Do Audiophiles Hear Real Differences, or Are They Justifying Expensive Purchases?

Over the years, I have encountered some remarkably different—and often completely irreconcilable—views on the role of cables in an audio system.

On one side are people willing to spend many thousands of dollars on cables and who consider those expenses entirely justified.

On the other side are equally convinced skeptics, some of whom have serious engineering backgrounds. More than once, I have heard an argument that goes something like this:

“I’m an electrical engineer, and I can tell you with complete certainty that cables cannot affect sound. It’s all marketing, self-deception, and snake oil.”

There are other examples as well.

One friend of mine collected vintage Japanese audio equipment and knew the subject inside and out. He assembled wonderful systems and was absolutely convinced that cables played no meaningful role.

“Look at this equipment,” he would say. “The Japanese engineers who designed it didn’t use any audiophile cables. Inside the amplifiers you’ll find ordinary power cords, and the systems sound fantastic. If you remove that wire and replace it with a cable costing several thousand dollars, nothing changes. We’ve tried it.”

Then there is another argument that every audiophile has probably heard at least once:

“Why spend thousands of dollars on the last meter of a power cable when the electricity has already traveled miles through ordinary utility wiring and through standard wire hidden inside your walls? If cables really matter, why not run one all the way from the power station?”

All of these arguments sound perfectly logical.

So where is the truth?

As I promised in previous articles, I like to state my main conclusion early rather than making readers wait until the end.

My experience tells me that cables can indeed have a surprisingly significant influence on certain categories of audio systems. However, they do not influence sound in the way most cable enthusiasts describe, nor do they do so for the reasons typically cited by cable skeptics.

Before discussing the technical side of the issue, I would like to tell three stories from my own experience.

Story One: The Cable That Couldn't Possibly Work

Around 2006, I was purchasing my first reasonably serious audio system.

In another article, I described the sound I heard as a teenager from my upstairs neighbor's system—a sound I spent years trying to rediscover. At the time of this story, that search had not yet begun. I wasn't looking for anything specific. I wanted to buy my first decent stereo after years of listening to music on a portable boombox.

By today's standards, it was not a high-end system at all. It was a respectable mid-level Hi-Fi setup.

The system had already been selected, and the purchase was nearly complete when the salesperson asked one final question.

“Would you like a power cable?”

The cable cost around $300.

I immediately dismissed the idea, saying that in my opinion a power cable could not possibly affect sound.

The salesperson did not argue.

“That's fine,” he said. “Just listen and tell me whether you hear a difference.”

A few minutes later he returned, changed something behind the equipment rack, and started the music again.

I listened carefully, fully expecting a sales demonstration designed to persuade me that I was hearing improvements that didn't actually exist.

Instead, something unexpected happened.

The system sounded worse.

A few minutes earlier it had sounded spacious, clean, and reasonably engaging. Now the sound seemed flatter and somehow dirtier.

After listening for a while, I finally said:

“Maybe it's my imagination, but your $300 cable makes the system sound worse.”

The salesperson laughed.

“Actually, I just connected the standard cable. The $300 cable was playing before.”

At that moment I realized I was going to buy the cable. The difference was not dramatic. It did not transform one system into another. But it was obvious enough that I had no trouble admitting that the additional three hundred dollars seemed worthwhile.

So, I bought my first audiophile power cable. What makes the story interesting is what happened afterward.

Several technically minded friends were deeply skeptical of my experience. One of them arrived at my apartment carrying test equipment and proceeded to demonstrate that the electrical measurements at the input and output of my expensive cable were virtually identical to those of an ordinary power cord.

Confident that we would reproduce the result I had heard in the store, I suggested connecting the two cables, one after the other, and comparing them directly.

Something unexpected happened again.

The difference was dramatically smaller. In fact, it was almost nonexistent. My friend left feeling quite pleased with himself, convinced that I had fallen victim to clever marketing. I, on the other hand, was left genuinely confused.

Had I imagined the difference in the store? Had I fooled myself?

Why did the result at home differ so dramatically from the result in the showroom?

The answer would take me years to discover, and I will return to it at the end of this article.

Story Two: When the Flagship Sounded Worse

Nearly twenty years passed between the first story and the second.

During that time, I became deeply involved in audio and eventually began working as a professional consultant. Dozens of systems passed through my hands. Thousands of hours of comparative listening gradually turned many former mysteries into understandable patterns.

