So for all those copper is copper believers (1 Viewer)

[Shion_ca]

Just a quick question since this seems to be the dominant view on the board and I would appear to be the minority... For those of you who believe there is no difference, have you ever, just for the sake of argument, gone to a high end store, listened to say a pair of B&W 803's Classe/Krell/whatever monoblocked, with say a suitably highend preamp and source all done up in cardas golden ref. and then asked them to switch out the source to pre interconnect with a radioshack or say accoustic research one?

You really didn't hear any difference whatsoever imagined or otherwise? Just wondering if this had been your experience.

 

[Bob McElfresh]

Ahhhh, but you mis-understand.
Most people DONT have sensitive enough systems that an analog cable would "flavor" the sound.
Cables DO make a difference. But only a slight one that most modest systems wont show any difference.
It's like drinking a good wine from a plastic cup, a coffee cup or the proper-sized wine glass. In all cases the wine is the same/tastes the same. But the different vessel changes the experience a bit.
This is also Home Theater fourm. The sound on a DVD is highly compressed. (They throw away about 60% of the bits compared to a CD). The sound on a DVD is also very processed/artifical. It's also very dialog-centric, not continous music. And (very important) you watch a DVD movie DIFFERENTLY than you play a CD.
All this adds up to the recomendation that people buy good quality, but budget audio cables for their home theater systems. The Video side tends to be more important than the audio side.
So for the given ammount of $$$, we push the bigger TV's, progressive scan DVD players and component connections and cables. The audio interconnects should not be as large a percentage of the money as the video for a home theater.
But cables DO make a difference. I guess that has not come out recently so I apologize if you have gotten that impression.
Since you bring it up:

have you ever, just for the sake of argument, gone to a high end store, listened to say a pair of B&W 803's Classe/Krell/whatever monoblocked, with say a suitably highend preamp and source all done up in cardas golden ref. and then asked them to switch out the source to pre interconnect with a radioshack or say accoustic research one?

Why dont you tell us about when you did this? What store, what music, what did you notice?

 

[Phil A]

I would mostly concur with the above post. Home theater vs. music has different requirements and demands and I've seen cable make a noticeable improvement in many music systems and a much lesser difference with the same cables used in a home theater environment. Some things are just more sensitive to cable changes and we also all listen in different rooms. The room itself is almost entirely overlooked in many of these discussions (not to mention we all don't hear everything precisely the same) and I've seem very high quality audio components sound mediocre to poor in some rooms. I always recommend with any cable or tweak that people listen for themselves with a right to return the item in the context of their own set-up and budget.

 

[Shion_ca]

Well at the risk of becoming audio flame bait I'll have a shot. One day I was looking for speakers. I had gone to numerous places and thought I'd try one in London that sold Von Schwiekerts the VR 4 I think. I sat down and auditioned it and agreed with the salesman that it really could rock but had decided that the female vocals didn't seem quite as sweet as those of a B& W 803 (on Miss Saigon track 7 and 14 and Norah Jones Come Away With me track 5). He thought nodded his head and said that they normally do the fine tuning with cables.

Being an engineer I laughed and asked if they had some sort of bandpass filter on them, he said some of them had impedance balancer networks and some didn't but that they could generally tailor the sound a little based on the cables. Right says I. So I sat and listened to the same passage a couple of times and excused myself to the washroom while he chatted with my girlfriend and switched the cables. Came back and listened and found that the vocals weren't really any sweeter, just seemed a little more rolled off in the high frequencies, I think he told me he went from a pair of MIT's to JPS interconnects. I also told him the base sounded a tad more bloated. He laughed and told me with this setup you'd need the speaker cones to tighten base response.

Didn't do any blind n tell bloated base from not bloated and all I was expectintesting but that's just the way it sounded. On the way home my girlfriend said that she'd noticed a slight change in the same direction and that he'd told her I'd complain about the base response. Anyway I didn't buy the speakers but it opened me to the possibility that cables make a difference. I was a non-believe prior to this, but was now more willing to consider. This is not scientific in anyway but I cag was perhaps a sweetening of the vocals (which I never got).

I figured there were a lot of problems with this scenario but his predicting my base dislike seemed remarkably flukey. So it started me on a little experimentation. My next being buying a pair of coral interconnects for $75 since they retail for $200 canadian and I could just sell them for the same when they made no difference.... There's a lot more after this but believe me I can add silver interconnects to some solid state setups that you can't but deny a huge difference because you'll have a headache like you won't believe after 20 minutes of listening. And in some cases the interconnects I swapped between made a more immediately noticible difference than the CD player.

My current gear ...
Musical Fidelity A3CR Amp
Musical Fidelity A3CR Preamp
Tannoy D700 speakers
NAD 541i CD player.
8ft biwired Transparent music wave plus speaker cables
2 1 meter Harmonic Technology ProSilway Mk 2 Interconnects

HT stuff ...
Harmon Kardon AVR320
Pioneer DV440
Sony 21" Trinitron (Stereo version!!!)
Nuance Spatial 3's for rears
Accoustic Research Sattelite FNT power bar.

 

[Chu Gai]

ever gone into a high-end store and have the salesperson extoll the virtues of the cables? he leaves the room with you to pick out something to play, returns, the two of you sit down and listen to the magic unfold as he knowingly tells you about how spectacular the interconnects are, enabling all the subtlety of the performance to come through...how perfectly matched they are to the system. the music ends and then your son asks, "dad, ok if i take my cables back?". the salesperson says, "well your dad hasn't said anything about buying them". your son replies, "i just wanted to see if they'd fit". the salesman then discovers that they're not his high end interconnects that bring out the nuances, but your RS Golds. i have. you should try it sometimes

 

[DaleBesh]

If you think of cables as being components themselves I think it makes it easier to understand that how various components fit together will determine the resultant sound.
Reviewers use 'standard' systems, and change out cables as part of their assessment on a regular basis. Again, what they like may not work as well as another cable for YOUR system.
How can the average consumer know they have the ultimate cable for their system without having new cables available on a loan basis to try?

This is all supposing that cables really do make a notable difference.
Myself, I prefer to take a different approach. I select cables that are well constructed using good materials, and have nice design features which facilitate installation and removal, as well as noise immunity. This gets me into the area of Kimber 4TC speaker cables, and Bettercables or Outlaw interconnects, and Bettercable Serpents for video.
Beyond that, I can not appreciate what extra bucks bring. It often gets into an area where critics argue which cable is better. That tells me we are hitting product compression, where things can only get marginally better for a lot more money.
This is just my opinion based on personal experience. Each person's experience will likely be different.

 

[Shion_ca]

Excellent point Chu, but out of interest did you then go to hear what the other cables did or just walk out at that point thinking it was all snake-oil?

 

[Chu Gai]

those particular ones, no...but i'd have evaluated them differently than most and that wouldn't have been an acceptable proposition I'd imagine. just the way I do things