Should all interconnects and speaker cable be from same manufacturer?

[wgscott]

If I spent that much money on a cable, I don't think I could admit it to anyone...

 

[wgscott]

It is called a rectangular hyperbola, or a saturation curve.

 

What evidence is there that the sound quality increases (even asymptotically) with money spent?

 

If you put one of these in the middle of your signal path, it might sound different, but it isn't a foregone conclusion it is better:

 

 

I might imagine it would sound different, but better?

 

[senmurv76]

If I spent that much money on a cable, I don't think I could admit it to anyone...

 

sure you would, if you were a member of the expensive-cable club ..

 

[SteveChicago]

I still use a stock power cord for one component ... shhh

 

[senmurv76]

As I said in my post my hypothesis was based on my "limited experience". I've owned three cables: Monster Cable ($), Van den Hul ($$), and Analysis Plus ($$$). Of course three data points are not enough to make a conclusion but to my not-so-well-trained ears the more I spent the better SQ I got out of my humble setup. Perhaps CA can do a comparison of a wide variety of speaker cables and report its results, though I am not sure how SQ is going to be quantified.

 

BTW whats that box with whiskers? It looks like a robot cockroach.

 

 

[SteveChicago]

... is that a Sunday football beer?

 

good to know that speaker cables make a difference ... someday if my run becomes a reasonable length, or if I win the Lotto, I'll try some spendy ones ...

 

[wgscott]

I thought it looked more like this:

 

 

or

 

 

[SteveChicago]

is that a new-fangled interconnect?

 

[Mark Powell]

The airline safety people like to use 'passenger miles'. It is totally meaningless. One plane can carry 200 people 12000 miles in a day.

 

1) I don't care about the other 199.

 

2) Presumably if you all get killed at the end of the flight rather than at the beginning it is safer.

 

[Harpy]

Personally, I would waste too much money on cables. Most are made of copper and follow the properties of the copper atom when electicity is applied. The speaker cables would be the only thing I'd worry about. The only negative effects on speaker cable is a too high of a resistance which affects the amps damping factor. If your speaker runs are less than 20 feet any 14 gauge or greater copper speaker cable will work.

I use a cable that are made up of separate strands the are individually insulted (Litz wire) to get rid of "Skin Effect". The wires overall effective resistance is greater at very high frequencies. The skin effect only occurs at high frequencies many times higher than what a human can hear. Maybe my Great Dane can appreciate it dunno.

I just rebuilt my speakers crossovers and rewired them. The wires going from the binding posts up to the crossover were single strand solid copper wires. I rewired everything using a higher gauge copper wire. I replaced all the caps with a higher grade and higher wattage caps. I replaced some of resistors with a higher grade. Granted these were old speakers, but replacing the caps made a huge difference in sound. I am sure the new internal speaker wire helped the damping factor as well. That where I’d put my money.

 

 

[CG]

Y'know, for a group of people who claim to be interested only in solid facts and science, you are very closed to technical information that may be outside your realm of experience or questions your existing beliefs.

 

Just saying...

 

[Mark Powell]

Not too convinced by Harpy's observations abot the 'technical' differences, but his results are fine.

 

Curious on what 'technical information' you mean. Hope it is not this guff that you see on the high priced cable manufacturers sites. Or the site that showed us how wonderful their power cables were with lots of nice graphs. At 300 amps.

 

As far as electical knowledge goes, mine is to university level, no more. My other hobby involves sending up to about 150 amps 30kHz square wave (I know they are they won't be really square) three phase AC up to about three feet. Cables have to nice and thick, not much else seems to matter.

 

[Kimo]

8.00 of speaker cable vs. 1700.00 of speaker cable.

 

They did sound a little different.

 

Next up, 399.00 vs. 8.00

 

Not the same

 

Finally, 399.00 vs. 1700.00

 

They sounded less alike than 8.00/1700.00

 

My conclusion, the only one worth the money was the 8.00 pair, but they aren't my favorite.

