Analog cables for sure. Specific cables are gear dependent. This is probably the general answer to your question. But if you are more specific about the gear application specific, you will be getting more useful recommendation.
What type of cables make the most difference
What type of cables, in your subjective experience, makes the most difference? I’m not focusing on brands, but rather, on type, ie, speaker cables, power cables, analog interconnect, digital interconnect, and anything else I may have omitted. If you don’t think cables beyond a base level of competency makes a difference that’s fine too.
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@gkelly i own several headphone amps, both solid state and tubed. Years back I noticed a hum on an OTL headphone amp. The power cord was very basic, and I swapped that out with a diy Belden cable that was shielded. Problem solved - |
My two cents: Power cables get called "most transformative" a lot, but that's asserted more than demonstrated. The case against it isn't hard to make: power cables sit upstream of filtering stages, transformers, and regulation circuits whose whole job is to isolate downstream components from mains garbage. The pathway by which a power cable then influences what comes out of your speakers is indirect at best, and the theory behind it is far from settled. There's also a prior question nobody asking about power cables tends to ask first: how dirty is your mains supply? Without measuring it, you have no baseline. Someone on a quiet residential circuit with short runs to a modern panel is starting from a very different place than someone in an apartment block sharing infrastructure with elevators, HVAC, and fluorescent lighting. The size of any improvement from a power cable scales with how much of a problem you actually have—and most people have no idea. Speaker cables carry the audio signal directly to the load, and interconnects ride earlier in the chain where source-level noise matters. There's a reasonable argument that either has more leverage than AC power delivery for most listeners in most rooms. Yet the original claim treats power-cable primacy as received wisdom and speaker cables as the naive first purchase—without establishing either point on anything firmer than anecdote. The conflation is the real issue. "People buy speaker cables first" and "power cables matter most" are independent claims. One might be true without the other, and neither is well supported by controlled listening research, which in this area is thin on the ground regardless of which side you favor. |
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