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

Do it. This is like polishing brass on a sinking ship.

 

Strongly disagree. The moderators should be too busy cleaning up spurious "Beatles " threads!

 

I don't do it for a kick. The reason I get into these debates is because it's like coming across a group of people vigorously debating whether the sky is green or pink. The urge to tell them that it's blue is overwhelming, as pointless as it may be.

I take issue with this. I work with scientists for a living, all very successful and intelligent people, a very high percentage of my co-workers have PhDs. Does that make them experts on everything? God no! It makes them experts in their field, and nothing more. With respect to issues outside their field, they're as likely to be wrong and are just as fallible as the rest of us. A medical doctor is no more likely to be right about audio equipment than a plumber or a dog catcher, he just has more money to spend on his hobby.

However, I WOULD trust the opinion of someone with a PhD in electrical engineering, and I think you'd find very few of them who spend their money on expensive cables.

 

Ever since I got that new USB cable, my short stories are so much better. It's the cable letting through higher quality words.

 

Whew, thank God it's Friday!

 

I'm sorry, but I heard a difference between the two digital cables. Simple as that. As did my wife.

Why the difference exists is up for debate, but the fact that I heard a difference is not.

I'm not silly enough to be taken in by reviews or price points or anything else. I let my ears do the talking.

And please can people stop telling me what I can or can't hear and what I should read to convince myself that I can't be hearing what I'm hearing?

I'm sorry, but I trust my ears and my ability to be honest about what I'm hearing.

 

Are you willing to accept that the difference may be inside your head, rather than in the cables?

Let me give you an example to illustrate what I'm talking about. I have an extensive collection of vinyl, and I've spent a lot of money on a high end turntable and cartridge. This is in spite of the fact that it's scientifically proven that vinyl will never reproduce a recording as accurately as a digital source will. I'm well aware of this.

However, to me, when I'm sitting in my room listening, vinyl sounds better, and I enjoy it more. I'm entirely comfortable with the knowledge that psychoacoustic effects are responsible for this. I know it's all inside my head, a function of my emotional connection to the tactile ritual of putting on a record and watching it play, or possibly (as one study showed) a product of the addition of low frequency surface noise to the music.

It's irrational. I accept that completely. And yet I continue to spend money on vinyl because it makes me happy.

This is the kind of admission I'm seeking from people who spend great sums of money on cables.

 

Well said!!!
People on here have NEVER bothered or tried anything but zip cord from Home Depot seem to know how your system sounds.
Of course this is all rubbish because hey have never heard your (or my) system so hey have no idea at all.

I too think that cables have there own sound and each one can make a positive or negative change to the sound

 

Here are two digital signals that I'm transmitting to you. The first is being sent using the highest quality, purest silver cable that money can buy:



The second is being sent using a $0.99 cable from Amazon:



Which one is more accurate? Are the digits in a different order in the cheaper cable? Are some of them missing?

 

Some digital cables are supposed to have a 110ohm characteristic impedance. If they don't, errors will occur. Many 'high end' digital cables in fact do not have this impedance, as a result reflections occur in the cable, causing errors. Result: it sounds different.

Back in the 1980s I was involved in a very in-depth speaker cable investigation. To do it we rented a time delay reflectometer from Hewlett Packard, back when that name meant something. We found that even though audio is at a much lower frequency, that we could see correlation between what we heard and what we measured. None of the cables had a characteristic impedance anywhere close to speaker impedances.The two that came the closest and no surprise were the Polk (well known for amplifier instability due to capacitance) and the OCOS made by Sumiko.

We embarked on a speaker cable design project, to see if the cable could be made to measure at 8 ohms on the TDR and see how it sounded. We had to make a jig to create the geometry of the resulting cable, which was made of multiple strands of 20ga solid copper with polyester insulation and a dummy core. The resulting cable was heavy enough that a 3 foot bit of it would have made an effect club and it really was inflexible, but it did measure well. The only speaker we felt we could play it on at the time was the Magnaplanar Tympany 1U, which had a fairly flat mostly resistive 7 ohm impedance. When the prototype was installed its seemed as if the amplifier played with more power and greater authority.

Ultimately the idea was abandoned for the simple reason that no speaker is a linear impedance for which a cable can be designed. Goertz made a cable that seemed to be designed around this idea but using a much easier to execute means (flat wire). From this project I've remained to this day that speaker cables are always going to sound different- even the same cable, on different speakers, because I am convinced that even though characteristic impedance is an RF thing, somehow it seems to play a role at audio frequencies (this is borne out by the first balanced lines which were a 600 ohm transmission line).

Besides characteristic impedance (geometry), the other variables seem to be overall equivalent gauge and purity of materials. IMO/IME your best bet is just to minimize the speaker cable length so as to minimize losses and error of the cable (such as it is), and run long balanced interconnects to get the signal to the amps by the speakers. Not always practical in some living situations, but its easy to demonstrate and measure the difference/improvement there.

