For HDMI, at least, there is supposed to be an actual cable specification and test procedure (connect a signal generator, measure data jitter, etc.) and a compliant cable should have a certificate to that effect, which indicates the tested product and precise specification version.
That’s a good start.
But to really hear, to really experience, Kind of Blue, you have to find heroin of the same quality, and shoot it in the same amounts, as Miles and Bill Evans were shooting. And you have to use the same kind of needle. But made of the purest alloy, of course.
If you had true golden ears, you’d know that.
Steve Martin - “Googlephonics”
You need to upgrade your comedy records. High definition makes it funnier.
Available since 2016 but there’s no detailed description – where they can brag about such things like gold-plated this or braided yak hair that – no questions, and no ratings.
They might exist but have any been sold?
That’s certainly not what I thought I was saying. Maybe I wasn’t being clear.
The HDMI cable in question was included with a certain media player device. It worked without any problems on my older TV, a Sony Bravia that had only 720p resolution.
When I got a new TV (also a Sony Bravia) I set the box to 1080p. And that’s when I started getting the occasional intermittent freeze, with the TV displaying an error message about an HDMI protocol error. It only happened every week or two. When I replaced the cable with a Monoprice one, which was a good deal heavier and equipped with ferrite cores at either end for EMI suppression, the problem went away. And Monoprice is not a cable to be snobbish about – they are quite low priced, but known for good quality.
You can try to spin that as the original cable being “defective”, but it doesn’t seem like a very useful interpretation. The original cable worked perfectly well with the original TV at 720p. It’s probably more useful to regard it as a cable that was adequate for lower performance applications but not for more demanding ones. This is the basis on which there are currently about 7 recognized categories of UTP and FTP Ethernet cables (Cat 3, Cat5, Cat 5e, Cat 6, Cat 6a, Cat 7, Cat 8) all of which superficially look the same, but which differ widely in performance characteristics.
Spend tens of thousand of dollars by switching out different kinds of cables and other widgets, to make things sound a little different. Do it again six months later, and six months after that. Take money out of your retirement account to pay the mounting debt you accumulate because of this habit.
Copper conductors? Are you kidding me? 
Those cables might be O.K. if you’re playing AC/DC or whatever, but they will absolutely destroy the sound fidelity of Kind of Blue. It’s time for you to grow up, put on your big boy pants, and use Da Vinci Interconnects by Crystal Cable. Trust me, at a starting price of $23,900, they’re an absolute bargain.
Those almost look good enough to hook up to my Perfect 8 Forces I have in my home theatre.
Additional photos:
Open Culture write today about this man’s quest to build the best stereo system in the world:
I don’t think he is anywhere close, but he has a nice living room. Would like to see his kitchen. All the mess has to go somewhere.
But a “best stereo system”, or at least pretty good, would involve wave field synthesis realized via thousands of loudspeakers: https://stackingdwarves.net/public_stuff/event_documentation/wfs_live_transmission_2008/WFS-Report-web.pdf
Could the guy get any recordings?
Needs more cowbell.
Reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon from the late 70’s - Two men are seated in a large room with an enormous amount of audio equipment and speakers in front of them. One is saying to the other:
“Great sound, but lousy music."
#MooToo!
Puts me in mind of this:
With the tone control at a single touch
‘Bel Canto’ sounds like ‘Double Dutch’
Still I never did care for music much
It’s the High Fidelity!
(Flanders and Swann, Song of Reproduction)
So at the other end of the spectrum I’m planning on building a set of distributed mode loudspeakers and see how they work. This will also allow me to dip my feet into DSPs and using REW for room correction and speaker optimization, which is something I’ve been interested in for a long time.
I don’t care for anything audiophile. It seems to me to be a cynical ploy to bleed as much money as possible from a niche group. Having the album once is enough.
Some things sound wrong cleaned up to me. Dark Side of the Moon is a great example. Pink Floyd performed it in its entirety for a year before its release, and I was in the tape trader network, so I knew it before it came out. The hype was big enough that a radio station I listened to at the time was going on about the new Pink Floyd album, be sure to listen for the premiere. I did, and I was really disappointed that it was music that was already a year old. .
There is a line where good quality equipment and recordings do make a difference, though. The difficulty arises when people confuse expensive with objectively better, which is what most of us have been poking fun at above. For your DSoTM example, I find the remastered 20th Anniversary CD much more enjoyable than the cassette version I had. I have no reason to buy the SACD, or HRA version as the gear I have makes the CD shine. I could chase the dragon you’re talking about and buy the SACD, or the HRA versions but I don’t need to because, to me, they don’t offer a significant enough improvement to justify the cost.
For me they absolutely do not. I hear music as architecture, in curves. There are zillions of types of musical curves: pitch, harmony, orchestration, dynamic, rhythmic, timbral, sequencing (e.g. the order sections are in) and they all combine to form a tension and release.
There’s a sound quality curve as well, and I find the audiophile game destroys this. When I’ve made a playlist there’s going to be something sourced from scratchy vinyl or worn analogue tape, and the anomalies add colour and character to the overall experience that I value as important in preserving. I come from the Cage/Tudor school that considers that all sounds heard during playback of a piece of music are part of the musical experience. The audiophile game of removing them to me is like trying to make a convincing chili with no chili powder.
DSOTM is always going to sound correct to my ears from the February '72 performances at the Rainbow. I acquired reels of the four shows in their entirety (at slow speed so all 4 shows were on one 7" reel) maybe two weeks after the shows occurred, so I knew the piece a whole year before everyone else did. When that album came out and I got to hear it spiffed up technically in the studio it sounded completely wrong, and it still does. That’s not to say I don’t like it – I do – but when I want to listen to the piece I generally reach for the Rainbow shows (with an Echoes like guitar solo section in place of On The Run, and Great Gig is a totally different song) or Knebworth 1975 (where On the Run and Great Gig are intact as you know them). Part of it is that on the audiophile release it’s too short – it feels right when it’s the full hour, not 40 odd minutes.