The Great Cable Debate

naturephoto1 · May 24, 2010

From my personal experience I have noticed differences in the sound from different IC cables, Coax, speaker cables, and even Power Cords. In fact the weekend before last, I was listening to some music on a friend's system. I had some of my expensive Wireworld Platinum Eclipse Balanced IC cables installed into the system. We changed to some of our much less expensive BalanceIC TimePortal cables made by Kevin (VALAB) in Taiwan. Much to our surprise we heard immediate differences in the sound and much preferred the much less expensive cables. From experience, I have also found that cables do improve or "mature" in performance with usage and rely heavily on an Audiodharma Cable Cooker to prepare the cables for their optimum performance. And yes, the cables do sound different after "cooking".

Rich

Steve Williams · May 24, 2010

Hi Rich

was this a blinded test that you did or did you just change cables and everyone listened?

I am not disputing your observations.

FWIW whenever I audition a new piece of gear and like what I hear my mantra to myself is "did I hear somehing better or did I just hear something different

naturephoto1 · May 24, 2010

Steve Williams said:
Hi Rich

was this a blinded test that you did or did you just change cables and everyone listened?

I am not disputing your observations.

FWIW whenever I audition a new piece of gear and like what I hear my mantra to myself is "did I hear somehing better or did I just hear something different

Hi Steve,

The last tests with the Wireworld Platinum Eclipse cables and the TimePortal cables were not a blind test. We swithced both sets of cables several times with the same results. The Wireworld cables may have been stronger and possibly a bit of a "bloat" in the midrange. They also were a bit more etched, did not image as well and had a smaller soundstage. The TimePortal cables were smoother, better top to bottom sound, with better imaging, deeper soundstage, more life like performance, more bass, etc. I really liked the Wireworld Platinum cables very much and wanted them to sound better than our much less expensive TimePortal cables. They just didn't sound as good.

ggendel · May 26, 2010

Nelson Pass did a study that does support this basic premise. http://www.passlabs.com/pdfs/articles/spkrcabl.pdf

This and my own double-blind tests have convinced me to use 12-gauge stranded wire costing about 13 cents/foot. I picked it up from the local electrical supply place. It was originally intended for outdoor low-voltage lighting and looks like a big lamp cord.

RogerD · May 26, 2010

ggendel said:
Nelson Pass did a study that does support this basic premise. http://www.passlabs.com/pdfs/articles/spkrcabl.pdf

This and my own double-blind tests have convinced me to use 12-gauge stranded wire costing about 13 cents/foot. I picked it up from the local electrical supply place. It was originally intended for outdoor low-voltage lighting and looks like a big lamp cord.

There's a video on youtube where two different IC's and a coat hanger are compared. The reviewers conclusion was that there wasn't a nickles worth of difference. The same argument is touted with capacitors, as we now have Duelands and teflon. If anybody can rid a system of hash by all means go ahead and use any type cable. It shouldn't make any difference in what's heard. The problem is in my experience I have never had inexpensive cables remove hash to the extent that some high priced cables do. The cable manufacturers use extreme pricing as some are willing to pay a big price for improved sound. Bottom line is there is a difference, I just look for the cable that I think sounds good at a comparitively decent price.

MylesBAstor · May 27, 2010

RogerD said:
There's a video on youtube where two different IC's and a coat hanger are compared. The reviewers conclusion was that there wasn't a nickles worth of difference. The same argument is touted with capacitors, as we now have Duelands and teflon. If anybody can rid a system of hash by all means go ahead and use any type cable. It shouldn't make any difference in what's heard. The problem is in my experience I have never had inexpensive cables remove hash to the extent that some high priced cables do. The cable manufacturers use extreme pricing as some are willing to pay a big price for improved sound. Bottom line is there is a difference, I just look for the cable that I think sounds good at a comparitively decent price.

Agreed! The more transparent the system, the more it reveals the noise, grain and crap cables add to the sound.

But on the other hand, there have been some lower priced cables whose sound belies their price.

FrantzM · May 27, 2010

Hi

That is one of the more civil discussion, I have been in or witnessed on the subject of Audiophile cables. The forum members must be congratulated for such exemplary behavior.

