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You just don't get it.

Of audiophiles, musiclovers, etc. or to be more precise, those people who care enough to get something other than a Bose Wave radio, the vast majority have heard for themselves what audio cables can do, and treat them as the component that they are.

They have the experience, and the sheer time listening to their system after various component upgrades, to have some trust in what they hear over the long term. They KNOW that cables matter, and can be heard as less than perfect. You have to chose which version of imperfection bothers you the least.

Folks like the (cable) naysayers at AR are the very small minority. They are just very vocal about their denial.

You mention that you believe that the speakers and amps limit what could be heard due to cable sonic variations.

However, this is the same flawed logic that is applied to amps and CDPs. Some folks like Dan B. claim that due to the levels of distortion in speaker systems( which often can run from 0.1% in the midrange for an electrostatic panel, to tens of % for cheap white-van speakers, and typically run from 0.5% to several percent for mainstream hi-fi speakers), that this means that any levels of distortion lower than that are going to be indistinguishable from one another.

Yet despite this seemingly reasonable logic, many folks can hear PAST the speaker distortions, and discern sonic differences between power amps with similar specs (by specs, I a refering to the very simplistic THD, S?N, and FR that is often claimed to be sufficient by many of the naysayers). Same for CDP's. If the premise is true that the speakers will mask anything lower than what they produce themselves, then we should not be able to tell the difference between a Mark Levinson and a RS portable CDP. But the vast majority of folks can hear the differences, quite readily, over loudspeakers with distortions tha may be 10 to 100 times as high.

So the whole idea that cable distortions are inaudible, due to this kind of reasoning, is just not going to cut it for the vast majority of experienced audiophiles and musiclovers, not to mention the successfull high end audio designers, who take great pains to voice their products to a point that satifies THEIR sonic requirements, sometimes going contrary to the THD meter BECAUSE THATS WHAT SOUNDS RIGHT TO THEM.

Until you gain some of this kind of listening experience, none of this will make sense when you continue to 'listen with your EE textbook' instead of your heart.


Jon Risch

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