 

[diw]

I believe the exact attribution of that comment goes to the late,great Bill Shankly when he was manager of Liverpool football club and the exact wording is...."some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much more important than that "

 

Still a chuckle, although later events at Hillsborough added a level of irony to his comment.......

 

[Part-Time Audiophile]

The thread seems to have wandered a bit, but in answer to the question "why a whole loom" and not just mix and match, then this might be an answer:

 

If a cable is a filter, then it's reasonable to assume that each design or variation of cable would be a different filter. Therefore, if you want to minimize/maximize the impact that a particular filter would have, don't add more than one.

 

FWIW, this a paraphrase of what Nordost pitches for why one should include their power cords into a system that has their speaker cables and interconnects.

 

[Mark Powell]

Similar to my shootout on interconnects I mentioned just now.

 

Do you know about 'conductivity'? It is not quite the inverse of resistance.

 

Regular 'metal trade' copper has a conductivity of 100. That is the reference for conductivity. Electronic grade, oxygen free, 99.9999% ('six nines' grade), and long crystal turn out to be exactly the same, 100. Don't know if there is an 'analar' grade, but conductivity will be 100.

 

Pure (not sure exactly what that means) silver is 105.

 

So don't get caught by mumbo jumbo about the grade of copper. The existence of long crystal is in scientific doubt in any case - how long do they mean? The thinner you extrude from the same block the longer the crystals will be.

 

 

[Kimo]

I have had very little luck in hearing major differences between ICs. Must be system dependent. Differences in digital cables were the most difficult to discern, though they were there. For example, the Nirvana cable offered a little less bass, and the Siltech a little more, than either the Benchmark or Apogee. Basically, they all sounded very much alike, however.

 

 

 

[esldude]

Why did you go and mention crystals? I have lots of large quartz crystals. They have pretty much no conductivity. Nor will I use them actually in the signal path. I plan to line the copper wire with them however. These crystals have well known 'power channeling' properties. Seems to me they will channel the fields around the copper allowing for much more undisturbed flowing electrons. Should also shield against outside detrimental forces in the air. Maybe they can even prevent oxidation from occurring if not outright healing what oxidation has occurred.

 

Do you have a good idea though if they would do more for my USB connection? Surely that is a much nastier and unruly a connection. Channeling and healing crystals might make more difference by fixing things upstream. What do you think? I know the answer is to do both, but I don't have that many crystals yet.

 

The good thing is crystals like this in the end are cheaper than the better cables. So I save money on cheaper cable and let the crystals clean it up. I guess once I have proved how well it works I will need to make some cables with crystals in the jacket or perhaps there is a bigger market to sell a crystal lattice to retrofit existing cables. What do you think?

 

[esldude]

http://18.7.29.232/bitstream/handle/1721.1/46225/41567257.pdf?sequence=1

 

A test of interconnects. One of course might quibble with this or that about the details. This is no listening test, but testing of cables for phase, response, THD, IMD etc. etc. Done by an MIT student for work in his EE class.

 

Pretty good test equipment used, pretty thorough testing. Definitely leaves one wondering if interconnects sounds different then why is it and what is being missed by measurements like these? I find myself hard pressed to come up with anything even likely.

 

The only parameter that might come close to being audible was channel to channel crosstalk. That could of course be altered by routing the two channels differently.

 

Now I do have some expensive specialty cables and I do think they make a difference. Is it for real, or am I just fooling myself?

 

Also seeing pretty much no measurable electrical parameters that differ enough to matter one has to ask oneself how do these companies do their designs? If there isn't a measurement to go by (and what would it be) then what do they do? Make some and listen? If so how do they decide how to make the next batch? If they are onto something why is it the more expensive cable always works out better? If they are on to something why hasn't someone figured it out to make the very best cable for a very reasonable price. I am sorry, I just cannot swallow that the material, design and construction cost of the more expensive cables is more than a tiny percentage of the selling price. Looks more and more like a confidence game in fact.

 

Here are some links to other measurements showing not much reason for cable to sound different.