It remains true however that the contributions of cables in the overall sound of a system is grossly and regularly exaggerated. I have been on the path of cables also.
A little bit of history to center the debate. My first encounter with audiophiles was when Iwas a teenager. Bob Fulton introduced on the market a pair of speaker cables: the Fulton Brown and the Fulton Gold. These cables did turn the audiophile world upside down because till this time, audiophiles have been quite happy with any electrical zip cord that was laying around. In my recollection the Fulton Brown DID make a difference to my ears. In retrospect it should be so... We were using ( please don't laugh) 18 Ga zip cord with a Phase Linear 4000 driving Bozark speakers (I don't remember which but they might have been the Imperial). The Fulton Brown were 10 or 12 Gau and the Gold even thicker maybe 6 or 8 Gau... This started the craze toward "Audiophile" cables. To be sure there were bad cables. Many cables are electrically and mechanically flawed. THeir effect can be seen and heard very quickly and reliably... Some audiophile cables fall in this category. A few years ago, there was a craze about small gauge cables and I did see 28 Gau speaker wires. These sounded thin and constricted in the lower end of the spectrum and some people called that "transparency" this has abated some but still has its proponents .. Then around the mid 90's Ray Kimber came up with a $15 K Speaker cable which for some reason was not well received. I think it was cultural, people were no consuming like today's where midle class people making less than 75,000 a yearflirt with the idea of buying a $2000 handbag or a 2500 pair of shoes ... It did not fly IIRC but a precedent has been set and the rest we all know it ...
Cables became audiophile orthodoxy: They made a night and day difference and subtly but surely another idea crept up: The higher the price the better it is . Not only in cables but in all components but we will remain on topic , on the cable debate. So cable became more and ore expensive to the absurd level we see today. Some with a network attached to the point of one of these network having an Articulation Modification Module or something to that nature .. This movement was aided by a few change in audiophile mentality and in society in general:

There was more money available to people the past few years. You would refinace your house and find yourself , courtesy of your friendly bank, with 200,000 in your hands.. not for the very rich, Joe Six-pack who happened to have purchased a $30,000 CONDO on Brickell in Miami, Fl in 1985, is in 2004 the owner of a $600,000 luxury condominium
The new wave of Audiophilia Relativism: If I like it , then it is good.
The complete Divorce from measurements. A serious paradox but the cable manufacturers have the Marketing chutzpah to pull it off ... and they have ..
The sentiment of not being a true audiophile if one doesn't hear the supposed differences .. We have all fallen for this. We strain and strain to no avail but then we hear a person telling us about the midrange "liquidity" and the "organic" lower treble an the magical lowered "noise" floor or the "black" background brought by this cable and slowly but eventually we start noticing these too .. With visual clues removed ? We simply can't but hey .. We are audiophiles ...

Yet it remains true that cables can make a difference , my point is that passed a certain level of electrical competence. Good gauge low resistance, capacitance and inductance. They make unnoticeable differences. YMMV and if it pleases you by all means but don't be too attached to that notion as being the truth.. It is not so ...

Frantz

MylesBAstor · May 27, 2010

FrantzM said:
Hi

That is one of the more civil discussion, I have been in or witnessed on the subject of Audiophile cables. The forum members must be congratulated for such exemplary behavior.

It remains true however that the contributions of cables in the overall sound of a system is grossly and regularly exaggerated. I have been on the path of cables also.
A little bit of history to center the debate. My first encounter with audiophiles was when Iwas a teenager. Bob Fulton introduced on the market a pair of speaker cables: the Fulton Brown and the Fulton Gold. These cables did turn the audiophile world upside down because till this time, audiophiles have been quite happy with any electrical zip cord that was laying around. In my recollection the Fulton Brown DID make a difference to my ears. In retrospect it should be so... We were using ( please don't laugh) 18 Ga zip cord with a Phase Linear 4000 driving Bozark speakers (I don't remember which but they might have been the Imperial). The Fulton Brown were 10 or 12 Gau and the Gold even thicker maybe 6 or 8 Gau... This started the craze toward "Audiophile" cables. To be sure there were bad cables. Many cables are electrically and mechanically flawed. THeir effect can be seen and heard very quickly and reliably... Some audiophile cables fall in this category. A few years ago, there was a craze about small gauge cables and I did see 28 Gau speaker wires. These sounded thin and constricted in the lower end of the spectrum and some people called that "transparency" this has abated some but still has its proponents .. Then around the mid 90's Ray Kimber came up with a $15 K Speaker cable which for some reason was not well received. I think it was cultural, people were no consuming like today's where midle class people making less than 75,000 a yearflirt with the idea of buying a $2000 handbag or a 2500 pair of shoes ... It did not fly IIRC but a precedent has been set and the rest we all know it ...
Cables became audiophile orthodoxy: They made a night and day difference and subtly but surely another idea crept up: The higher the price the better it is . Not only in cables but in all components but we will remain on topic , on the cable debate. So cable became more and ore expensive to the absurd level we see today. Some with a network attached to the point of one of these network having an Articulation Modification Module or something to that nature .. This movement was aided by a few change in audiophile mentality and in society in general:

There was more money available to people the past few years. You would refinace your house and find yourself , courtesy of your friendly bank, with 200,000 in your hands.. not for the very rich, Joe Six-pack who happened to have purchased a $30,000 CONDO on Brickell in Miami, Fl in 1985, is in 2004 the owner of a $600,000 luxury condominium

The new wave of Audiophilia Relativism: If I like it , then it is good.

