A butt-load spent in cables - how much improvemt?

I don't think anyone will argue, for instance, that capacitance will affect sound. However, it's not going to cost a lot of money to simply find a lower or higher capacitance cable.

Where people start to wonder what is going on is when the cable makers start to use a lot of other "science" to explain why you should spend thousands of dollars on their product. R&D costs something,ads and small part manufacture are issues for making small quanities of anything (though they don't have machining costs in cable manufacturing generally) but wire is fairly cheap.

The very idea that 30K speaker cables exist scares a lot of people.

It seems to me that cable performance is non price hierarchical but rather to do the power in you house and the way your system matches to the wire, RF rejection, etc.

I think that is a great response Mlsstl. Clean power, rf rejection, component matching etc., have so much to do with cables. You can't just stick an expensive cable in somewhere and say it sounds better because you want it to either. If people better understood and were open to dialogue on the issues of what the cables relate to in terms of current, rfi and the rest of the system, I think there would be less bad blood in the camps that argue over these things

After all, many things make little bit of difference, including what time of day you play your stereo. That doesn't make me tell people that they can't possible hear anything if they listened to something in the middle of the day on a hot afternoon though.

We all have to *try* to be reasonable!

Well, i think it s pretty well documented that DBT's are unreliable themselves. I am the last person to argue in preference of high cost tweaks, but I think neither the DBT or the non-DBT community likes to admit that everyone is a little bit right.

jim,

Sigh. This is why i stopped posting at rec.audio.high-end. It seems the reductionist camp and the "everything is magic" camp never tire of arguing.

Unreliable and being level matched certainly sometimes.

People tend not to name what they are hearing if they don't understand properly what they are listening for or how they are listening for it. This doesn't mean they do not hear something, it only means they cannot identify it.

I remember there was a DBT test a friend of mine who is a mastering engineer participated in some time back, where people were asked to identify dithered and non dithered material. Most people couldn't not identify the sound of jitter or could not say what it was. However, when the sound of the jitter was turned up so one could hear the way it sounds and then turned back down to its original "inaudible" level, most people could tell the difference in the DBT because they knew how to indentify the sound they were listening for.

I don't have a problem with DBT's myself, I do them when I can to listen for differences in gear.

The history of DBT's has been spotty though. They have showed us apparently, that no amps sound different, that vinyl does not sound different from cassette , etc., etc. So, one can say that these were poorly conducted, but at some point something everyone knows, like that there is a discenable difference in the sound of amplifers, has been "proved" wrong by a DBT.

I don't particularly care whether people swear by them or don't and I am also suspicious by nature about tweaks, cables and other things that seem less than scientific. Since my job is in audio, I am constantly testing for audible differences. However, this process has a lot more wiggle room than determining that a motorcycle can't get you to the moon.

Thanks for the response Jim.

FWIW , unless I inherit cables in gear purchases,I make my own and have been quite happy.

I have some friends who changed all their power and IC cables and really felt it made a huge difference but I have yet to be convinced to go that route.