If Cables Are Not Tone Controls...


I can't count the times audiophiles have said "Cables are not tone controls".  But if we audition (remember that?) two sets of speaker cables and decide that one sounds "better" than the other, aren't we using it as a tone control?  You can call it whatever you want, but in reality we are deciding which cable contours the sound to our liking?  Or should we just buy the speaker cable with the lowest resistance, inductance and capacitance we can find and if it sounds like crap, change other components until it sounds good?  Then we're just using the other components we've swapped out as tone controls. Just asking.  
chayro
It's a good question. I've taken that comment to mean this: "If you want to affect the tonal balance of your system, the are many better ways to do it." This argument would probably also say, "Get your system balanced as you like it and then the cable should be as neutral as possible, doing its job of delivering what you've established." An analogous saying in the food arena would be, "Dinner plates are not flavor controls."
A tone control is a specific thing. It means a control which broadly boosts or cuts the midrange, bass or treble.  Get too fine and it's an equalizer.  Use it to cut out a range altogether and it's a filter.

Anything else a component does to the sound is no longer a tone control.

But yes, tone controls are great, and most people swapping around cables need something else, like better room acoustics, or an actual tone control.
@hilde45 - building on what you said, I think the real meaning is don’t try to fix a component you don’t like with cables. I think almost everyone believes that or at least say they believed it. I certainly believed it . Then again, I have a pair of speakers that I did not like, but were transformed with different speaker cables. I think I was just lucky in finding that match. So I guess I used the cable as a tone control.  Then again, if I had those cables to begin with, I just would have loved the speaker and never known it was being "tone controlled" by the cable.