The complete Divorce from measurements. A serious paradox but the cable manufacturers have the Marketing chutzpah to pull it off ... and they have ..

The sentiment of not being a true audiophile if one doesn't hear the supposed differences .. We have all fallen for this. We strain and strain to no avail but then we hear a person telling us about the midrange "liquidity" and the "organic" lower treble an the magical lowered "noise" floor or the "black" background brought by this cable and slowly but eventually we start noticing these too .. With visual clues removed ? We simply can't but hey .. We are audiophiles ...

Yet it remains true that cables can make a difference , my point is that passed a certain level of electrical competence. Good gauge low resistance, capacitance and inductance. They make unnoticeable differences. YMMV and if it pleases you by all means but don't be too attached to that notion as being the truth.. It is not so ...

Frantz

Frantz:

Re: exaggeration. I think the issue is that most of us are frustrated by the tradeoffs in most cables. And to paraphrase something HP said a while ago about cartridges that also applies to cable, "If these cables are supposed to represent what the sound of real music is, how come they all sound so different?" Now the thing that drives me crazy about many cables is that upper mid zing-particularly those of the Ag or Ag coated persuasion. Yes, I hear the colorations of copper but I can't live with the colorations of Ag cables. Now if you have a dull system OTOH, maybe silver cables are the answer. But not in a well balanced system.

OTOH, I have some cables in for review that have made such a profound difference in the sound of my system, that I am trying to figure out how to pay for them. These are the first cables I've heard where I can live with just about everything they do. I've never heard anything like these cables on the phono end and their IC are spectacular. I'm still awaiting arrival of the speaker cables.

MylesBAstor · May 27, 2010

amirm said:
Frantz, you are being too hard on yourself . Most double-blind tests people propose are faulty! For example, studies have shown that your memory of what you heard is accurate to about 4 seconds. Go past that and you simply will not recall small differences even if they are there. So any test which calls for stopping music, changing cables, and going back to listening is invalid for detecting non-gross differences. It is exceedingly easy to create double-blind tests which find no difference. The trick is to come with the opposite, increasing the chances that the difference can be found.

Further, you have to make sure that you don't mask the differences with other things. So as much as possible, one needs to eliminate other (weak) links in the chain. For this reason, for interconnect testing, I use highest quality sources/DACs, use the highest quality headphone amp and that is it. No speakers. No amps. No room interactions. No processor which could create audible issues of their own. And most importantly, I use material which shows the difference more. I cannot offer any meaningful way to test speaker cables.

Of course, the above means that any description of improvement as being "huge" etc is wrong. The differences here are subtle and expectations should not go beyond that.

Amir-

I'd add that it's not just that short term memory is only reliable for about 4 sec but short term memory is easily overloaded since it has a limited amout of processing capability and "space" as compared to long term memory. For instance in training athletes, the trick is how to use motor control and learning to enhance skill aquisition ability eg. how to maximize short term memory by not congesting it with useless information eg proper cuing.

FrantzM · May 27, 2010

Myles

I didn't reply to Amirm on this point. Previously I was certain that the Valhalla made a clear and definitive improvement in my system. Upon removing them and substituting Heavy Gauge Copper wire .. No one, (other audio buffs and I) in the room could identify the cables in play .. The system was very high resolution Burmester 911/011/870 .. it sounded the same ... I have calmly arrived at this point. The differences we think we hear vanish when the visual clues are removed . It is not a matter of short term audio memory but rather of level of reliable perception. If we can't reliably discern when we don't know which is which ,isn't it time to become very skeptical? Especially when the science on which after all our hobby is based point in the direction of these differences "too small " differences to matter ... And the cables start costing more than a reasonable speaker? Or that the manufacturer use pseudo-science to try to convince us that their cables are indeed different? I am now certain that no one can reliably discern what a cable is made of when visual clues are removed (nice euphemism for the dreaded "blind tests"). Yes some cables do sound tiny , one canmake a cable to sound that way but to repeat myself pass a certain degree of electrical adequacy, that the cables be made of Silver, Silver-plated copper, Pure Copper, Platinum or Palladium .. differences are not audible, or to be on the side of caution , not reliably, audible

Frantz

Ron Party · May 27, 2010

Amir, I am curious as to your take on the ABX comparator boxes designed and implemented by Arny Krueger and QSC. Unless you believe there is something inherently faulty with that box, does not that box overcome the short term memory issue?

Gregadd · May 29, 2010

I hate cables. If for no other reason than we are about to sink into that deep dark hole of ABX and DBT. Surely our souls shall be lost and we will never be heard from again.

MylesBAstor · May 29, 2010

Gregadd said:
I hate cables. If for no other reason than we are about to sink into that deep dark hole of ABX and DBT. Surely our souls shall be lost and we will never be heard from again.

