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Suggestions sought: Speaker wires


GA Russell

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No tantrum, just making it clear some folks see through your veiled insults. The one thing I've learned over the years about many in the audiophile community is how little they actually know, yet how much they pity others for not sharing in their superior intellect. At the end of the day what too many of them know is "this is really expensive, so it must be superior".

And companies like Pear and AudioQuest are eternally grateful.

http://www.pearcable.com/sub_products_anjou_sc.htm

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/audioquest-diamond-3-3-high-speed-hdmi-cable-dark-gray-black/2383276.p?id=1218324437192

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At least you're not burdened by humility. The self-delusion is troubling, but there are a ton of audiophile companies out there that really appreciate a client that does their job for them. I wonder if I can buy stock in Less Loss?

http://www.lessloss.com

Skin filtering power cables! :D

A fool and his money...

Edited by Scott Dolan
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"At least you're not burdened by humility." WOW! coming from you! what a joke. OK, you think you're right, and I guess I'm supposed to accept what you tell me. But I've already done my due diligence, and I don't agree with you. I don't see why you can't just let it go at that.

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Whatever you've convinced yourself of is just fine with me. It's when you make assertions like:

"I think the key was having electronics and speakers that had the capacity to make fine distinctions. For a mid-fi system, that ability to resolve sounds is much less, and speaker wires are less critical."

That's when you leave me no other choice than to call bullshit. If there is an appreciable difference in changing out wiring, it happens across the board. Not just in higher end components. If you put racing fuel in a Farrari, it will make a difference in performance. Conversely, if you put racing fuel in a Honda Civic, there will also be an increase in performance.

Statements like the one I quoted are where audio snobbery get the better of folks. "I drive a Ferrari and you drive a Civic. Naturally, racing fuel will have a more pronounced effect in my car, and very little in yours." Sorry, brother. It simply doesn't work that way.

In the audio world you can run into diminishing returns very, very quickly. There are cutoff points to everything. It's perfectly natural for any of us to say, "this is better because I paid a lot of money for it". I have no real problem with that just as long as the person saying it fully comprehends that is a faith-based statement. If you pay $1000 dollars for speaker cables, you're convinced before you even listen to them that they are superior. If you weren't, you wouldn't have paid that kind of money for them.

As the saying goes, the most important employee for a company that manufactures speaker cable is the head of the marketing department.

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I first ran into upgraded speaker wires back in the late 80's when a rep from a local company, who knew I was an audio geek, told me about his latest speaker wires, which cost him $10,000. He said that they made his very expensive amp "listenable". It was "un-listenable" before then. What the... I had to hear this and he was glad to show me. We listened to some great music and I told him his system sounded great, but how did it sound before with the old wires? He started going on about no bass, muted highs, just general crappy sound. So this $10,000 amp, $5,000 pre-amp & $4,500 CD player needed speaker wires to make them listenable? I was glad I didn't have the money to buy that gear. :)

Fast forward a few years and I get a bargain on some heavy gauge Monster Cable speaker wires. I buy them and start an A/B test. I swapped as fast as I could, back & forth to no avail: I could not hear any differences. Maybe there were some, but if there were, they were far too subtle for me. I recently did it again when I bought a pair of Blue Jean Cables speaker wires. I have also done this with an expensive CD player interconnect. I swapped away (even pulling in one of my daughters to the test) and we couldn't hear any differences. I have come to the conclusion that I do not have the audio memory to hear these differences. To my line of thinking, this is a good thing. It saves me a lot of money.

Now the dreaded "science arguments"... I can get into them here on Organissimo, unlike at other forums. I work in the RF industry where signals can go as high as 100 GHz. That's 100,000,000,000 Hz. Most people's hearing tops out at ~16 kHz. That's 16,000 Hz. Believe me, cabling affects RF performance and it's almost directly proportional to frequency. We test the heck out of "interconnects" (RF signal cables) to make sure that we are transmitting the signal to the device under test as best as we can. Loss is a killer at high frequencies. It can mean the difference between being able to test a part or not. I can tell you that these very, very expensive cables test out identically down below about 1 GHz. To almost every cable, any signal below about a 1 MHz (that's 100,000,000 Hz) is just DC. In other words, you connect it and the signal on one end comes out on the other pretty much unaffected.