One day I visited a large, well-prepared showroom to audition the newly released dCS Varese digital front end. I was considering the purchase and wanted to know whether Varese represented a meaningful improvement over Vivaldi—and whether that improvement justified the substantial additional cost.

Both systems were connected to the same reference setup. I was seated between the loudspeakers and handed a remote control that allowed instant switching between the two sources.

When I asked which input corresponded to Vivaldi and which to Varese, the consultant smiled.

“That's for you to figure out. Consider it a blind test.”

I sat down, started a collection of familiar reference recordings, and began switching back and forth between them. Scan the QR code to watch a video from this listening session on my Instagram.

There was a difference for sure. But it was surprisingly small. One source seemed to produce slightly greater depth. Drums appeared a bit more focused. A guitar solo carried slightly richer tonal color. And that was about it.

The differences were subtle enough that I was already preparing a conclusion:

Perhaps dCS had reached the practical limits of their technology with the Vivaldi platform, and Varese wasn't worth the enormous premium.

After the session, the consultants asked for my verdict.

“The first source sounded a little better,” I replied. “But honestly, the difference is very small.”

Their expressions changed immediately.

“That's a very interesting answer,” one of them said. “Because the first source was Vivaldi.”

At that moment, my own expression probably looked much the same.

The older, less expensive dCS system had apparently outperformed the company's new flagship. That wasn't supposed to happen. I knew the dCS product line well. From Bartók to Rossini to Vivaldi, each step had represented a meaningful improvement. I could easily believe that the company had reached a technological plateau and produced a flagship that was only marginally better than Vivaldi. I could even imagine a situation where the difference was so small that it became difficult to justify on financial grounds. But worse?

That made no sense.

“Show me the cabling,” I said.

Ten minutes later I had found the explanation.

The digital components in both systems were connected using cables from a well-known cable manufacturer. I am intentionally not naming the brand to avoid turning this story into an endorsement. The Vivaldi stack happened to be connected with cables from the manufacturer's top series. The Varese stack was connected using cables that sat several levels lower in the same product range. The employee who assembled the system had used what was already available rather than opening another package.

After the cables were replaced, the situation changed completely. The advantage of Varese became obvious immediately. This time, repeated switching was barely necessary.

The lesson was not really about cables, but also about conclusions.

Had I not already accumulated years of experience with cabling, I might have left that showroom convinced that dCS had reached a technological dead end and released a flagship product that actually sounded worse than its predecessor. The cost of that completely incorrect conclusion would have been two pairs of XLR digital cables.

Story Three: Burning In a Digital Cable

Digital cables remained the last category of cable I refused to believe in.

By that point I was already working professionally in audio.

I had heard about the influence of power cables and analog interconnects. I had heard what speaker cables could do to the overall character and openness of a system. Digital cables, however, continued to strike me as nonsense.

I could not understand where a sonic difference could come from if the cable was only transmitting ones and zeros.

Eventually I decided to upgrade the cable connecting the digital components in my showroom Vivaldi stack.

I ordered a cable from a distributor who, depending on the day, was either a competitor or a business partner.

A few weeks later, the cable arrived. I installed it, listened, and once again, something unexpected happened.

The system sounded worse.

I had a familiar reference track featuring exceptionally realistic percussion instruments placed precisely within the soundstage. Before the change, the percussion sounded lively, dynamic, and natural. After installing the new cable, the instrument completely lost its sense of realism. The sound of it resembled someone striking a metal frying pan.

Dynamics diminished. Ease disappeared. Part of the musical magic that had made the track such a useful reference recording vanished.

I called the seller.

“Something isn't right,” I said. “Either the cable is defective, or it doesn't belong in this system. I want to return it.”

His response was immediate.

“You haven't burned it in yet.”

At that point I started laughing out loud.

You can tell that story to people you're trying to sell cables to. What exactly are you planning to burn in? Are you going to roast the ones and zeros so they run faster?”

His answer was equally direct.

“Bring it to me. I have a burn-in machine. Pick it up tomorrow and listen again. If you still don't like it, I'll refund your money.”

A machine designed to burn in a digital cable sounded ridiculous even to someone with a decade of audio experience. Any electrical engineer would probably have laughed much harder than I did. Still, I decided to give the absurd idea one chance.

The next day I collected the cable and returned to the showroom. What happened next was impossible to ignore. The previous day the new cable had sounded clearly worse than the original. Now it sounded clearly better. And not by a tiny margin - the kind of difference that can be dismissed as imagination. The improvement was obvious.

