The question is vague, so let me explain.
There is some very expensive equipment available for audiophiles, like oxygen free or directional cables, power supply setups with batteries to eliminate mains noise and whatnot.
I know that most of these either do nothing at all (except making some fool’s pocket lighter), or they do something but at a very low Return On Investment.
So I am wondering, what do the actual professionals use? Are there any audiophile products that are used by pros too?
Audio engineers realise that “audiophile gear” does nothing (A/B testing on Monster cables vs Coathangers proves this). It is magical thinking. They use good quality (low oxygen) cables, well looked after, for hook-ups. That is about it. Certainly they don’t use gold plated connectors or the like. Way too expensive. They just use good reliable connectors.
Depending on the studio, though, there may be different sorts of aesthetic thinking involved, which other engineers may qualify as a form of magical thinking …
Condenser vs Dynamic vs Ribbon mics
Valve vs solid state (for amps and preamps)
Analogue vs Digital (recording media)
Physical vs digital reverb
A/D/A converters are particularly contentious at any stage of the process.
Sampling rate
However, personal preferences aside, pro quality audio gear has solid information to back up the decision to use one or the other - Frequency response curves, distortion measurements, noise floor, microphone sensitivity pattern are all measurable and quantifiable, and decisions can be justified on that basis.
Of course, Sound Engineers can be just as prone to the “it just sounds better using xxx” as anyone else.
Musicians, on the other hand, are a nightmare. I heard a story about Jimi Hendrix - he had broken his Wah pedal, so went (after hours) to a New York music store to get a replacement. The owner pulled one out the box for Jimi to test - Jimi didn’t like it. So they tried another. And another. Eventually the owner ran out of pedals. So he handed Jimi the first one again. Jimi liked it and purchased it. It hadn’t changed since the previous test. It probably wasn’t any different to any of the other identical Wah pedals he had tried. It just suddenly became “the one”. :smack:
Ditto with Stradivarius violins - no-one can tell the difference in an A/B blind test, and the preference is for modern instruments.
Si
Gold plated connectors aren’t really all that expensive, it’s the snake oil that costs.
That makes no sense. If no-one can tell the difference then they would have no preference.
I got a subscription to Stereophile a while back. I’m not renewing it. There is no justification for what is charged for any given piece of equipment.
I don’t mean that in an absolute sense obviously, but damn close. I’ll give you an example. I was reading an speaker review just this week. Well, giggling at it. The speakers were $20k. One of the first tests I learned a little about was the one that shows how quickly a speaker snaps back - spectral decay I think. I don’t really understand the full import and tend to just look at the summary plot to get a rough idea. OK, so the plot on these guys was awful. I mean just hideous.
The reviewer made a good point and said that there were several drivers in the box and he could only measure one at a time, but still, you could tell he was doing what he could to find some justification. However in the end, he just couldn’t do it and basically said he couldn’t understand how another reviewer gave them such a high rating.
No one will believe me when I say this and I’m not going to explain why it’s so, but I’m fairly immune to the placebo effect - which is unfortunate since it is useful very often. Maybe for that reason I’m more aware of it in others, which is fine. I’m envious. The thing is though that sometimes, if you’re going to be a good friend or whatever, you need to point this out to someone, and boy howdy do get some shit when you do that. Audio is one of those areas. And it’s a particularly bad one since it seems that the amount of shit is in direct proportion to how much money has been spent.
Recording studios will go to companies like Belden, Mogami, and Canare for their cable. There is a small price difference between them, but it is mostly a wash. There is good physics in the design of cables from these guys. The designs have good shielding, low capacitance, flexible if needed, low handling noise, and are generally what you expect in a professional quality product (which means it is nicer made, more robust, and more expensive than cheap cable.)
Connectors are almost exclusively XLR, and the pins on these a typically nickel plated. As noted above, gold isn’t actually expensive. and does have some nice properties, but nickel is as good.
It is hilarious to find audiophiles claiming magical properties of cables a metre long, and jewel like connectors costing more than jewels, when the audio recordings have sent the same signal though tens of metres of dollar a metre cable and five dollar connectors.
I always ask myself if audiophiles know what sort of equipment was used to produce the recordings they listen to on their stereos with inch-thick speaker cable carefully lifted from the ground. The amount and (almost zero) thickness of cable and different connections inside an analog mixing console would make these people faint. (ETA: I see that Francis Vaughan has already adressed this.)
