A fresh approach to cable analysis

@bruce19  If you cut open a cable how would you know what you're looking at?Who knows what kind of copper is used or if it's been 'cryogeniclly treated or not. It could be anything.

Without test equiptment you don't know the resistance, inductance, capacitance or how effective the shielding is which would be WAY more producive than cutting it open and simply looking at it.

The first company to market "audiophile" cables was Disc Washer with their Gold Ens ($15/meter) in 1976. I bought some and happily used them for a few years. Around that time I was buying my first lomc cartridge and in need of an SUT. I decided on Mitch Cotter's Verion transformer. He also was making/selling RCA interconnects - Verion Tri-Axials ($30/meter). I bought several pairs and continued to use them until 2015 when I had to move. They worked fine with all my components. I never felt I was missing anything! I still have the Verions buried somewhere in storage. IMO interconnects have ZERO affect on sound quality!

So no one here remembers the Disc Washer Gold Ens RCA interconnects? They had gold-plated connectors, hence the name. I should have kept mine instead of listening to Mitch Cotter's claim that his Verion cables had better RFI immunity - all without measurable verification!

Now the sky's the limit what cable manufacturers claim for their products. 99% of audiophiles fall for the advertising hype, making selling wire a lucrative business! In the old days everybody used used Radio Shack gray  Switchcraft cables and nobody complained.

@bruce19 

...and carefully dissect them and expose how they are constructed and with what.

That will not tell us the purity of the metals used, nor how the metals are conditioned.

Do they go through a super-annealing process?

Are they oxygen free?

Are they mono-crystal?

Are they frequency tuned, via an extruding process for specific, physical, geometrical measurements?

Are the cables designed to minimize skin effect?  Different frequencies travel along the metal in different paths.  Ideally, you want the entire signal (all of its frequencies) to arrive with perfect timing (not even picofarads apart).  Low frequencies are attracted to the perimeter of the metal.  Better signal cables conduct the voltage with better linearity.

Better cables have better dielectrics.

And the cable's terminations is yet another engineering and construction topic for discussion.

Dissecting cables will not reveal the above engineering properties.  And all of the above contribute to how good your revealing stereo will sound.

In the past, we have been through all the arguments about measurements and subjective evaluation, and that gets us nowhere.

I respectfully disagree.

Just because cable deniers refuse to acknowledge reality, and keep digging themselves deeper holes, does not mean that we get nowhere.

Allowing the propagandists to go unchallenged, and not expose them for being propagandists, would be a win for the propagandists.  So these discussions serve an important purpose.

The cable deniers are, virtually without exception, those who never demoed the cables that they are bashing.  Shining sunlight on that deception is key to ensuring that people looking to learn do not get conned by the cable deniers that never listened to what they claim is snake oil.