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

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#2,921
Re: I don't beleive cables make a difference, any input?

The Paulinator said:
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.
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I've done my own double blind testing and my own single blind testing and I have never found significant differences in adequately sized conductors with reasonable clean termination and reasonably good connectors (where used - bare wire works fine also). I have a friend who

What irks me the most however are those who sell "high quality" digital cables. Huh? Bits are bits... they make it or they don't. Granted the optical vs. rca debate is not moot - but that is related to things outside of the cables themselves.
 
#2,922
mwaters10 said:
In most situations the degradation is insignificant enough to worry about.
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Perhaps "insignificant" have a different meaning to us. 😉

mwaters10 said:
I prefer not to think of any signal as flowing, like there is some sort of signal path highway that it travels down from the input to the output......
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Current always flow and need a defined path to do so. The less resistance, capacitance, inductance, interference etc. the less the degradation of the complex current flowing. Everything does not happen instantly also.

Surely every stage recreate the signal, nobody argued about that.
 
#2,924
mwaters10 said:
There are some loudspeakers that have high impedance at high frequencies, ( like the original Quad ESL ) and maybe one or 2 other designs, and certain types of cable are not suitable.
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Don't you mean low? Electrostats are effectively big caps.
 

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#2,925
terry j said:


Yeah, 80% did prefer the expensive one. The test however (which seemed to be forgotten) was something like 'was the extra spent on the expensive front end worth it' (whatever the actual wording was).

That answer was quite explicit.

No.
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so, would you say, then, that the only really important element in a sound system is the speaker (and, presumably turntable, in that arena)? surely had you used really small cheap speakers against really large well-designed ones, EVERYONE would pick the same pair as vastly better.
your test implies that there is hardly any difference between any other component if the volume is the same.
i personally think a tiny difference is a huge difference when it comes to playback. what it's worth cost-wise is another story. i personally think design philosophy is more important than price.

switching any component is audible. 'better' is more about matching well designed components that compliment each other than how much it cost, imo. bright speaker with dull amp, duller speaker with brighter cd player, etc.

for speaker wire, though, bigger is better. more open, crisper, deeper stage more silky, more punchy definition, more revealing...all that when you just switch speaker wire from tiny to thick. exotic cable suffers from the law of diminishing returns (financially) and placebo/preconceived notion effects (sonically), although i'm sure they all have a 'sonic signature'.

to my mind, good sound (getting delivered from source to speaker) is MOSTLY about delivering lots of speedy(rise time), dynamic (meaning fewest echo and unwanted capacitance effects, and plenty of conductance) current. big transformers, big caps, big heat sinks for 'big' transistors, and as few inefficient components in the signal path as possible. preamps with no tone controls sound better. separate power supplies for left and right is better. ......and big fat speaker wire (if it could safely be bare, solid wire, that would be best).

i think you should have used 24 gauge multistrand speaker wire (or even skinnier, if you could) on the cheap set to make your matrix test more fair (and perhaps a crappier amp, like an eighties mass market featherweight japanese thing or a ghetto blaster's amp. denon stuff is pretty high current, isn't it?). 12 gauge housing wire is hard to beat for efficiency, and is a critical part of the chain.

as pointed out, it's about getting the current from CD to amp to speaker as efficiently as possible. you lose more energy as heat in less efficient(skinny) wire. this translates as a more 'veiled' sound at the speaker than with more efficient (thick) wire.
interconnects are not as critical/audible, because of the low power traveling through them.
 
#2,926
Not a rule and certainly not a comment that intends to pour oil in the fire,but IMO,CD-based systems can get away more easily with lesser quality cables,in contrast to a high performance turntable/arm/cartridge/phono stage.To be more specific,to me better quality cables have purer conductor metals,better insulations,shielding etc.....and not necessarily huge prices.
 
#2,928
dukeoyork said:
....jitter being induced by reflections in the cable, causing 'good' bits to be offset in time by 'bad' partial echo bits, but i don't buy it. the sending and receiving clocks are in sync, and any bit arriving late or early would be ignored. the way to get rid of jitter is with a better clock.
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A better clock can sure help! Trouble is, a lot of circuits take the clock from the spdif signal. So there isn't an independant receiving clock. Feed it a bad signal and it sounds "bad". I have a rather cheap and nasty toslink cable here that can make things sound awful. :dead:

Having spent many years routing standard and hi-def video, I know that cables make a difference there. But it's actually the terminations (connectors) that cause the most trouble. It's easy to see as ringing or echos on the screen.

If a digital audio cable is doing same thing, the reciever circuit may not be very happy about it.
 
#2,929
panomaniac said:

A better clock can sure help! Trouble is, a lot of circuits take the clock from the spdif signal. So there isn't an independant receiving clock. Feed it a bad signal and it sounds "bad".
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i don't know that much about spdif, but because of this conversation, i did go learn that the sending and receiving clocks are NOT synced. so, i guess the cable is more important, there than with, say, hdmi, where the cable makes no difference.
man, the urban legend that different hdmi cables were better sounding/looking than others milked (and continues to milk) consumers for MILLIONS of dollars.
 
#2,931
dukeoyork said:
...the urban legend that different hdmi cables were better sounding/looking than others milked (and continues to milk) consumers for MILLIONS of dollars.
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The HDMI and HDCP consortium are doing a fine job of making money from fees and royalities. What's the poor cable seller gotta do to make a buck? 😛
 
#2,932
mwaters10 said:

I prefer not to think of any signal as flowing, like there is some sort of signal path highway that it travels down from the input to the output.

....SNIP.....

No flow. Input receives - output responds. At the same moment.
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tell that to a diode or transistor. anything that has a direction, 'flows'. power supply to ground is a pathway. anything in the path affects the signal.

you could call it a 'signal path', lol.
 
#2,938
Re: Re: Re: Re: I don't beleive cables make a difference, any input?

panomaniac said:


If a digital audio cable is doing same thing, the reciever circuit may not be very happy about it.
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Especially if the receiver circuit is actually making things even worse courtesy of a schmitt trigger input. But why spoil the fun and complicate the world of anyone willing to sing "bits is bits tra-la-la"?
 
#2,940
Been ther, done that

Cal Weldon said:
Why don't you start with this?

http://www.a-msystems.com/electronics/wire/platinum.aspx
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I've already got platinum wire, various gauges up to .040". I listened to it, but didn't hear anything special 😀 😀

It works really great as an insoluble anode, though.... and I can heat it to red heat without it doing anything!

Does that count for anything?

Got a bunch of palladium too.... maybe a palladoplatinoauric interconnect composite, eh?

John L.
 
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