Proof that cables Do make a difference

@ rblnr well, you've hit it on the head: cable that does nothing is ideal. If you talked to some of the leading cable designers, you wouldn't get any argument from them on this point. Their basic position is that all cable does bad things, it's just how much. You do have a good point the making major expenditures on any audio component (speakers, cables, amps) could be misguided until basic room acoustical issues have been addressed.

My hierarchy is room acoustics, cables, speakers, and finally gear. Basically one can get really, really good electronics for reasonble amounts of money, same with speakers, and they can both be purchased used. You'd be amazed at how wonderful relatively inexpensive kit can sound in a good room with quality cabling. Conversely, with not-so-good cabling (which comes at all price points), it really doesn't matter how good the gear is.

Even a decent stereo FM table radio can deliver a lot pleasure given decent acoustics. Trust your ears, as they say, and you'll make good purchasing decisions.

Nicholas Bedworth said:

@ rblnr well, you've hit it on the head: cable that does nothing is ideal. If you talked to some of the leading cable designers, you wouldn't get any argument from them on this point. Their basic position is that all cable does bad things, it's just how much. You do have a good point the making major expenditures on any audio component (speakers, cables, amps) could be misguided until basic room acoustical issues have been addressed.

My hierarchy is room acoustics, cables, speakers, and finally gear. Basically one can get really, really good electronics for reasonble amounts of money, same with speakers, and they can both be purchased used. You'd be amazed at how wonderful relatively inexpensive kit can sound in a good room with quality cabling. Conversely, with not-so-good cabling (which comes at all price points), it really doesn't matter how good the gear is.

Even a decent stereo FM table radio can deliver a lot pleasure given decent acoustics. Trust your ears, as they say, and you'll make good purchasing decisions.

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What happened to the source? If it isn't of high quality, all that you've done for your rooms is meaningless. Crap in, crap out.

My hierarchy is room acoustics, cables, speakers, and finally gear. Basically one can get really, really good electronics for reasonble amounts of money, same with speakers, and they can both be purchased used. You'd be amazed at how wonderful relatively inexpensive kit can sound in a good room with quality cabling. Conversely, with not-so-good cabling (which comes at all price points), it really doesn't matter how good the gear is.

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Nicholas -- must say I don't understand the hierarchy with cables coming before speakers. If one assumes major differences between them (which I don't necessarily), how do you know how a given pair will sound in a system you've not yet built? To hear them in another system doesn't tell you anything -- way too many variables.

Further -- while it's usually easy to discern the difference between this and that 1K or 2K (or 20K) speaker, the difference between two cables in the same price range (or different price ranges some might say) is usually very subtle at best. To me, speakers influence the overall sound of a system far more than any other component.

So after the room, I'll put in the speakers which directly interact with the room, then work my way back from there -- the amps that drive the speakers, etc. and then end with cables. My experience is that as you go back in the chain, differences become increasingly subtle at a given price point.

Cable-wise, I think the best bet is to start w/something neutral like Belden, which wires an overwhelming majority of the studios where our music is recorded, or some straight copper like the Speltz stuff. Get to know your system and then maybe try some fancier cables to tweak with.

KeithR said:

Miles- i think the issue for me is that there isn't a ton of "science" behind cables. what you are talking about with amps, etc. is far different. i mean, we are still talking about capicitance, resistance, and inductance which is all basic physics.

i would like to see you guys at the mags call out the obscene pricing on some of this stuff at least. does that magical cable that you tried out equate to 10-15k that some are spending on speaker cables? 5k interconnects which now seem the norm? 5k power cords which are on their way? cable pricing inflation is the mosts egregious in this hobby and borders on the insane---at least a 10k amp weighs several hundred pounds and likely has hundreds of parts, schematics, R&D, etc. what does a 10k cable get me? that is the REAL the reason the high end is dying---people my age (33, the young guys most of you in the high end don't really care about) don't care about stupid cables and tweaks. they DO care about iPods--which by extension can lead them to digital servers, the rebirth of vinyl, quality headphones, etc.

when people saw my old Shunyatas they thought i was crazy---but if i showed them a Sooloos instead, they would be enthralled. see the difference?

cheers,

OT somewhat.

KeithR

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+ 1

On Myles observation. Audio is NOT dying. High End Audio in the sense of what we have come to take as such might. The days of $30K cables and $150 K components are counted. The days of better reproduction in our home are not.

