I just posted this reply on another thread and it sparked my interest again in what people believe about the subject. Please read my whole post before you reply. I am not trying to be contentious, so please don't overreact like some people do when I suggest that their expensive cables may not be worth the money.
I am going to very mild-mannerdly make the statement that I have come to my own personal conclusion that speaker wire matters to the sound quality of your speakers about as much as a big pile of baked beans.
I used to be a beleiver. I THOUGHT I heard such undeniable differences between various speaker cables and interconnects, until one day I was doing a comparison between a 1 meter, 500 dollar cable and a 25 foot Radio Shack gold series cable. i listened to my favorite tracks with the Radio Shack cable, and then got up to swap the cables. In one of those weird brain farts, I changed CD's as usual, but without realizing it, forgot to go back to the expensive cable.
I sat down and listened to track after track, amazed at the better sound quality of the better cables that I, in fact, hadn't even hooked up. The highs were smoother, the bass was tighter, and the mids were more natural sounding. When I went up to change CD's, I realized my mistake. Dumbfounded, I shuddered at the thought that all the money i had put into cables might be wasted. I went back and did the most open-minded, honest listening of my life. Being for the first time in doubt of the importance of good cables, I wanted to reassure myself that my money was well spent. I listened for literally hours. Replaying tracks and litening to each individual part, each instrument, over and over again. I listened for improvements in soundstage, clarity, definition, anything that might prove my money was well spent. I wanted to hear a difference, but for the first time, I opened my ears to both cables. I didn't want to hear a difference so badly that I pretended to, or told myself that I heard a difference. I really wanted to know.
I had come to the conclusion that I couldn't hear a difference.... at least at the moment. I decided to try to prove that a difference could be heard somehow, maybe just not by me. I was at the time a salesperson at a respectable audio boutique where we were absolutely obsessed with cables. We put more emphasis on cables than on the equipment itself, mostly because we felt that it didn't matter what equipment you got if your interconnects were going to ruin it. For fun, I took a few employees into a room and sat them in front of a pair of Energy Veritas Floorstanding Speakers (2.8's I believe, the older, GOOD ones), running off of an Adcom stack. I showed them the two cables and asked them to tell me which sounded better. I first played the "low end" cables and listened to my fellow employees reem them for their lack of detail, soundstage, their harsh highs, and the other usual retorts. I then went behind the stack and unplugged the RS cables, so my colleagues could hear the "switch", and then put the same cables back in again. I played the same track again. Suddenly the highs were smoother, and the bass had this great power that it had lacked before. The soundstage was HUGE.....according to my subjects. After I hit stop, I notified the group of my plot. This was first met by silence, and then every single one of them left the room ****ed at me, accusing me of trying to bring down the sales of the store.
After this experience I have tried numerous times to see if anyone can hear a difference between cables. I of course now do it without tricks. I simply don't reveal the good from the bad until after the subject had stated which demo they thought was using the high end cables. I think a cable costing 500 dollars of even just a few hundred should sound significantly better than a 20 dollar cable, enough that you should recognize it everytime in a blindfolded test. Never has anyone gotten 5 out of 5 in my tests.
I hear that Richard Clark does a test like this at autosound 2000 and nobody has ever gotten a perfect score. He is also a disbeleiver in the need for high end cables.
I encourage people to take their high end cables and have someone do a blindfolded test on them with some radio shack specials.
Remember the story of The Emperor's new clothes, and don't feel bad or left out if you don't hear a difference. Nobody ever seems to under these conditions.
I'd be happy to hear anyone's input on the subject.