Like most people upthread already said, there are some areas where recording engineers go nuts over - preamps, vintage gear, summing mixers, monitors - but cables and connectors are not usually among them. There are definitely differences between valve and solid state amps, or analog vs. digital equipment, but at this point it’s more about preference or the philosophy of the studio.
Yea, I subscribed to a number of audiophile magazines back in the 1990s. It was a total waste of money, as a few things became obvious after a while:
The manufacturer of the equipment being “reviewed” by the editors – surprise surprise! – is almost always an advertiser in the magazine. The mag scratches the manufacturer’s back, and vice versa. What a racket!
Manufactures – particularly ones making very high end hardware – put most their resources into art, aesthetics, and advertising. Apparently, if it looks good, it must sound good.
There is absolutely no difference between wine reviewers and audiophile reviewers; both us lofty, subjective, and meaningless adjectives to describe their observations. “The bass response had a forward presence that was utterly precise, almost arrogant, yet possessed a subtle warmth that perfectly complimented the hyper-realistic sonic attributes of the midrange driver.” Huh??? :dubious:
Oh, and don’t even get me started on high-end interconnects. Those folks should be thrown in jail on felony fraud charges. :mad:
Pah, missed the edit window.
Not all high end audiophile stuff is snake oil junk. You can’t argue with physics, and really good speakers cost big money. Mastering engineers are known to use very expensive audiophile speakers, such as B&W, Wilson, Dunlavy, as well as studio standards like ATC and Genelec. The thing about these brands is that they are run by engineers, and they have some science behind what they do. Many audiophile speakers are made by dilettante enthusiasts who have no real idea what they are doing, but have weird theories that are often little removed from homeopathy in validity. Hence the comment from deltasigma above. (And in this context, what an interesting choice of username.)
There are a lot of products that are sold into the professional recording market that look a lot like audiophile stuff, some of them even have crossover markets, with domestic and pro versions of the product. For instance Lavry sells his ADCs and DACs in both. They are very highly thought of in pro circles, and interestingly not so well received in the audiophile arena. Then you get companies like Manley that sell tube based gear (and pretty expensive gear too) in both markets. The difference is that nobody ever suggests magical properties of purity of sound, or accuracy in their pro products - they are sold to deliver a particular sound, and a sound that is worth the money to some engineers. There is also lot of interest in old gear. Some old tube based compressors and limiters go for stupid money, because they have a particular sound, or sadly, just because they have a certain reputation. Then again, many recording studios are digital end to end, and if they want the particular sound of a bit of gear they buy a digital plugin that emulates the sound.
Participants were asked two questions: identify the modern violin (results were 50/50 - no better than random), and select the preferred instrument (preference for the modern instrument).
Si
Another one I find amusing, in audiophile design, opamp choice is something of a religion, and some audiophile engage in “opamp rolling” swapping opamps to find audio nirvana. In all of this there is one opamp that is universally reviled. The humble 5532. These are considered the mark of an inferior and cheap design, to be rooted out wherever possible. The great SSL desks that decades of music was recorded on are filled with them. Any signal at all that made it to the master will have passed though 20 or 30 5532 opamps.
Now there is devil in the details, the precise implementation of the circuit can make a big difference to the performance of the 5532 (Douglas Self provides a very complete guide to this) and the guys that designed the SSL desks were not fools (uniike many audiophile designers) but the fact still remains.
And amusingly, rational people in both fields use the same test methodology, a double-blind ABX test, to determine if anybody can really tell the difference.
The most significant upgrade that I have made to my prime system was to link the preamp and power amp with XLR leads instead of the phono leads that they had been using.
I was offered some Van den Hul leads at £180 but bought some nameless ones from China (eBay) for £13.
The improvement was comparable to spending £10,000 on better speakers or buying Electrocompaniet’s Nemo amplifiers.
Currently listening to Leonard Cohen on a 1970 Sonab R-4000 amp and Sonab OA5/2 speakers, also 1970’s 
To answer the OP, a professional recording studio is definitely concerned with the quality of the interconnects. From a strictly performance perspective, they are concerned with:
#1 is the least important. Why? Because at these frequencies, a discarded lamp cord will work just as well as solid silver conductors surrounded by Teflon insulation infused with ceramic nanoparticles. (Well, not quite. There is something to be said for good shielding. But even that’s not expensive.) I’m not aware of *any *wire or interconnect that could not satisfy the electrical specs sufficient for audio use.
#2 is paramount, as mechanical performance is *much *more important than electrical performance, particularly with connectors. A studio does not want to screw around with cheap, unreliable connectors that go intermittent in the middle of a session. They need connectors that can be easily disassembled, repaired, and reassembled in short order.
