Audio cables vs cheap wire test

High quality cables make a difference to me. Coupled with a Tidal Hi-Fi/Premium subscription and you’re talking good shït.
 
6spdmanual said:
High quality cables make a difference to me. Coupled with a Tidal Hi-Fi/Premium subscription and you’re talking good shït.
Click to expand...
Same here.

It is such a heavily debated topic as can be seen by the comments here. I have my theory that the doubters have never owned or listened to a high end system before.
 
maxxis said:
Same here.

It is such a heavily debated topic as can be seen by the comments here. I have my theory that the doubters have never owned or listened to a high end system before.
Click to expand...
To some people it makes a difference.. But to most people they cannot tell the difference.

There is likely some element of confirmation bias at play
 
ToxicBunny said:
To some people it makes a difference.. But to most people they cannot tell the difference.

There is likely some element of confirmation bias at play
Click to expand...
Confirmation bias yes and no. The objective of a good audiophile grade system is reproduce music in such a way that you feel that you are truly right in front of the artist performing.

You know exactly what to look for. Things like the environment that the recording was done in. A recording done in London's Abbey Road Studios has a certain warmth and character to it. I want my system to reproduce that accurately.

In many many blind tests we noted certain elements of a recording (for example midbass) can become muddy or higher frequencies can suffer so badly from sibilance that it distracts from the experience.

Cables can change the characteristics of the sound enough to enhance and correct these issues.

Was a fun night or ten testing many different cable combinations and quite easily picking the cheap control pair from the high end cables.
 
Yanno,
When I was still a joggie techie circa 1998, I worked for the network department of a "Leading Financial Institution" with a "Very Highly Senior Network Techie" title, and was tasked with making the slow Internet faster.
They had a 64 kbps Diginet circuit to <redacted Internet service provider> at that time, and an upgrade to 128kbps had maxed out the memory of the Cisco 25xx series router.
The institution wanted at least <gasp> 256kbps, but the trusty Cisco router (if I remember correctly it was a Cisco 2513) had only 4 Megabytes of RAM, and the speed upgrade to 256kBps demanded 8 or even 16 Megabytes of memory.

Sensing the urgency of the situation, I personally ordered the "Cisco Certified" 8 MB memory upgrade, got the overpriced PO signed, and collected and installed the blister packaged 8MB of "Certified Cisco" memory in said router. For some reason, it didn't work, so I called our Cisco Global Gold supplier's account manager. He invited me to see him in his office.
I put on my best tie and jacket.
The guy greeted me, and asked how I was doing. I started to explain my tale of woe. He stopped me midway, putting his index finger to his lips, and then casually opened his top desk drawer, pulled out a few loose SIMMs of dubious origin, dusted them off, (including removing some chewing gum or Prestik from the contacts of one particularly nasty one), and after inspecting them all against the light, and giving them a serious blowing from his lips, handed 4 of (what he considered) the best ones to me, into my sweaty hands.
No ESD strap or ESD bags, just like that.
The other remaining (nastier ones?) were returned to his drawer.

"Try those" was his response.

I looked at the motley crew of SIMMs in my sweaty hand, not one was identical, all had different manufacturers, different company stickers, different sizes and colours, differentmarkings and different specs. I immediately touched the metal table leg in a belated (and futile!) attempt to discharge the static from my body.

"But what about Cisco Certification?" I croaked.
"Don't worry about that" was his response, "I will deal with that if they don't work".

I was dumbstruck. We were paying a huge price premium ( I don't remember the exact bill but it was very expensive) for a "Cisco Global Gold Partner" to support our beloved Cisco 2513, with "Cisco Certified Spares", and here he was handing me (at best) 2nd hand memory modules of dubious origin, in the most undignified manner. And suggesting that I plug them into The Internet.

"OK, I will try them." was my response. The project was already past critical path, and could not envisage my directors face if I failed.

The first SIMM that I inserted worked, and I didn't bother returning the other three, not did the account manager ask for them. They went into my top-drawer, along with all my unused Steer sauces, Prestik, fountain pens and other pocket lint-like items.
 
SAguy said:
That's an easier one. There's no picture or sound difference between cheap cables and gold plated, diamond encrusted hdmi cables.

Makes a difference in terms of durability and supporting longer distances, but in general there's no difference between a R100 hdmi cable and a R1000 hdmi cable between your blu ray player and tv.
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So are you saying that speeds or bandwidth is not a factor in hdmi cables?
Any hdmi cable would perform the same for 4k and dolby atmos etc? What about shielding capabilities?
 
maxxis said:
Garbage in, indistinguishable garbage out.

Coming from a high end audio background I can assure you that cables make a difference.

Would you power a set of Martin Logan speakers powered by a set of Mark Levinson mono blocks with twin flex from builders or with some Van Den Hull Supernovas?