Computer Audio is real and the Audiophile world had to embrace it. The results are that most PC which means anywhere from $300 to 2000 have the basis of a superior Audio experience (OF course with the Appropriate DAC). The same computers allow us better components, heck even better tube components: CAD for example does allow better tubes and afford less expensive and better circuits simulations .It is not so bleak as some of us Old Guard would like to think. We must embrace the future not fight against it.


Nicholas B.

It is indeed a matter of preference but cables before speakers in the hierarchy ? Allow me to be puzzled ...

@ Frantz... My personal experience is that choice of cables is transformative... one can have a truly wonderful speaker, but the cabling can sour everything. Similarly, a modest speaker, with excellent cabling, can be quite satisfying. What comes to the fore are the distortions or limitations of the cable. Possibly this is because they often color the entire spectrum? Also, the cables I listen to come from companies where there's one designer, and there's definitely a "house sound" that's pretty easy to discern.

I've seldom found the difference between cables to be subtle. Most, to my hearing, are quite different one from the other. Perhaps 80% or more fall into this category, meaning there are distinct colorations that tend to dominate the listening experience. Then there's the top 20%, where there there are more similarities than differences.

@ Myles... To me, the electronics, including the source, are the easiest part to get correctly these days. There's so much available, and prices for quality components, especially used, are quite reasonable.

Somehow, to me, good cabling brings out all kinds of "latent" performance in most decent speakers, electronics, but of course doesn't make the room sound better . Conversely, a wonderful speaker with cables with a particular house sound, well, that's what's most apparent to my ears. The "houseness" as a coloration comes across more than the qualities of the speaker.

It's always surprising to me how much mediocre cabling "hides" the potential of even modest electronics. That's probably the core observation. One colleague who designs cables has a fun demo, whereby he plays music through a boom box with and without quality internal cabling.

You'd be amazed!

And of course Dave Wilson is famous for demonstrating speakers using budget electronics, once with an iPod as the source, as I recall.

I smell an ABX/DBT challenge. Dave wants you to spend all your money on his speaker.

Nicholas Bedworth said:

@ Frantz... My personal experience is that choice of cables is transformative... one can have a truly wonderful speaker, but the cabling can sour everything. Similarly, a modest speaker, with excellent cabling, can be quite satisfying. What comes to the fore are the distortions or limitations of the cable. Possibly this is because they often color the entire spectrum? Also, the cables I listen to come from companies where there's one designer, and there's definitely a "house sound" that's pretty easy to discern.

I've seldom found the difference between cables to be subtle. Most, to my hearing, are quite different one from the other. Perhaps 80% or more fall into this category, meaning there are distinct colorations that tend to dominate the listening experience. Then there's the top 20%, where there there are more similarities than differences.

@ Myles... To me, the electronics, including the source, are the easiest part to get correctly these days. There's so much available, and prices for quality components, especially used, are quite reasonable.

Somehow, to me, good cabling brings out all kinds of "latent" performance in most decent speakers, electronics, but of course doesn't make the room sound better . Conversely, a wonderful speaker with cables with a particular house sound, well, that's what's most apparent to my ears. The "houseness" as a coloration comes across more than the qualities of the speaker.

It's always surprising to me how much mediocre cabling "hides" the potential of even modest electronics. That's probably the core observation. One colleague who designs cables has a fun demo, whereby he plays music through a boom box with and without quality internal cabling

You'd be amazed!

And of course Dave Wilson is famous for demonstrating speakers using budget electronics, once with an iPod as the source, as I recall.

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Well we'll have to disagree there. I can tell you that the difference between playback heads and electronics on my R2R makes a huge difference in the sound of the tapes. Far bigger difference than what I hear for almost all cables save for one or two.

I think there's quite sizable sonic difference between entry level and top flight analog front ends. For instance, in general, going to a top flight front analog front end brings with it better frequency extremes, resolution (!!), dynamics, soundstaging and esp. decreased noise floor.

I'm not going to comment on digital.

Cost allocation strategies in a baseline reference system

Agreed. I'm just thinking about simple all-digital systems, which as we all know, have their issues.

Anyway, let's say we have $10K speakers, $5K monoblocks, $2K speaker cables, $1K interconnect to a $2K DAC. $20K (assuming a laptop source). Should be a pretty decent system, right?

An unexpected check comes in, and we can wing $5K on upgrades. What to do?

Well, upgrading to $15K speakers probably doesn't change performance that much. Same for the amps. We're into quality gear already. Same for changing the DAC to amp interconnects; it may not be that helpful. They're low voltage and low current, not under much stress.