Agreed. It usually seems that one has to pick the lesser of two evils when buying cables.

muralman1 · Jul 7, 2010

Now I will throw a hand grenade into the cable debate

My system proves the unusual. I had a well regarded heavily insulated $10k cables on loan. I could hear the music, but only through a pronounced audible haze. Folks regard this cable as sounding warm. I also had lighter insulated $6k well regarded cables on loan. I could hear the music better, but still through an audible haze. People regard this cable as more revealing.

I tried a lacquered solid wire. It was perfectly clear sounding, with no self-noise. The solid wire produced a lovely sounding midrange, with roll offs in the highs and lows. The stage was without form. Switching to ultra thin ribbons, every aspect of music popped into correctness.

I don't doubt what people hear in their own systems. I just think everyone can spend a lot less and reach the same conclusion had they spent a lot more.

MylesBAstor · Jul 7, 2010

muralman1 said:
My system proves the unusual. I had a well regarded heavily insulated $10k cables on loan. I could hear the music, but only through a pronounced audible haze. Folks regard this cable as sounding warm. I also had lighter insulated $6k well regarded cables on loan. I could hear the music better, but still through an audible haze. People regard this cable as more revealing.

I tried a lacquered solid wire. It was perfectly clear sounding, with no self-noise. The solid wire produced a lovely sounding midrange, with roll offs in the highs and lows. The stage was without form. Switching to ultra thin ribbons, every aspect of music popped into correctness.

I don't doubt what people hear in their own systems. I just think everyone can spend a lot less and reach the same conclusion had they spent a lot more.

Were the cables properly broken in? Cables can take any where from 100-300 hours for their sound to settle-in.

muralman1 · Jul 7, 2010

The cables mentioned were loaned by a dealer, and were their demos. I think from that history I can infer they were well broken in. They were at my place for four days. Their character never changed.

MylesBAstor · Jul 7, 2010

muralman1 said:
The cables mentioned were loaned by a dealer, and were their demos. I think from that history I can infer they were well broken in. They were at my place for four days. Their character never changed.

I guess there's no accounting for system synergies-or cables that are "forgiving." I've had many highly touted cables come through here and was nonplussed. But then I got my current cables and they absolutely locked in and really pulled the sound of the system together.

In the past, always felt buying a cable was buying the lesser of two evils; this cable has few weakness and nothing that makes my ears bleed

muralman1 · Jul 7, 2010

I hear you. My take on cables are very unconventional. I have to tell it like it is, though, as honesty is important to me. I even found that AC through speakers have poles of highly different requirements.

KeithR · Jul 19, 2010

i just ran some cable tests over the weekend....didn't have to stop and switch cables at all because i have both single ended and balanced outputs on my dac that are live.

therefore, was just able to switch inputs on the fly on my McIntosh (the inputs btw are level matched)----no difference at all between Monster and some ICs that costs 10x as much (the Monsters are pro audio patch cables). true, the cables are brand new so i'm going to do the same battery of tests next week.

but what i am tired of is the cryo stuff, quantum tunnelled stuff, stuff that no cable company can prove with any measurement makes a difference--and why that difference is positive, even if so. i even read about cables that had "cable trauma" if moved----so that traditional blind tests were pointless and it would take several weeks for the cable to "settle back down." i mean, seriously---do these guys take us for fools?

i would love to hear MikeL's latest perspective on cables....

Keith

muralman1 · Jul 23, 2010

Hi Keith, actually there is at least one cable that I can think of that needs to settle for a good long time, and that would be Cerious's liquid ceramic cable. It is what it says, and like any silt in any water, it takes a long time for it to settle. I had a listen to Cerious on another fellow's system. I thought it was the best I heard there.

As I have stated, I have a phobia against cable companies bragging points. I found fruitful engineering can make a difference. Our Sacramento Audio Club had gathered at a member's house to test various components. One of the tests was over what difference digital cables will make. At that time, way before the Cerious incident, I was under the supposition there is no difference between any cable.

We had on hand six cables of different companies. One was a cheap AV cable. This is the black tricolor cable you get with most midfy video/audio components. Another was a silver digital cable I was using at the time. There was an Audio Note digital silver. There were two I can't remember. And the last tested was a $800 Virtual Dynamics digital cable. This one had beads you could hear inside.

We had one blindfolded listener, while the rest of us weren't. Everyone agreed there was absolutely no difference between the first five, silver or not. That gratified me no end, because I didn't believe in differences. When it was the VD's turn, we all, including the blindfolded guy, agreed it trumped the others easily. I was crestfallen, because at that moment I knew choosing cables was going to be a big hurdle to cross.

Both the above winning cables were structurally abnormal. No cable I tried with any charge carrier wire configuration make any positive difference in my system.

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