No article here, just graphed test results.

http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/cable-distortion-and-dielectric-biasing-debunked/cable-thd-measurements.pdf

 

http://www.audioholics.com/education/cables/cable-distortion-and-dielectric-biasing-debunked/additional-cable-measurements.pdf

 

 

 

 

[Gregor Samsa]

My suggested approach to audio cables:

 

Initially, wire your entire system with Monoprice cables. They are sturdy; I have never had one fail on me. To my ears, they sound better than the red, white and yellow ones that come packaged with equipment or the stuff on large spools at Home Depot - but forget I just said that for reasons I'll get to in a minute. They're not exactly Analysis Plus Golden Ovals, but they're reasonably attractive. They're dirt cheap; the shipping might be more.

 

Do your best to convince yourself that this is all you'll ever need. Pore over every study you can find that failed to reject the null hypothesis with ABX testing. Immerse yourself in the writing of Julian Hirsch, Peter Aczel, Floyd Toole and mzillch on the Marantz AV7005 thread at AVS forums. Hang out at Hydrogen Audio. Repeat "Cables make no difference" to yourself like a mantra until you reach semantic saturation. You'll be happier, richer and will avoid untold degrees of abuse and ridicule. If, God forbid, you do later hear differences you will have done your level best to minimize confirmation bias.

 

If you're not totally indoctrinated now, still wish to investigate the sonic attributes of cables, and are a glutton for punishment, obtain a more expensive cable to audition. If you can, get a loaner, preferably from someone who isn't trying to sell it to you. If not, buy one off Audiogon. Do a little research to make sure you're getting it at a reasonable price. This way you can re-sell it if you want without excessive penalty. Insert it in your system and listen to music the way you usually do. If you customarily listen by rapidly switching back & forth between sources or playing the same 30 second snippet of music again and again for comparative purposes, by all means do so. Otherwise, sit back and relax.

 

If, after all of this, you find that you prefer the more expensive cable, may God have mercy on your eternal soul.

 

Oh yes. Jim Smith, feel free to use this in your next revision with impunity. It's the ideas that matter, not the attribution. Besides, for reasons that should be obvious by now, I prefer to remain anonymous.

 

 

 

[Jay192]

@realhifi - survey is on AA under their 'Cables Galore' section

 

@wgscott - FYI - survey was for ALL cables currently used in one's system(s) (so includes HDMI, power etc) - and I didn't say but it was done using the cables' retail prices, and it could have encompassed people's AV systems too.

 

@Mark Powell - re boast bias - I'm sure there could have been 'some' (& with the embarrassment bias people not voting), and then there's the $=security/insurance bias (i.e. I better spend more to make sure the rest of my audio investment isn't wasted). There were certainly some extreme outliers too!!

 

All of which brings me to my next question ...

 

POLLS!!

 

This was be a perfect time to have one. I have a feeling that once people added up what the value of their cables was there would be some surprises.

 

Poll questions: 1/ total retail value of all cables currently used in your main audio system. 2/ what % is that of your system's total retail value

 

 

 

[Jud]

Regard, we not on 'opposite sides'.

 

Agreed. I'm hoping for an invite the next time you get to sail aboard a J boat. ;-)

 

I find reasonable if occasionally spirited discussion (which is what I think we and the vast majority of participants here have) about the enjoyment of well reproduced music to be a pleasure.

 

[Harpy]

Well I just plugged my copper wire into the binding posts and evidently a couple loose strands were touching and blew out my left amp channel. So it shows what I know. Maybe karma to my previous post. Tomorrow I am going to shop for some nice speaker wire and properly terminate it. Luckily it was only the internal fuses that blew, but I am taking it as a sign.

 

[barrows]

"Agreed. I'm hoping for an invite the next time you get to sail aboard a J boat. ;-)"

 

Funny how it seems the folks who tend to not believe that cables matter seem to spend more words writing about how the cables do not matter. Perhaps those of us who know that cables matter are spending more time listening to music.

 

 

 

[wgscott]

You need an audiophile-grade fuse.