I almost forgot: speaker cables driving 4 ohms are far more critical than driving 16 ohms, where you can often get away with hardware store zip wire.

bottom line: the speaker cables sounding different conversation will never go away.

 

Anyone who thinks that if science (which is limited), that if doesn't know how to prove something then it doesn't exist, is barking up the wrong tree in the wrong grove on the wrong planet. If you walk down the street and recognize the face of an old friend, a really complex process has taken place. Like one of those modern sophisticated face recognition systems that allow people entry into many off limit importaunt restricted areas, whose computer circuitry near instantly measures all kind of distance points between the nose and the eyebrows, width and fullness of lips, shape of face etc. The same sophisticated process goes on in our brains every time we recognize a face. If asked, to draw the face or just how much distance is between this and that facial feature, we would be stumped. The important thing is not if we are able to explain why, or give scientific reasons why we can instantly recognize a face; but simply that we can. That we cannot explain it or scientifically prove how one can instantly recognize say, one's own wife's face, does not mean that the marriage and the kids must have never occurred . Life is not scientific measurements. There are plenty of things we cannot measure properly. Ask 4,000 different audio designers if measurements really jibe and coincide with the way a speaker or amp actually sounds, and you will likely get 4,000 answers saying NO. Anyone who has listened to or read many interviews with the worlds greatest audio designers know this is the consensus. Sometimes the way something sounds is actually the opposite of what the measurements say. These doubting Thomas's on cable improvements have their logic half _ _ _ backwards. Telling people there can be no big differences between cables that they've never heard, all based on their backwards "logic" is not doing a good service. I wonder how many audiophiles who have experienced first hand the magic of great high end cables, will doubt their own perception because of these naysayers. My guess is NONE ! The only group they have to work with are the poor souls who have never listened to or experienced the obvious improvements of well designed cables and might be dissuaded to trying them, with the result that they will never get the kind of glorious sound quality that they otherwise would. As I said, another major audio forum has in its rules that "if you cannot hear differences in cables DO NOT JOIN IN ON AUDIO DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CABLES. The ones that own and operate the forum knows that there are big differences and that the doubting Thomas's are not really series audiopholes & they cannot hear worth a lick, and they would prefer their forum to be good advice rather than bad and particularly annoying advice and ridiculous logic to boot.

 

No. Nor is my wife.

Go and have a chat with a Harry Chapin.

 

One last thing.

Re: Dansk who says that digital can be Proven to be superior to analog. A record groove it has been measured can resolve information down to a small fraction of an angstrom. That's enormously better than the best digital format can muster. If you do not know how small an angstrom is look it up. Years ago when a Stereophile reviewer proposed sadly that we need something that is truly a high rez (resolution) music format. John Atkinson the editor said, " we do have high rez; LP's. Just to give one example.

 

Was Angstrom in ABBA?

 

I've never really considered myself a series audiophole anyways...

Then there's nothing more to be said, because we effectively live in different universes. Mine obeys physical laws, and yours is rather magical.

 

Being perhaps a tad naive, could I suggest that perhaps the quality or the lack of quality of the interconnect terminals may have more impact on delivered sound quality than the interconnect itself?

 

How these cable threads can go on & on is always amazing to me, but, I just have to say, thank goodness my wife & I both enjoy magic.

 

Why are you seeking that? Why should it concern you?

 

Something introduced the difference that I heard. Not sure what, but something did.

 

Because I'm bored and frustrated with my life right now and this is a distraction, however pointless and unproductive it is.

 

So anything that cannot be measured reliably is magic ?? Sounds like someone's logic is magic. There are lots of "athletes of the mind" out there.

 

An honest man. Quite refreshing.

 

FWIW, I took the opposite approach of most people in these debates -- instead of going to great lengths to demonstrate what the audible benefit of superior digital audio cables does (or doesn't) sound like, I went to great lengths (literally!) to demonstrate the what the detriment of inferior digital audio cables does (or doesn't) sound like:

 

Digital audio is not just 1's and 0's. It is the timing of those 1's and 0's. Timing and clocks affect the sound of the digital signal. It's not just the 1's and 0's being in the correct order. When the timing is wrong you get jitter. Acceptable amounts of jitter won't flip or change any bits, but can cause the DAC to sound different.

Here's an article explaining jitter. Written by an objectivist who had to admit he attended an AES presentation where he heard and audible difference with jitter.
NwAvGuy: Jitter Does it Matter?

 

I'm quite familiar with the concept of jitter, thank you. Jitter is a clock issue. Cables do not contain clocks. They have a fixed latency measured in nanoseconds, dependent only on the length of the cable, which doesn't vary from bit to bit.