Now, going from a $2K to a $5K or $7K DAC, which get one into very high quality devices indeed. Or, think about going from $2K speaker cables to $6K. Same thing, you're into really high-performance products. Huge difference.

The speaker cables are (or can be) very high current and, very high (relativey) voltage, which means very fast rise times (V/microsecond). These guys are under a lot of stress, so to speak.

Just some ideas...

Nicholas

I am lost here ...

What do you mean by rise time in a speaker cable? .. Can you provide me with such measurements for speaker cables ? I would like to see such measurements for a zip cord and a "Quality cable" which seems to mean those in the $10K range ....

?Also what kind of "stress" are most speaker cables under?
A 20 feet long, 12 AWg zip cord will push 1000 watts to an 8 ohms speaker without heating and the voltage drop will be a negligible 0.35%... A 10 AWG Zip COrd will allow when feeding a 500 Watts continuously a voltage drop 0f 0.2% .. Hardly stressed, I would say AN electric iron subjects its very menial cable to much more ...

add subs? a means to control the subs? room treatment??

Always interesting what is left out of a system profile....

I am quite happy to accept there could be cable differences, after all the physics does 'allow it'

But statements like this regarding cables??

.Or, think about going from $2K speaker cables to $6K. Same thing, you're into really high-performance products. Huge difference.

I mean, I wouldn't expect to spend 2k on cables any time soon ( and my system is an active four way with subs) but to go from 2k to 6k, on cables??

I find it hard to believe that money cannot be spent elsewhere for far better returns.

I think I would go in the other direction. I would reduce the baseline allocation to interconnects and speaker cables and use this money on the speakers or possibly the amplification.

Also, is rise time really a function of voltage and current?

@ Reg... naturally

What's amazing to me is the statistic that over 10,000 pairs of Watt/Puppy's have been sold. Nothing succeeds like success. Looking forward to trying the Sashas, which will be here in a couple of weeks. These Wilsons will be a completely new experience for me.

Great article from the Fender Web site on the difference between line-level interconnect and speaker cables...

http://www.fender.com/news/index.php?display_article=458

Think of the slope of a high voltage, 10 kHz impulse... presumably the dV/dT value in speaker cables must be considerable, given the voltages. The point was that line-level interconnect doesn't have anywhere near the same voltage swing, and is perhaps easier to make sound well.

Keep in mind that speakers such as the Wilson Sashas are less than 2 ohms over much of their bass range, so there's going to be a lot of current required. My Odyssey Kismet monoblocks should be good for 100amps on an instantaneous basis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_time

From that article...

Rise time values in a resistive circuit are primarily due to stray capacitance and inductance in the circuit. Because every circuit has not only resistance, but also capacitance and inductance, a delay in voltage and/or current at the load is apparent until the steady state is reached. In a pure RC circuit, the output risetime (10% to 90%), as shown above, is approximately equal to 2.2RC.

And check out the Fender article... http://www.fender.com/news/index.php?display_article=458

@ Frantz... With respect to being lost, seek and ye shall find out, a lot.

Get together with a cooperative friend or dealer and listen to a couple of pairs of well-used speaker cables from the same vendor. Once you're clear on how the products differ in their sound, then start investigating how it could be. Generally the designers are more than willing to explain all the details.

Regarding zip cord, I wonder if those using it get the speaker polarity set correctly .

Anyway, given the easily audible and identifiable differences between the designs of various cable manufacturers, and between the products in their lineup, if two cables that sound quite differently have the same measured value when looking at a particular electrical parameter, obviously that's not the right one to be measuring. That's like to old medical school joke about the patient expired, but his electrolyte balance was perfect.

My baseline for high-quality cabling, for speakers, would be around $2K for a set of single bi-wire, 4ft pairs. Not $10K. Extremely high quality is around $6-7K, for the products I'm familiar with. And of course one could spend way more, but what's available for $2K-$7K is excellent.

Nicholas Bedworth said:

@ Reg... naturally

What's amazing to me is the statistic that over 10,000 pairs of Watt/Puppy's have been sold. Nothing succeeds like success. Looking forward to trying the Sashas, which will be here in a couple of weeks. These Wilsons will be a completely new experience for me.

