Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

RE: Do various speaker cables sound different, or just various expensive ones?

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.


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  Michael Percy Audio  


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