So I was looking at a stereo magazine the other night and wondering if there’s anything to the really pricey cables. Not the Monster Cable that you find at Circuit City but the stuff that costs tens to hundreds of dollars per foot/meter.
There’s no shortage of people who claim that they can hear the difference, and all sorts of glowing reviews in the ads (“I was stunned by the clarity and transparency of the VanDerSnoot 4000 cables. A true bargain at $2,000 per foot, I will sell my children into slavery to obtain a set”).
OK, fine, but that’s when the listener KNOWS which cable is in use. Has anybody ever tried something like this:
Get group of listeners (include regular folks and trained listeners). Have them set up a system of their choice and provide the recording of their choice, and have onhand sets of super-duper cables, some 12ga copper and some zip wire. Play the recordings several times, revealing which cables are in use, so that the listeners have a baseline. I assume that the audiophiles will be able to tell the difference when they know which cables are being used.
Now repeat the test several times, but hide the cable changes - you don’t know if you’re listening to the high-end stuff, M.C. or lantern cord. Everybody makes notes on their scoresheet as to what they think is in use.
I can’t see a magazine doing this - if it turns out that most people can’t tell the difference then a lot of those advertising dollars will dry up. Likewise for the local high-end stereo store, if it doesn’t work out then they have to face up to the fact that they’ve got some very expensive stuff of questionable utility. There’s no upside for them (and their market frankly isn’t the folks who’d plug “cheap” cable into expensive speakers any how).
Has anyone ever performed a truly blind test this way? What were the results?
Bingo. I mean, why would anyone in the industry do a rigorous, thorough, double blind test?
We’ve discussed expensive cables in the past. (The funniest are the expensive power cables.) The consensus among the rational-minded? For the most part, the ultra-expensive cables are a rip-off. If you have money to burn, spend it on a better pair of speakers…
Be careful when you discuss ultra-expensive cables with an audiophile.
You will be on a one way ticket to the Pit. Rarely do any threads get as violent as cable threads on Home Theater boards.
I think a lot of the cable issues are relative, but I cannot see the need for really expensive cables. I don’t use the stock cables that come with the hardware (they are more prone to fail and have intermittent problems due to their cheapness and lower quality control than after market cables) but I usually spend money on Dayton audio or Acoustic Research Concert series cables which are $10-$30 cables. They are more rigid, thicker wire, and have molded higher quality connectors then the very cheap cables. My Denon 3802 receiver sounds good with them. Some people swear by BetterCables or AudioQuest and pay $120 a cable and say it makes a huge difference. I doubt it is a huge difference but it may make some difference.
I would be curious to see a double blind test with really expensive equipment using cheap (out of the box), mid-priced $20 a cable, premium ($120 a cable), and ultra-premium $200> a cable and see if it makes a difference. The problem is that even if someone does a double-blind test, all of the hard core audiophiles will refuse to believe the results.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that I have heard differences between cables. One time in particular stands out. My brother was trying out a set of cables a friend brought over, I had zero interest or knowledge that they should sound different at all. When he switched them and replayed the song, I (and everyone else, including my dad) heard more bass the second time around. I can’t say one was better than the other, but they didn’t sound the same.
Even when I was into audio, though, I was never much a fan of expensive cables. However, in stark contrast to some snake oil that is out there, cables do reside squarely in the signal path, it’s not inconceivable that different cable designs can result in different signal degradation. Like Crafter_Man, I think money is best spent on speakers, then the source / amplification, with cables coming up last.
Yes, it’s been done. (One interesting story about blind testing of cables and other tweaks appeared in the old Stereo Review magazine. A “mid-fi” publication, SR didn’t get any ad dollars from cable makers, and thus didn’t run much risk by printing such a story. Sorry I can’t be more specific - if you know a library or a friend with a collection of back issues, it shouldn’t be that hard to track down.)
And for every blind cable test, there are a thousand passionate editorials in Stereophile et al. explaining why no audiophile could hear cable differences under the “stressful” conditions of a blind test, or how the listening room wasn’t up to snuff, or how the cable-switching test equipment created a capacitive load on the amplifier’s output stage, or how the cables weren’t broken in properly, or… or…
All of which sounds very much like the defenses psychics, telekinetics, seers and other fortune-tellers use when their “talents” evaporate in the harsh light of scientific scrutiny.
None of which proves that there is no difference between cheap cables and pricey cables. But I’m very skeptical. Given solid connections between components (no loose or corroded plugs) and sufficiently heavy-gauge lamp cord running to the speakers (to keep impedance within reason) I doubt you’ll hear any improvements from expensive cables.
Thus my idea of having the people who claim they can tell the difference provide the setup, and have them do several run-throughs using the recording of their choice with known cables in use so that they can satisfy themselves that the difference is audible. I’d also switch the cables manually - no switch box, just plug and unplug. If somebody is going to claim that the act of unplugging the cable degrades the quality so much that a $200 cable suddenly sounds like 50 cents of zip wire then that says something right there.
