Are you buying the right interconnects ?


In the late 90's I purchased a pair of Paradigm Active 20 speakers from Definitive Audio. Prior to buying I purchased a 3 meter pair of MIT interconnects from Audio Advisor. Regular retail price was $700 and they were on sale for 50% off. 
Hooked every thing up and waited a month for a full burn in. Wasn't satisfied. I thought, whats going on here? So I decided to try the Paradigm stock interconnects that came with the speakers. They were twenty feet long and looked really, really cheap like you find in a department store. They cost $20 a pair. I switched them out and was blown away.
The sound from those 20's suddenly sounded, rich, full, very sweet top end and the bass sharpened up to complete focus. I called Paradigm and spoke to an engineer and asked why the sound difference? He said the MIT's are not a match since they are a high impedance/capacitance cable and it has nothing to with the price. He mentioned the impedance/capacitance value numbers vary with different brands. He said you should always talk to the engineers at the amp/preamp companies, and ask which cable values would best match their components. Once you get the specs, go to a local electronic supply house, the one's that sell cables to TV station's and radio station's. Give the measurements to the salesperson to find a match and your good to go. 
audiozen
Probably for the reason that most speaker lines are passive, not active.
And as a whole, the high end industry is one big money machine, and the cable companies and retailers will always take full advantage of those high profit margins.
Yes well this all sounds very reasonable and believable. Who knows there may even be a bit of truth buried in there somewhere. But from my 30 years listening and comparing and reading everything I’ve been able to get my hands on though I’d have to say BS.

If it was this simple there wouldn’t be so many crap cables out there. Companies like MIT, or at least the people who sell them, would be telling you all about it. For 2 reasons: one, because it gives them a really strong selling point, and two, it would dramatically increase customer satisfaction and repeat business and cut returns and deserters to other brands. So however good it sounds its utter BS.

The list of reasons/theories/engineering/electrical/physical designs that have been touted over the years to make one thing or another sound good is so long and so discredited that long ago- twenty years ago at least- I quit even paying attention. NOT ONE of them has ever held up. Whatever has at one point in time seemed to matter has ALWAYS in the fullness of time proven to be BS. Hard to appreciate if you haven’t been following this for 30 years like I have. But its true.

Far from what you think audiozen what your experience demonstrates to me, yet again, is there’s expensive stuff out there with people paying big money for what not only does not sound better than crap, but actually sounds worse than crap. Crap being the one you think sounds good.

Because what you will find, there really are cables out there that are so freakishly good they defy any reasonable explanation. Get some Synergistic Research Element CTS, but not unless and until you are ready to have your world rocked. Then when you’ve been amazed by them for a few weeks send their Active Shielding power supplies off to Michael Spallone to have their diodes and caps upgraded. Be even more amazed at how such a simple inexpensive tweak just dropped the noise floor, threw the sound stage deeper and wider, corrected tonal and timbral imbalances you thought were already gone, and blew micro and macro dynamics out the roof.

Then try and tell yourself this is all because of, what did you say? Oh yeah, capacitance.

Yeah. Right. Dream on.
MIT used to sell speaker cables with whatever was in those boxes(resistors?) customized to work with your specific equipment.They may still make them.That still doesn't guarantee they would sound good though.
The fact is you can take several cables from different manufacturers that will measure exactly the same on test equipment but each one will sound different.There's many different theories as to why but nobody really knows for sure.

Back in the 80's, Corey Greenberg, reviewer for Stereophile, took a hacksaw and cut the box open longways on a MIT cable, and their wasn't much inside the box, don't recall the detail's, but his impression wasn't that great.