one here has described.

Also, I'm willing to accept that jitter can be introduced through capacitive effects in very long runs of copper cable, but I don't see how that's possible in optical cable. Light isn't subject to the same kinds of degradations that electrical pulses are, that's why fibre is used for extremely long runs of data cable, over tens or even hundreds of kilometres.

The post that originally drew me into this thread was a guy claiming that his expensive TOSLINK cable improved the sound quality, which is pure nonsense.

 

Perhaps you should fill out your profile to help us understand where your “silky smooth airy textures” are coming from. Otherwise it’s just a line borrowed from either You Don’t Mess With The Zohan or the meaningless, adjective-laden, undefined, quasi-descriptive drivel published in hundreds of gear reviews.

You debate only with yourself, setting up carefully crafted positions expressed by nobody but yourself, then knock them flat and gleefully declare victory. It’s just verbose spam and it’s pathetically transparent.

Like most cable makers themselves, you offer no before & after comparisons that anyone can verify. All you offer, like most cable makers, is your insistent declaration that the cables you’ve chosen are best. You employ the well-known psychology of the cable marketers in the same breath that you imply any such psychology is nonsense. You employ logical fallacies, such as the argument from authority, as repetitively as someone who is sealioning.

The biggest problem is that you, like so many others, blithely ignore all of the posted results of listening sessions in which none of the listeners know what cables are in use at any given time. That is to say, listening sessions using very high quality systems in audibly and measurably superior listening rooms. None of those listening sessions produce any tendency or preference for high-end cables of any kind. I’ve set up such listening sessions, and I’ve participated in sessions set up by others.

Your argument - made by others in this thread too - that so-called naysayers don’t or haven’t spent serious money on expensive cables is pure fiction you’ve made up to serve your fallacious position.

No high-end cable maker has ever willingly offered or submitted its products for use in comparative objective listening sessions as described above. Requests are met with utter silence. Many cable makers have promised that they would do so, but not one has ever followed through. Not one. They have a good thing going and there’s no law that requires them to allow reality to be injected in any way that would kill or erode their profits.

 

Looks like you own quite a few high end cables, both speaker and ic.

Why did you buy them then?

 

Good grief! Why did I buy them? To do the very thing you and some others, at the very least, have implied that I (and some others) don’t do - that is, to attempt to listen to the cables. Speaker cables, interconnects, digital coax, optical cables, adapter cables, balanced cables. You name it. I spent thousands over the years and I’ve also borrowed cables worth thousands.

Note that when I write the phrase “...listen to the cables” it seems even more foolish.

Of course I’ve posted about the results of such listening sessions on SHF and on other forums. Some of the components and speakers used for such sessions have been photographed and posted on SHF and elsewhere too. My own gear is listed in my profile. Even higher end gear, in some cases, is used (and in a couple of cases in even better quality listening rooms) by members of my music listening group.

In any listening session in which subjective influences were hidden - e.g., cable visibility, cable packaging, cable brand name identification, and any knowledge of what cable was in use at any given time or whether a change in cables that was declared actually took place - as long as the cables in use were electrically appropriate for their purpose, nobody could determine which cable was which or even positively determine that a change had been made with any greater accuracy than flipping a coin to make the choice.

A bad cable - e.g., a phono cable that has inappropriately high capacitance, a speaker cable with capacitance on the order of 1500 pf/metre, interconnects with poor quality shielding, ill-fitting AC connectors and IEC connectors that allow micro-arcing, ill-fitting RCA connectors that make poor connections, speaker connections that allow micro-arcing and/or triboelectric effects, among other things - can appear at a wide variety of price points, from the cheapest to the most expensive. Generally, the higher priced cables get the basics right - e.g., for speakers cables that means very low DC loop resistance, moderate to low capacitance, and very low inductance, locking banana connectors, cold-welded wire connections, and strong strain relief where the wire enters the connector - but many relatively inexpensive cables get the exact same crucial things right too for a fraction of the cost.

There’s no cachet associated with high quality inexpensive cables though, and without market appeal based on desirability there is the very real psychological effect that an audiophile will not find such cables appealing personally. That’s how marketing works and it’s exceedingly difficult for any individual to overcome. Library shelves full of such testing results at the university level prove without a doubt that what we hear is dynamically and inescapably influenced by what we are told or persuaded or entreated to expect. Believing otherwise - believing that because we insist we can be objective listeners that we are - is something that makes audiologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and researchers laugh out loud. Not even they can be objective listeners and they admit it readily too. Don’t devalue such expertise. Only the cable makers tell us otherwise because it serves them to do so, and a percentage of audiophiles go along with the cable makers.

I do not think that I am going to change anybody’s mind on the subject. I don’t care about your decision or anyone else’s decision to purchase whatever cables provide them with personal satisfaction. I think it’s important for anyone contemplating the purchase of expensive cables to know exactly what is going on in the marketplace, and how cable makers make careful use of well-worn and successful marketing strategies to promote their wares. That even includes the use of paid contractors to start or participate in cable threads on online discussion forums.

 

Re: Agitator. All I know is that if you can't tell there are big improvements with superior cable, you have some real sorry perception there. The millions of listeners who have made it a billion dollar industry worldwide would second that. The 50th anniversary of Woodstock was on the news. You weren't one of those people who climbed all the way up those towers to hear the speakers louder, were you ? Those were nearly 140 decibels each, Man !

Speaker cable companies submit their cables to audio review magazines all the time and they do measurements. The cables seem to come out positive for better sound too. I choose not to be too specific about the equipment I have for privacy reasons. I Don't see you listing the equipment you have. I doubt if I would take the time to do all that you claim I do. I simply state reality. You think high end cable manufacturers are con artists. Maybe you and some of the other cable naysayers should form a club. You'll need a name. I know! How about "The Cable Rebels". You can travel to cities where they have high end cable manufacturing facilities. You can all walk in the door and cuss them out for a few minutes and then go back home. If you can afford the round trip bus fare.

 

I'm joining the Cable Rebels, especially if I can get personal insults in the deal! I certainly won't try to change any minds with pesky facts.

 

I get it now. You’re just spamming. Enjoy your joke.