Rule of thumb was always to spend at least 10% of the system cost on cables.
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And this is where you are complete wrong and perpetuating urban legends, generated by audio salesmen. (and I've owned high-end AV stores, so know the type very well)

I've owned Martin Logans and many other kinds of high-end speakers. I've yet to meet anyone who could tell the difference between an obscenely priced cable and a decent copper cable. In fact, my favourite speaker cable is those thick orange cable used for lawnmowers.

Take that 10% and buy even better speakers. That's where the distortion is. Orders of magnitude more than what any other component can introduce.
 
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jannievanzyl said:
And this is where you are complete wrong and perpetuating urban legends, generated by audio salesmen. (and I've owned high-end AV stores, so know the type very well)

I've owned Martin Logans and many other kinds of high-end speakers. I've yet to meet anyone who could tell the difference between an obscenely priced cable and a decent copper cable. In fact, my favourite speaker cable is those thick orange cables used for lawnmowers.

Take that 10% and buy even better speakers. That's where the distortion is. Orders of magnitude more than what any other component can introduce.
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It is the internet. Somewhere someone is always wrong.
 
Tacet said:
@Jan
One of the advantages of audio cable that you've underplayed is that it is shielded. Unshielded cable to e.g. the corners of a room has the potential of acting as antennas with inherent AM demodulation. When I was a student I used cheap twin-core cable to drive speakers sitting in the corners of the room. The audio quality was pretty good, except that the AM that the wires demodulated at times came through stronger than the audio signal from my amp.
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Speaker cables are normally not shielded as the voltages are massive.

In AM signals you heard was picked up by the amp, not the speakers. By definition, the levels are way to low to drive the speaker but it fed back into the amp where it was amplified and you heard it. I've seen the same at lot, but many years ago with 1970's / 80's kit. Modern amps, not at all.
 
maxxis said:
Confirmation bias yes and no. The objective of a good audiophile grade system is reproduce music in such a way that you feel that you are truly right in front of the artist performing.

You know exactly what to look for. Things like the environment that the recording was done in. A recording done in London's Abbey Road Studios has a certain warmth and character to it. I want my system to reproduce that accurately.

In many many blind tests we noted certain elements of a recording (for example midbass) can become muddy or higher frequencies can suffer so badly from sibilance that it distracts from the experience.

Cables can change the characteristics of the sound enough to enhance and correct these issues.

Was a fun night or ten testing many different cable combinations and quite easily picking the cheap control pair from the high end cables.
Click to expand...
Is maxxis a resraurant or audio shop?
 
maxxis said:
Same here.

It is such a heavily debated topic as can be seen by the comments here. I have my theory that the doubters have never owned or listened to a high end system before.
Click to expand...
I've been involved in high-end audio for over 30 years. Built music studios for a living, was a sound engineer. Owned high-end AV stores. Had more high-end speakers on my floor than you can wave a stick at.

I'm happy to put a massive bet that you will not be able to tell the difference between a cheap piece of high-current cable and a R40K speaker cable in a double-blind listening test. :)
 
jannievanzyl said:
I've been involved in high-end audio for over 30 years. Built music studios for a living, was a sound engineer. Owned high-end AV stores. Had more high-end speakers on my floor than you can wave a stick at.

I'm happy to put a massive bet that you will not be able to tell the difference between a cheap piece of high-current cable and a R40K speaker cable in a double-blind listening test. :)
Click to expand...
Definitely wont. My hearing isn’t what used to be after years of riding bikes.
 
jannievanzyl said:
I've been involved in high-end audio for over 30 years. Built music studios for a living, was a sound engineer. Owned high-end AV stores. Had more high-end speakers on my floor than you can wave a stick at.

I'm happy to put a massive bet that you will not be able to tell the difference between a cheap piece of high-current cable and a R40K speaker cable in a double-blind listening test. :)
Click to expand...
But the "audiophiles" will keep on telling you that expensive copper cables is better than "cheap" copper cables. Kind of remnds me of a certain fruit flavoured cult that will believe anything their lord and masters at *unnamed fruit flavoured cult" tells them to believe. Even if it involves a 16k monitor stand.
 
6spdmanual said:
High quality cables make a difference to me. Coupled with a Tidal Hi-Fi/Premium subscription and you’re talking good shït.
Click to expand...

Ultimately it’s a case of very quickly diminishing returns though.

High quality yes, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be R1000/m (or worse even) and a R100 a metre cable would be just as good.

The argument is rather between the R10/m and R100/m and the interference one will suffer over the other in a real world environment with high end equipment.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Ultimately it’s a case of very quickly diminishing returns though.

High quality yes, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be R1000/m (or worse even) and a R100 a metre cable would be just as good.
Click to expand...
@LazyLion's DSTV installer begs to differ
 
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