The CABLE fallacy and Human Hearing.
Over many years, I have heard audiophiles online and in person talking about cables making an audible difference in their system. The ELECTRONICS sound different, not the CABLES.
Swap one out, swap another out, and there we go - a huge difference (improvement).
There should be NO IMPROVEMENT. You hear your systems capabilities with any decently designed interconnect, speaker cable etc. I am suggesting spending some decent money on interconnects, but not thousands of dollars.
First of all,
We as audiophiles were not there when the original recording was recorded, mixed, and mastered. We have no clue about the true intent of the producer, the artist etc.
All we can say is - "it sounds good" or it sounds "realistic"
But these are interpretations not rooted in any observable understanding of psychoacoustics, or applied science or physics, or medical literature.
Certainly,
Human hearing is incredibly sensitive and can pick up on many minute differences in sound due to the nature of the human hearing apparatus, and human hearing being sharply defined over millions of years of evolution.
Human hearing originally evolved from fish gills 400 million years ago. Since then, it has evolved from our primate ancestors to the point where our ability to localize sound is excellent; because that way we didn’t eat eaten by a saber-tooth tiger.
Human ears evolved from the gills of ancient fish
it’s common sense guys. Not an opinion. It’s a fact.
If you dig deep, you find:
Level JND: the tiniest change in loudness you can perceive (often ~1 dB under good conditions, sometimes less in midrange sensitivity).
Pitch JND: the smallest frequency difference you can hear (much finer in midrange than at extreme lows/highs).
Timing JND: tiny differences in delay or phase that affect spatial perception.
None of these IMPROVE with cables. The change you noticed already existed!
What changed? You improvised and heard a specific subset of the music or a passage of it in real time, that you hadn’t paid as much attention to before....
In other words - it’s human observation divided by human confirmation bias plus faith.
And then the CABLE BURN IN myth -
Yeah okay, so you go to a tropical island with your family for vacation. Then upon return, your cables need to be burned in again?!
No they do not. The cables were stable and in good condition when you received them, right? So then, what changed inside? Nothing changed. If someone needs to burn in cables for you, charge you a fee, and have it shipped to your house and that takes two weeks, then what? See where this is going?
YOU CAN’T PROVE THAT CABLES NEED TO BURN IN TO SOUND THEIR BEST. IF THIS WAS TRUE, EVERYONE WHO EVER USED ELECTRONICS WOULD KNOW THIS AND IT WOULD BE WRITTEN IN ENGINEERING TEXTBOOKS.
IF you listen to your system every day, then notice it sounds "off" it is not because of the cables, unless they are defective, damaged, or have poor terminations.
If you really want to compare sound quality, make sure the volume, the track, and the electronics are all dialed in properly and listen to the same track over and over. Make sure its a track you can listen to in a neutral way, not one that makes your heart pound or makes you feel heavy emotions. If not, then you have an unwavering cognitive overload, which will invariably lead to false conclusions.
Recordings such as electronic synths or simple instrumentals or musical instruments will be right to test with. See if you can determine if the sound character changes overtime, by pattern matching specific sounds, or sounds in a specific sequence.
Keep a notebook handy and write down your observations. Then on day two, dial in the system exactly the same way and listen again. Write your impressions on a blank page. Compare the two pages. is the extent of what you're trying to communicate about the sound quality able to communicate the same message? Or not?! if not, there was never a difference to begin with if you are doing this vs. swapping cables.
Many audiophiles I know in person often play things at random and notice some nice things about mixing and mastering methods; but that is not the same thing as a real-life improvement in audio reproduction. So in other other words, if your listening session is sporadic and not controlled, you cannot deduce that the cables made a positive or negative improvement.
Yet, everyone seems to fall in to the rabbit hole.
Get with the program gentlemen.