“Breaking in the cable”? Sure, got to loosen up them electrons I guess?
A former housemate of mine is a professional musician and also an electrical engineer who designs high-end studio recording boards. He was very much of the opinion that the premium cables are pretty much 100% snake oil for any normal use. He used big fat cables at his gigs because he’s running the stuff for long distances, that’s reasonable.
Mbacko1, I read the “high quality connectors” bit a while ago in Popular Mechanics (they had an article on extremely high-end audio and spoke to some of the folks who manufacture the premium cable). Given that a set of 4 nice gold-plated connectors only costs about $10, I could replace every single 12ga copper speaker cable (plugs and wire) every month for a year and still come out hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars ahead. I assume that the electrons in the copper don’t get worn out any faster than that
Speakers, headphones, and other equipment with moving parts will change their sound characteristics as they break-in, but solid-state equipment will not. Claims that cables or solid-state amplifiers break-in are erroneous.
(John Dunlavy from Dunlavy Labs, calling the stuff an outright fraud)
Man, I just spent some time checking out discussions forums on cables and it’s like watching a debate over something like “Does astrology work”. Not a lot of middle ground between those who say it does work and those who say it doesn’t.
Most of my previous equipment was second-user so there was no perceptable change in audio characteristics except a startling bang accompanied by the magic smoke beig released on one spectacular occasion.
Recently though (almost a year ago) I had a serious brain disorder and actually spent some real money on new gear.
I too was sceptical about this ‘burning in’ of electronics, but the speakers I got (Jamo D590) showed considerable improvement over about the first six to eight weeks of use.
I added a new CD player that kind of reversed this experience. as the supplier only had a demo model in store at the time, they insisted I took it untill mine was delivered. It sounded excellent to my ears (obviously auditioned in-store but home was better).
CD player is a Shanling CDT-100, which is tube (valve) output, so some maturing of the valves may be at the root of the changes there.
When mine came after a month, I expected it to sound harsh compared to the run-in machine. Not so, it was infinitely superior but has improved even further on maturing. The improvements are fairly subtle but not intangible, a greater richness and vibrancy, more ‘colour’ for want of a more apt description.
Also, fiting better interlinks and speaker cables has improved the sound still further, although I wouldn’t disagree that putting that money into a better source or amp wouldn’t produce more spectacular improvements.
Nah, it couldn’t have been that. Here’s the scenario, a bunch of us are at my bro’s apartment, and he says “my friend brought over this pair of wires, let’s listen to them.” Plays a song with his normal setup, then swaps the wires and plays it again, simple as that. I won’t even say it was definitely the wires, but something caused it to sound different.
No joke, I’ve heard some very wacky things hanging out with audiophiles. I’ve heard speakers 5 ft away from me make sounds that seem 20 feet away. I’ve heard a standard stereo setup give the impression that a dog was barking outside the window behind me (google QSound) I’ve stopped reading a magazine, whipped my head around and said “What the heck did you just change in the system?” to have the answer be “We put these brass cones under the CD player.” Brass cones?
I sort of sound like a guy convinced he’s seen a flying saucer, but I have to believe my ears.
Here’s the physics of it. If one set of speaker wires (but not both) had been connected backwards, then the speakers are out-of-phase. If you put two speakers close together, especially facing each other, and wire them out of phase, then the frequencies whose wavelengths are longer than the separation between the speakers will be attenuated. That’s because one speaker will be pushing a cylinder of air while the other pulls it, the air just goes back and forth, and very little of that pressure wave makes it out to your ear. If the speakers are within a foot or two, then you won’t hear frequencies even in the midrange very well. It will sound like it’s playing through a long tube.
As the out-of-phase speakers get farther apart, that frequency cutoff point goes down to the lower tones. Speakers five feet apart will be doing this push-pull thing below about 200 Hz, which is in the bass range. So it will kill the low-end bass response, just by connecting one pair of wires backwards.
Seen it, heard it! Its actually quite amusing, the excuses people will come up with. People will swear they can hear a difference that cannot be measured with the most sophisticated audio test equipment!
Its not just cables and wire, either. Did anybody see the “product review” for the jar of glass marbles? Don’t recall what mag it was in, but they claimed having this jar of marbles, like you see in fancy fishbowl somehow did something for your audio system! We passed it around the building where I work and all nearly wet ourselves laughing!
Planar transducer speakers do actually have to be “broken in”. They have a thin film sandwiched, under tension between the metal frames. As they play, the film (does whatever it does) and develops a richer, deeper sound. And you can measure it, in theory.
Actually, the story I had in mind was much later - late 90s or maybe even later. It was a listening test conducted with a single pair of speakers and two seprate source/amp setups behind a curtain. One source setup used fancy wires, carefully laid out, with isolation feet, etc. The other used a bunch of nasty old original-equipment wires deliberately tangled together. Most of the listeners obviously couldn’t tell the systems apart at all. One listener appeared to be chalking up a better record than the others, but even he was only right about 60%-70% of the time, not even statistically significant, it turned out.
Brass cones?