There is basically a low threshold of quality that makes a difference. If you buy decent speakers, the wires with them should give as good a signal as you are going to get. If you buy high end 400W speakers and attach them to your high quality amplifier with wires that came with cheap Walmart speakers, you could have bad sound, or even start a fire. But I have never heard of any audio reason to buy speaker cables that cost more than $100/10ft. Hell, I could go to an electronics parts place and get high quality wire and connectors and make speaker wires that will equal or exceed anything from monster for significantly less than that.
I bought a 6 food HDMI cable on eBay a few months ago, the seller was from China and it was his first auction. He started bidding at 1 cent US. The specs were as follows:
HDMI Male to Male
Perfect for connecting your HDMI Monitors, A/V Receivers, and HDTV
Supports all HDMI Devices, including
Supports Resolutions up to 1440P
Fully HDCP compliant to provide highest level of signal quality.
24k gold plated conductor to provide optimum signal transfer.
Triple-layer shielding rejects interference for the best EMI effect.
Cable Length: Appox: 6 feet/(1.83 meters) v1.3b Cat 2
HDMI Adopter, Certification with ATC to ensure best quality
RoHs Compliance
At 17 minutes to go, it was shown with 1 bid at 1 cent. I bid 26 cents, I did not bid enough. I bid $1 and was the high bidder at 76 cents. I won the auction at this price. Oh, did I mention the seller was offering free shipping? The cable arrived a few weeks laters, works perfectly and positive feedback was left by both parties. I just checked up on the seller, he is selling the same cable but with $4.75 opening bids. Another noobie learned an expensive lesson.
Cables matter - to a point. If a cable has decent shielding and electrical specifications, not adding enough capacitance or resistance to the line to affect the signal, one cable is the same as another. The problem is that weasels like Monster stack the deck in demos. For instance, they’ll compare their speaker cable with an effective 12 to 10 gauge diameter to 24 gauge speaker wire. The 24 gauge (the higher number in wire gauge is smaller) is too small to safely handle the output of a 300 watt amplifier and will affect the sound. But of course you can buy good, 10 gauge copper wire for a fraction of the cost of anything Monster sells and it is a great replacement.
There are enough difference in the design of filters to possibly cause a change. But, here the the thing, your head was not in exactly the same place both times. The comb effects introduced to the sound by the environment have far more measurable impact on the sound than any cable, digital converter or any other piece of electronics.
Ethan Winer published an amazing and eye-opening article about this that I saw linked to from Mix magazine, a trade journal for sound professionals. He shows that a 4" difference can cause dips and peaks of 3 and even 6 dB at various frequencies.
This is why audiophile tweeks don’t show up in double-blind “A/B/X” tests, but do show up in longer, subjective listening tests where the listener gets up, changes the cable or piece of electronics and sits back down. Unless their head is strapped down like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” it is going to be in a different position. It’s not that the audiophiles are fooling themselves - they do hear a difference, but it’s not caused by what they think it’s caused by.
Bi-amping doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the silly audiophile tweeks, if that is what he did. Bi-amping means switching from a passive cross-over in the speaker after a single amp to using an active, electronic cross-over before a pair of amps. If he bi-amped, that is a very significant change, if only because of all the settings that need to be made for the electronic cross-over to work properly.
If he “bi-wired” the speakers, that just means he doubled the gauge of the wire going to the speaker. If it was electrically inadequate before, that might help some. But, as with anything in audio, it would have to be double-blind tested to see if it really changed.
See above. Changing from a terrible cable that is negatively effecting the sound, like a 28 gauge wire with a spiral shield with only 50% shield coverage to one with a reasonably sized center conductor, a dielectric large enough to avoid adding sonic artifacts and a braided or foil shield? Then yes. But changing from the latter to a $200 pair of “interconnects”? No way.
The same issue of Mix had an article where they took some super high bitrate recordings and ran them through an A/B/X comparator. A was the super high bitrate source’s analog out. The second was the same signal run through a very good CD recorder in monitor mode. The first was from DVD-Audio and SuperAudio CD, while the second was limited to 16 bits at 44.1k -CD standard. The two sources were matched to .01 dB. The trials were done in a wide range of locations with a large number of listeners, recording and mastering engineers, males and females with a total of 544 test subjects.
The results?
The number of times out of 554 that the listeners correctly identified which system was which was 276, or 49.82 percent — exactly the same thing that would have happened if they had based their responses on flipping a coin. Audiophiles and working engineers did slightly better, or 52.7-percent correct, while those who could hear above 15 kHz actually did worse, or 45.3 percent. Women, who were involved in less than 10 percent of the trials, did relatively poorly, getting just 37.5-percent right.