A fresh approach to cable analysis

@bruce19 

I have also purchased moderately expensive cables, such as mid-level audio quest and DH labs stuff and compared it with no name, lamp cord and Amazon‘s best types of cables and noticed differences so small that they made me doubt my judgment as to whether they were doing anything at all.

Expensive does not always mean quality or a good match for your gear.

My local high-end store owner handed me a box with a half-dozen cables, all from reputable cable companies.  All were expensive to wire up an entire system of separates.  They were complete sets (enough to wire up my entire stereo with each brand -- so lots of cables in that box).  I tried them all, and returned them all.  They either did so little that I had to strain to hear it, and a couple of them made the sound worse.

At the time, I did not know one brand from another.  To me, it was just a box of cables.

The store’s owner then handed me one more set of cables to try.  And those were the ones that I purchased.

I asked him why he did not include them in the first box.  He said that they were more expensive than the others.  But when I demoed them, I neither knew the brand nor the price.  I just heard what I heard, and made a purchase.  They were expensive, but I did not know that when I fell in love with them.

The first round of cables that he lent me were all copper (if I remember correctly).  The ones that I purchased were silver.  That is what drove up the cost.

@seymour-krelborn You’re actually making my point for me — there isn’t a single well-controlled double blind test that reliably confirms audible differences between cables. Not one. With full methodology or without. Zero. So why not? That’s the question nobody on the other side seems eager to answer. Don’t weave your hands and insist it’s not necessary in such a contested situation. It would help your side a lot. Repeatable and falsifiable insights. 
 

@mclinnguy Nobody is claiming all speakers sound the same — that’s not even a contested point, which is precisely why no double blind testing is needed there. It may be the only true consensus in the audio world. But cables are a fundamentally different case from components: a speaker or amplifier contains tens or hundreds of individual parts, each with measurable, transferable influence on the signal. A cable is a passive conductor. The comparison doesn’t hold.

read this too

https://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/bas/0710/

Just a comment on the veracity of the much vaunted double blind tests. It takes at least two days for any cable to settle after I swap it into my system. I am not talking about break in, I am talking just swapping cables. This is pretty consistent in my experience. Performing a/b switching is pretty pointless, cable comparisons happen over days and weeks, not minutes or hours. Double blind tests fail by design.

Most reputable cable makers already show what is inside, so there is little advantage to pull them apart unless you suspect there is a conspiracy in the industry to float bogus cables. There are a few questionable brands, but most are reputable. 

I have written a great deal concerning cables and their proper use in my book, The Audiophile Laws. I discuss break in or settling, geometry and length of cables, and some novel configurations that associated with electronics yield superior performance to traditional setups. 

I conducted double blind testing in my room with my components, speakers, and cables. The results were interesting, and I include the outcome in my book. I believe it would be most helpful for those who have questions about the benefit of such comparisons. 

There is only one way to work with cables properly, comparison of them in complete sets. Ad hoc collections of cables are playing at system advancement. There is no directing of a system toward a desired outcome when flipping cables and placing them in mixed sets from different manufacturers. Most hobbyists and many industry members simply work with cables using poor methods. 

Where can you buy affordable shielded power cables? There's a lot of EMI behind my power conditioners, outlets, and near every power cable.