Dave — known as raueda1 on another forum — just posted his thoughts in a way I wish I could have phrased myself. Enjoy.
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I think there’s a different angle here that hasn't been explored much and may be more useful than simply asking whether enough blind tests exist to resolve anything.
I’m happy to concede that the public record of rigorous cable blind tests is thinner than many people assume. There are some tests, some interesting attempts, and some suggestive failures, but apparently not some vast body of research that settles the question with sufficient rigor. So sure, one should be careful about overstating the literature. However, that raises what I think is the more interesting question: why is that the case?
If expensive cables produce identifiable, reliable, repeatable audible improvements, why hasn’t the cable industry funded and publicized proper independent testing? That would seem to be enormously valuable. A clean, well-run, preregistered blind test showing that trained listeners could reliably distinguish a high-end cable from a competent ordinary cable would be marketing gold. It would be cited endlessly. It would appear in ads, white papers, dealer literature, show demos, interviews, and manufacturer websites.
Yet that does not seem to have happened in any meaningful way, despite decades of claims, substantial money, passionate users, and manufacturers who would benefit directly from a positive result. That absence strikes me as meaningful. And it is not just the manufacturers. There is an entire cable-marketing ecosystem - cable companies, distributors, dealers, reviewers, magazines, forums, audio shows, YouTube channels, influencers, affiliate links, advertising relationships, and websites (including AS) built around the idea that these questions remain endlessly open but experientially discoverable.
That ecosystem benefits from cable belief. Cables are easy to ship, easy to demonstrate, easy to describe in poetic language, easy to swap, easy to photograph. I also assume that audiophile cables are highly profitable. Cables also create constant content: reviews, comparisons, shootouts, system-matching advice, “loom” discussions, break-in reports, dielectric explanations, geometry narratives, and upgrade paths. IOW, cable audibility is not merely a technical claim. It is also a commercial content engine.
I think that makes the absence of decisive testing even more interesting. If the claims are as strong as commonly presented, this entire ecosystem would seem to benefit enormously from a clean positive result. It would validate the products, validate the reviewers, validate the dealers, validate the publications, and reassure customers that their purchases are grounded in something more than subjective impressions.
A failed test, however, would be very damaging. It would not just threaten one product. It would threaten a recurring revenue stream and a lot of audiophile mythology. I've come to believe that the incentive structure actually runs the other way: keep the claims subjective, keep the comparisons sighted, keep the language experiential, and avoid tests that could collapse the ambiguity. None of that requires some kind of conspiracy, all it needs are very ordinary incentives. If sighted reviewing and subjective testimony already sells cables, why take the risk of a controlled test?
By contrast, I don’t find the absence of extensive academic research mysterious at all. Cable behavior is not exactly an unexplored frontier in electrical engineering. Resistance, capacitance, inductance, shielding, impedance, dielectric behavior, skin effect, connector resistance, source/load interaction, and transmission-line effects are mature subjects. And here is a great deal of real cable engineering in RF, telecom, instrumentation, aerospace, power transmission, medical systems, and data communications. But “do two competent, appropriately specified audio cables sound different in a domestic hi-fi system?” seems not to be a high-priority research question. Why would it be? The expected effect size is small, the commercial claims are often vague, the mechanisms are often underspecified, and the result would not add much to core electrical engineering knowledge.
So, I would distinguish two kinds of silence. The silence from academic science may simply mean: this is not a promising or important unresolved research problem. The silence from the cable-marketing ecosystem is different. That ecosystem is making, amplifying, reviewing, advertising, and monetizing the audibility claims. If the claims are robust, it has every incentive to demonstrate them.
None of this proves that no cable difference can ever be audible. I don’t think anyone needs to make that absolute claim. Obviously pathological cases exist - very long runs, unusual source or load impedances, bad shielding, poor terminations, high capacitance, oxidized connectors, inappropriate gauge etc. But that's a very different claim from the broad high-end cable narrative, where competent cables are said to produce large sonic differences in warmth, detail, space, timing, soundstage, liquidity, blacker backgrounds, and imaging.
And at the end of the day, if someone simply claims “I enjoy these cables,” that’s great. No laboratory, no data required. But that's very different for saying “these cables produce audible sonic improvements because of their design,” in which case the burden of evidence still sits with the claimant - and even more so with the industry and media ecosystem selling and promoting the claim.
May the force be with us. 🪄
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