I don't believe cables make a difference, any input?

[soongsc]

Originally posted by burnedfingers
I must make a confession here. Just for grins I tried some high dollar cables both speaker cables and interconnect cables only because I could borrow them instead of shelling out my hard earned cash. Working for a shop has some advantages once in a while.

I looked at the venture with interest to see if I could manage to tell a difference in performance as measured with test equipment.
I conducted various tests with the interconnect cables and found there wasn't any increase in performance. I moved on to the listening tests with the aid of a helper to conduct blind tests aka
A/B tests and have come to the conclusion that the improvements if any are in the mind of the listener. The biggest speaker cable improvement I had was when I used 22ga mic line as speaker cable and then moved to some commercial 12ga wire. In this test that was still an A/B test I heard a marked improvement. There was a very very slight difference in how the high dollar speaker cables could color the sound. I feel this is totally due to the differences in capacitence and inductance of the cables.

I feel that 12ga of a good quality will provide ample satisfaction to most people as a means of obtaining a quality low cost cable.

In the interconnect corner I favor cables that are of the $20-30 dollar variety only because they are slightly better than the OEM cables that come out of a CD player shipping box.

What other equipment were you using please? Speakers, Amp, etc?

[lndm]

Originally posted by poobah
Carbon cables... I've been hearing about those. Nuttier than nuts!

Automotive ignition cables are specified as carbon AFAIK to prevent the emission of RFI. Could there be something in this for us? Might this work in reverse, a reduction in excess noise or something?

Originally posted by johninCR a network cable can stop working without having been touched or otherwise moved.

My network cables/phone jacks/serial connectors etc tend to oxidise and temporarily fail at least once per year.

[El_Hefty]

the biggest con being bi-wiring or tri-wiring...

Bi amping maybe, but how can a wire split a signal.... in short it cant, all it does is ulitmately double the thickness of your cable and in some instances that might have an effect

[phn]

Originally posted by TB
Hello,
This is amazing how peaceful this thread is if we think about one of the most contoversial topics in the world of audio community.
I have a question about one type of interconnect cable where two wires are run independently like suggested for Gaincard by its maker. Did anyone try this and would like to share the opinion?

As far as I understand it, the 47 Labs interconnect is poorly designed from an engineering POV. I believe it's used between the transport and DAC (i.e. SPDIF) as well. Maybe the 47 Labs interconnect tells us just how irrelevant cables really are.

[mrshow4u]

the 47 Labs interconnect is poorly designed from an engineering POV

Monster Cable too. Many others. It seems that any of their 75 ohm cables for component video or digital S/PDIF are hand soldered. From a transmission line POV, this is a no-no. The moment the physical layout of the center conductor, dialectric, and shield are screwed with, you've created a discontinuity in your transmission line. You've just messed up your VSWR. The penalty is jitter and possible loss of data (in digital) or a ghost image (video luminance ). It's best to have connections where the cable dimension can be maintained.

[quasi]

Originally posted by poobah
with their 200 dB SNR ears....

[audiobomber]

Why on earth would you have to match signal levels to compare interconnects? How could the fraction of an ohm in an interconnect cannot affect the level of a 22Kohm termination?

I don't use ABX testing. The best way to listen to wires is to plug them in and use them in the long term (hours at least). Long-term listening is more effective than an ABX test because it's closer to reality. ABX testing is an artificial construct and should not be used to replace the real deal. The real deal in this case being long-term listening in an intimately familiar environment (i.e. my system, my room, my music).

[mrshow4u]

Why on earth would you have to match signal levels to compare interconnects?

If you are referring to me, I mis-spoke. It was important when comparing DAC's, pre-amps and the like.

The best way to listen to wires is to plug them in and use them in the long term (hours at least).

Yeah, I don't know. Moods change, hearing changes (fatigue), and the knowledge of knowing what cable you're listening to is definitely sloppy experimentation. Let's just say you looped a 30 second CD selection. Every time the selection looped, it displayed some number on a display. A good relay randomly selects an interconnect every time the selection starts and the display, displays a unique number. You could perform this experiment over days, get thousands of guesses. Sure, you'd get bored to death, but you'd get a large sample size, you'd be listening during different mood swings. Your ear would be used through differents parts of the day, during different ambient conditions (noise, temperature, humidity). Truth should be the goal. Knowing which wire you're listening to sounds like a flagrant foul in getting to the truth.

[astouffer]

They all laughed when I used 1/4" copper tubing with a liquid nitrogen flow to achieve near superconductivity....

[jneutron]

Originally posted by El_Hefty
the biggest con being bi-wiring or tri-wiring...

Bi amping maybe, but how can a wire split a signal.... in short it cant, all it does is ulitmately double the thickness of your cable and in some instances that might have an effect

Hmmm. Please explain mathematically why that is so.

Originally posted by astouffer
They all laughed when I used 1/4" copper tubing with a liquid nitrogen flow to achieve near superconductivity....

77K only gets you down 1 to 1.5 orders of magnitude, and only for very pure copper. I bet you only got 50%..

Cheers, John