Now, what can affect audio cabling? Resistance, inductance and capacitance could do something, right? Not really. Most amplifier designers are very particular about their designs and it's all about the transfer curve. They worry more about power delivery to a 4-8 Ohm load than they do about its absolute output impedance. At these frequencies, that's what matters. So how much should we worry about these things. Well, capacitance and inductance don't mean much at all. Certainly not at an audible level. Resistance - now there you got something. You will see a loss of power with a lot of resistance. This will result in a lower volume, but that should be it. But how much resistance are we talking about? 1 Ohm of added resistance to a wire is a lot - it would take a pretty bad speaker wire to add this much resistance and even that much resistance is likely to be inaudible to most listeners.

Here's a good article that sums up a lot of what I am saying and adds a discussion on the damping factor, which some people believe is the be all-end all for audio amplifier design. But as this article shows, even that has very little affect unless it's really bad.

One last thing - I am not saying that anyone buying expensive speaker wires, RCA interconnects or AC power cords is an idiot. If I had the money, I'd consider upgrading myself. Many of these esoteric wires and cables are almost works of art. However, for me, I know that I can't hear a difference so I put this item very far down my upgrade list. Other listeners can hear a difference, so they are happy with their purchase. I am just as happy that I can't. It allows me to concentrate on improving what I hear changing my system.

Lon and I can still talk about audio and get along fine. I am sure I'd love the sound of his system and I imagine he'd dig mine. We can disagree on how we got there too. :)

Edited by Kevin Bresnahan
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I wish we all lived within spitting distance because I'd put up $100 if you could pick out your speaker cables over mine in a double blind using your own rigs. Let's just say I'd be leaving my checkbook at home.

The one thing I do kinda dig, though, is the rising number of skeptics in the audiophile community. Nice to see folks coming to their senses.

Man, I was raised in a Christian household, I had enough of that garbage as a kid.

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I wish we all lived within spitting distance because I'd put up $100 if you could pick out your speaker cables over mine in a double blind using your own rigs. Let's just say I'd be leaving my checkbook at home.

The one thing I do kinda dig, though, is the rising number of skeptics in the audiophile community. Nice to see folks coming to their senses.

Man, I was raised in a Christian household, I had enough of that garbage as a kid.

Post of the week! Not only do you come off as feeling superior, and patting yourself on the back, but you insult Christianity too! Way to go!

Kevin: I think Monster Cable, especially at the lower end, is drab and rip-off stuff. . . not really a fair tool to use. But whatever.

I use the bog-standard Naim speaker cable (NACA 5) and it is just fine as is. Precision powerline cabling to selected components has made a very noticeable difference though, compared with standard IEC cables/connectors.

Attention to power to components is really the last place I paid attention, and really wish it had been the first. That has made the most profound difference to me, and allowed me to evaluate other cabling etc. more accurately and easily.

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Pardon me, Lon, but the only one here claiming superiority of any kind is you claiming you can perceive things that others can't with your bionic hearing.

Science and audiophiles who have participated in double blind testing for decades prove your assertions wrong, but Super Lon says NO!

But, as with believing in God, your faith-based proclamations cannot be "disproven". So congrats to you and your golden ears. Though, you'd think with the money you've spent that if you really believed everything you're saying is true you wouldn't be riddled with such a persecution complex.

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I would prefer to stick to speaker wire discussion, since they are in the signal path and could possibly affect your sound. If you all want to start talking about AC power cords... well, in my book, fancy power cords are simply a waste of money. And yes, I have experimented with them too.

Start another thread about power cords so I can ignore it. :)

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Those who wish to purse the further implications of faith-based speaker cables and other audio-metaphysical esoterica are warmly encouraged to engage
Mister Dolan on his home turf, where the discussion can no doubt ripen to its fullest potential: http://www.jazztalk.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&p=7150&sid=0cf1a26cc183a08fe0cae16ae5c072bb#p7150

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Scott, your second-hand science is more faith-resembling to me than my own hands-on experiential knowledge. But you can continue to feel superior with your "science" if you wish. To me much of "science" is as religious in nature as religion. But whatever, I don't see any use trying to talk any further. But don't forget to pat yourself on the back for saving the many from folly!

Kevin, threads evolve. But I don't want to talk about power cords or regeneration or conditioning here either, other than as I did to say that I feel it's the first place to start with many systems.

Edited by jazzbo
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I would prefer to stick to speaker wire discussion, since they are in the signal path and could possibly affect your sound. If you all want to start talking about AC power cords... well, in my book, fancy power cords are simply a waste of money. And yes, I have experimented with them too.

Start another thread about power cords so I can ignore it. :)

Well, I think the biggest problem is that the results have been in for a very long time. If people haven't studied them and gained any insight at this point, it simply isn't going to happen. The great thing about science is it is studied, corrected, peer-reviewed, and then established.