Great article from the Fender Web site on the difference between line-level interconnect and speaker cables...

http://www.fender.com/news/index.php?display_article=458

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Commercial success is not a proof of excellence. Else we could start counting how many Bose units have been sold ... The Watt Puppy has been successful no doubt and it is a good speaker, not my cup of tea, mind you. Success a mixture of meeting the customer needs and good marketing. Let's make no mistake about that.

Now let's address your mention of Rise Time in a Speaker Cable. I will grant you that anything that carries energy from one point to another is a transmission line. As a Rule of thumb Transmission Line equations are invoked when the highest frequency wavelength is 1/10 of the length of the cable ... Now Let’s take this as an example... Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the Highest Frequency in your Audio signal amplifier is 1 MHz ... For the Rise Time TO matter .. Your speaker cables need to be 300 meter long, 1000 feet .. … I doubt there is much to send to a speaker at that frequency, unlikely your amps are that far..

Let’s use the 2.2 RC for a cable of high capacitance let’s say 200 Pico farad per feet .. let’s assume again the 12 AWG wire which has a resistance of 20 Milliohms per feet… We end up with a rise time of 200 pico seconds for a 50 feet speaker cable .. Your amps rise time is likely in the nanosecond at least 1000 slower so the rise time of the speaker cable doesn’t matter … At all…The rise time is essentially 0 at 100 KHz for a speaker cable at 100 feet long .. Be it zip cord or the more expensive variety that you favor … IOW The similarity between a speaker cable in term of applying Transmission Line concepts and a real transmission line, e.g. a coaxial cable carrying hundred of MHz or GHz would be same as comparing the flow of soda in a straw to the flow of Petroleum in a transcontinental pipeline .

Now consider your amplifier (very interesting by the way) are capable of 100 amps for a short period of time to be capable of such in 2 Ohms they should be able to produce peaks of 200 Volts at 100 amps .. I am not too sure there are many amps capable of such. Likely not yours they need to be capable short term of 20 Kw, 20, 000 watts .. That is a lot … That is highly unlikely but…
I’ll go further and grant you they can … if you were to push 100 Amps in the Sashas woofer for any period of time there would be no woofer in your Sashas because then you would have pushed (assuming the drivers behave then as a pure resistor ) about 20,000 watts in these drivers (P=V x I) ..

Now on the subject of exposure to cables. I have experienced cables very expensive cables. I have owned cables which are squarely what you would consider the good side of expensive at over $7000 for an 8-foot pair and I also used the same barnd interconnects… I no longer care for cables, once they achieve a certain level of electrical competence… Being an audiophile at least 4 AWG for speakers …

I am sorry to have to go into semi-engineering mode but that is what I do for a living, being an engineer and I am in Telecom ... I no longer think cables differences are so easily discernible or frankly that they matter .. for electronics , maybe, for speakers? A resounding yes .. To repeat myself cables make a huge difference ..? Cables ? Only when you know, when you have seen ...

Hey Amir,

You said 20 ohm load, then a trial with 600 ohm source? Did you mean source in both cases? What was the load impedance?

As I think I have said elsewhere, my previous history with cables is that the difference among interconnects is very dependent upon the source and load impedances. Mostly the source, since the loads tend to be uniformly high (10k ohms and up for single-ended inputs), but some inputs (loads) exhibit fairly high capacitance (tubes in particular due to Miller effect acting upon unbuffered inputs). The result can be attenuation and phase shift in the audio bands. Interestingly, some of the combinations that produced lower bandwidth (i.e. rolling off the high end) were preferred in tests. Based on that, I do think interconnects can make a difference, and completely agree with you that one has to look at the whole system (source, cable, load). I tend to look at standard wires and get what works vs. going to highend cables, but that's just me.

Except for extremes, I have found little if any differences in speaker cables (measured or heard) once you have enough wire to do the job. I got into a big argument eons ago about the requirement for ultrawideband (>1 MHz) speaker cables; my contention was that the speakers would at best filter out, or worse convert to heat in the tweeter, any such wideband signals anyway. Never could sway the gent. There are tweeters around with response approaching 100 kHz and above, but my ears don't go so high.

Engineers with ears, scary... - Don

Thanks, I sorta' figured as much. I think most of the AP units have 100k - 200k ohm inputs (like many other analyzers), but it may drop down to 600 ohms with the balanced option (not sure if that's the default for all inputs with that option; hope not, but if so I think you'd see wider bandwidth, though I am not sure the basic BW of your unit).

If it does phase (or group delay) and not just magnitudes that could be interesting. I suppose an S21 plot is out of the question...

Back to the grind - Don