The sound difference between instruments is huge. Recently I heard Tasmin Little, and then a while later Nicola Benedetti. Both play Strads. I was in close to a prime listening position for both, in a very good venue. The differences in sound between the two instruments was immense. Tasmin’s was warm, full, and well, unexciting. Nicola’s was brilliant, vibrant, and really captivating. Both were clearly very good instruments, with great balance of sound, and in both cases we are talking international level virtuoso players worthy of million dollar instruments.
Also recently I was talking with cellist Jian Wang. His preferred instrument is a modern one. This is interesting as he said that when he first got it, it wasn’t very special, but he got it out after about a decade, and in the interim it has transformed to one with a sound he really preferred to his old, very very expensive instrument. It did indeed sound wonderful.
The way a player approaches an instrument makes a big difference too. It isn’t possible to divorce the way an instrument plays from the player, and the final sound. They are all intertwined. YoYo Ma now has Jacqueline du Pre’s cello - the Davydov Stradivarius. He comments that she never really understood how that particular cello needed to be treated - she was too aggressive, whereas that instrument needs to be gently coaxed. One might disagree, but Jacqueline didn’t choose the instrument - it was a present. But YoYo doesn’t play that particular cell much either now.
Tests that preport to prove that a modern instrument is indistinguishable from a Strad or Guarneri are doomed. No two instruments play exactly the same way, and a virtuoso player learns to work within the character of their instrument. If a player can’t distinguish between instruments they are probably simply not up to the standard needed for a useful test. This isn’t to say the old instruments are better. But it is to say that simple tests for differences are invalid.
This off topic, but it’s not worth a thread. I have some nice (for me) NHT Classic 3 speakers. What I love about them is that they are really clean. I can’t hear above maybe 8k any more, but I can still tell good transient response from mud and the sound from these I think is pretty well defined.
Now here’s the weird thing, and I know I’m going to get shit for this (and no this is not the reason my hearing sucks btw), the speakers seem to have a sweet spot. Either that or my ears do. They don’t really come alive until I crank up the volume to maybe the low 80db area. That’s not to say that they sound like crap below that, just that there seems to be a qualitative difference.
Now it could well be my hearing. My frequency impairment is just normal age related crap you deal with. Sensitivity I think is ok, but I don’t know for certain - no obvious impairment. So I’m not sure what’s up. Someone told me it has to do with speaker sensitivity. That sort of makes sense, but I’ll spare you my likely bogus explanation.
They also want connectors that can be plugged and unplugged many times over a long service life without bending or breaking or messing up the equipment. Heavy-duty XLRs and 1/4-inch TRS are great for that. RCA plugs are a pain.
Nope, there is a lot of good psycho-acoustics here.
Your ears have a level dependant frequency response - often known as the Fletcher Munson curve, although that particular curve is obsolete, and replaced by better measurements.
The softer the sound the worse the bass and top end response of the ear. This partly why you hear the idea of reference level for home theatre, the sound level at which the mix is correctly balanced. Some home theatre systems will apply a very accurate compensation to the response to account for this when playing at lower levels. On the old HiFi systems there was often a “loudness” button, which provided a very (very) rudimentary correction.
In the absence of this, the correct answer is to crank it up to the same level that the music was mixed at. This is invariably loud by domestic standards. A symphony orchestra can make you flinch when in full flight. Proper rock and roll needs proper loudness. That is the nature of the game.
Also, speakers have non-linear distortion characteristics. You are may also be hearing the speakers getting to the point where they are generating a nice amount of low order harmonic distortion, and making the sound richer (and curiously sound even louder.)
Top end at 8kHz seems unfortunate. That would take a lot of snap and sizzle out of the sound.
Say what now? 
Speakers are the most important component, no doubt.
I used RBH speakers when I built my HT system a couple years ago. They may not be “super high end,” but they’re well made and more than suffice for my ears. They sound good with music, but interestingly they are only so-so for movies.
My stepfather has a pair of Altec Valencia speakers. They were made in the late 1960s, and are huge. But they sound incredible; they blow away my RBH speakers.
Gold-plated contacts aren’t snake oil. They’re appropriate whenever corrosion might be an issue for nickel-plated contacts. Granted, this is unlikely to be the case in a studio setting.
Anyways, a gold-plated XLR from Neutrik will run you about 4 bucks, versus about 2 for the standard one. Made in Liechtenstein, too, and how many products can you say that about?