Simply saying you can hear things that don't exist, well, isn't any of those things. And they lead to the unwitting who are dipping their toes into the water for the first time to spend absurd amounts of money on unnecessary products. Like $XXX+ speaker cable and absurd power cable replacements.

All that really remains at this point is to speak up whenever you see snake oil being peddled. The true believers can have their perceived audio bliss, and the skeptics can have more money in their bank accounts.

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And if I set up multiple rigs of varying quality and switched out different sets of cables neither of you would be able to identify which was which. I've actually had that proven to me by multiple people. Hell, there have been double blind tests conducted at the university level.

People possess the power to make themselves believe anything. The placebo effect isn't mythology. But claiming speaker cable that costs $100 a ft will sound different than, for example, the Emotiva cables I linked to early is.

The one thing you'll never hear an audiophile say concerning expensive equipment and interconnects is, "that's just nonsense". Because there is no line of demarcation in that world. No reference points that will signify the beginning of diminishing returns. It can be found in many hobbies. Probably most hobbies. It's just more glaring in the audiophile world, IMO, because I am an audio enthusiast as well.

And it's exactly why you have people that claim that you "need" the most expensive and heavy duty Toslink and HDMI cables you can afford.

No, you don't.

To say that audiophiles don't understand diminishing returns is really a stretch. Plenty -- myself included -- recognize the concept w/ audio gear. And while I don't buy the all wire sounds the same argument, I will say that diminishing returns set in very quickly with wires.

Edited by SMB1968
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I get where Scott is coming from. I used to try and help people out by steering them away from expensive wires and interconnects as one of the last things a newbie should be trying to change to get audible improvements. I almost feel dirty coming in here and saying that expensive speaker wires aren't worth the expense. The subjective world seems to be winning the battle, particularly on other forums where "I hear a difference" is taken as sacrosanct. Science sucks and all that. Trust your ears and nothing else.

Sorry, but I disagree. Without science, the world would be a very different place.

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I personally am not saying that science sucks. But I'm saying that science is never comprehensive and is always being challenged. It's quite conceivable to me that what seems not possible is just not fully understood.

And I also think that some persons just can't hear changes that others can. Some of us are supposed to believe we hear what we supposedly shouldn't be able to hear. What if these other persons can't hear what others do hear? I certainly know there are some things I can't do or perceive that others can. But I also know that I and some others hear things others claim they can't. Why automatically should that mean I or we can't?

Anyway, I don't believe in paying silly money for cabling, but I may have a wider definition of "silly money" than others, and I find real value, real improvement with cabling and power and isolation treatment. Whether it's a value, or one worth pursuing, is a personal decision. I have a friend who feels it is worth it to him to spend hundreds of dollars on alcohol a month. To me, that's literally pissing money away that could be used on other things. But to him it's a pathway to a heightened enjoyment of some of his time. That's they way improving a stereo system seems to me as an investment.

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Actually, yes there is. Having been that newbie once, I wish the level-headed and informed had spoken up over the flock of true believers who weren't informing so much as indoctrinating.

Which is exactly what I saw earlier in this thread.

I've been considering getting new speaker wires, so I want to thank you, Scott, for "saving" me from doing that and listening for myself. You're a true prophet. :smirk:

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Jim, you do realize that the next time you add anything to the conversation it will be the first, right? That's two completely off-topic posts so far.

And Paul, I'll gladly accept your unnecessary pejorative of "prophet" as long as I can prevent some con artist from making a profit. And I never said to not get new speaker wires. All I've been saying is that people need to be aware of where the point of diminished returns lies. Those, including Kevin, who recommended Blue Jeans Cables are steering you in the right direction. I have the utmost respect for them and budget hi-end companies like Emotiva who aren't looking to scam buyers by offering over-priced nonsense. They at least have the integrity to tell you the truth, rather than con you for profit.

Copper and silver can only do so much when it comes to carrying electrical signals. There are no magical formulas to improve on that.

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In my view, stereo systems are all about value. There is no such thing as perfect, so the question is, "I have a budget of X. How should I spend it?"

When I say value, I mean that a system that would be unimpressive priced at $1,000 might be considered quite good priced at $400.

I agree with that 100%, Mr. Russell. It's one of the reasons why I've stuck with mid-fi rigs throughout the years. I just don't believe in spending more than $5K on one. To me, the returns you get from $10,000 rig over one that is $5,000 simply doesn't justify the extra dollars. Now folks like Kevin and Lon draw that line a little higher up, and that's cool because I know they both have great rigs that do indeed sound better than mine, and I'd love to hear both. And would do so with a huge grin on my face.

Everyone has to decide for themselves when to say when.

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