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In Reply to: RE: Do various speaker cables sound different, or just various expensive ones? posted by jazz251 on May 12, 2012 at 13:35:38
If substantial differences in electrical measurements can be detected, there's a case for an audible difference. But most speaker wire/cables have similar resistance per foot and capacitance/inductance is negligible. In practice, the only time speaker cable parameters become an issue is when cable runs are long and wire gauge is small - not the case in the average home system. A good quality high purity copper stranded 12 gauge conductor is more than adequate for most installations. The sound qualities attributed to "vastly improved" cables are invariably hyped bunk. For every 500 "reviews" of super cables, you might find one series of laboratory measurements that helps support the hype surrounding a particular cable product. Again, if you can't detect a decibel of difference with highly sensitive test instruments - the claimed "veil lifting" or "improved soundstage" is more likely to be in the reviewer's imagination than part of everyone's reality. The same can be said for amplifiers, preamps, digital playback systems, inductors, capacitors,...etc. Claiming you can hear something that can't be measured is an insult to those in the business of measuring this stuff. Wide bandwidth , low noise digital technology has produced amazing advancements in measuring capability. In most cases, the measuring equipment is far more sensitive and reliable than the hearing of the average listener. But this never stops the tinfoil hat crowd from asserting for example, that they can hear differences between different digital-analog converters taken from the same production batch. Speaker cable suspenders and cables that cost several hundred dollars per foot are nothing more than great business opportunities for fraudsters and crooks.
Follow Ups:
. . . to cause audible signal degradation.
In the linked issue of Audio Critic (see article starting p.51), the much-maligned skeptic Mr. Aczel demonstrates, with precise measurements, that some exotic "high end" cables can roll off the treble above 7kHz by more than 1dB, due primarily to series self-inductance. Note also the fluctuations of +/- 0.5dB or more in the midrange with some of those cables. (He did test 10-meter runs of each cable under consideration, which is a bit longer than most of us would use, and would thus show higher resistance and inductance and consequently more pronounced effect on frequency response).
But he shows that cable performance can be measured in a meaningful way. I would not trust any wire "review" that did NOT include such measurements.
"He did test 10-meter runs of each cable under consideration, which is a bit longer than most of us would use..."
Oh, for Heaven's sake, that's a LOT longer than most of use. My longest cables are approx. 7.0 meters, and that's to my surrounds - Gallo Reference AV. The Fronts and Center use 3.5 meters or less. And I'm using Goertz Pythons up front with plain old copper, multi-strand, 12 ga. to the rears. It sounds *great*!
Don't sweat this small stuff, spend your time and money seeking better source material and proper room treatments - THAT'S where your efforts will really pay off...
-RW-
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Einstein
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