As with every surprising experience I have had in audio, I immediately started looking for a rational explanation.

I was not willing to accept that a digital cable—and especially a burned-in digital cable—could somehow improve the transmission of digital data. I needed a technical explanation.

Inside the Engineering Side of the Debate

A couple of years later, I had the opportunity to discuss the subject with a man who actually created that cable. He represented a well-known European manufacturer that I will once again leave unnamed. During a lengthy conversation, I asked every cable-related question I could think of.

Several key ideas recurred, and I will summarize them here in roughly the same order in which they were explained to me.

The first idea was simple:

Cables are not accessories. They are components.

Their influence becomes increasingly audible as the system's resolution increases. In modest systems, that influence may be small. In highly resolving systems, it may become surprisingly significant.

The second idea challenged one of the most common arguments made by cable skeptics.

The purpose of a specialized power cable is not to deliver “more electricity.” The purpose is to reduce three-dimensional electromagnetic radiation from any cable carrying alternating current. This is why many high-end power cables become physically large. Not because they need to conduct more current than a standard power cord. But because their geometry, conductor arrangement, and insulation are designed to minimize electromagnetic contamination around sensitive equipment.

One practical consequence is surprisingly simple. Many audiophiles have equipment racks filled with tangled cables. Separating those cables and organizing them properly often improves system performance even before a single component is replaced.

The third idea involved analog interconnects and speaker cables. While power cables primarily focus on limiting radiation emitted by the cable, analog cables are largely concerned with preventing external interference from entering the signal path. At the same time, conductor materials, connector quality, and cable geometry can subtly influence tonal balance and overall resolution.

In highly revealing systems, cables can sometimes be used to fine-tune the presentation—slightly brighter, slightly darker, more dynamic, or more relaxed.

The fourth idea addressed digital cables.

According to my source, digital transmission is not merely a question of whether the correct bits arrive at the destination. Timing matters. The analogy he used was a train. Imagine a train leaving point A and arriving at point B. Not only must the cars arrive in the correct order, but the spacing between the cars must remain consistent. Electromagnetic interference can affect timing relationships within a digital signal. In audio, one manifestation of this problem is commonly referred to as jitter.

Whether one agrees with this explanation or not, it was the first theory I encountered that aligned reasonably well with the listening experiences I had accumulated over the years.

Another topic we discussed was phono cables.

Unlike most other connections in an audio system, phono cables often carry an extremely low-level signal. That signal is vulnerable to virtually everything around it. Add too much shielding, and the signal may lose some of its openness and immediacy. Reduce shielding, and the cable begins collecting interference from the surrounding environment. In other words, a phono cable is asked to accomplish two contradictory tasks at the same time. Perhaps for that reason, truly exceptional phono cables are relatively rare.

We also discussed why cable effects seem to become more dramatic as systems improve.

The explanation was straightforward.

As the overall resolution of a system increases, more and more low-level information becomes audible. Tiny spatial cues. Long reverberation tails. The subtle sounds musicians make while performing. The texture of a voice. The shape of an acoustic space. When interference masks part of that information, the listener may not consciously identify what is missing. Instead, the presentation becomes flatter, less convincing, and less immersive. The soundstage loses depth. Instrument placement becomes less precise. The illusion of real musicians performing in front of you begins to weaken.

Eventually, even a very expensive system can be reduced to merely reproducing frequencies. The bass is there, the midrange, the treble. Yet the sense of realism is diminished. Whether that loss justifies the cost of premium cabling is a decision each listener must make individually.

What interested me more was another question.

Why do so many technically educated people remain skeptical?

Part of the answer may be surprisingly simple.

Every field contains areas that lie outside the experience of otherwise knowledgeable people. An electrical engineer can spend an entire career designing power systems without ever investigating how extremely small forms of electromagnetic interaction affect highly sensitive audio equipment.

The individual I spoke with admitted that he had once been just as skeptical as many of today's engineers. In the early 1980s, after hearing unexpected differences between cables, he became curious enough to investigate further. That curiosity eventually led to years of experimentation and the development of a dedicated research laboratory.

Whether one agrees with every conclusion that emerged from that work is beside the point.

The important lesson is that skepticism and curiosity are not opposites.

The most productive skepticism eventually becomes investigation.

Another observation from our conversation concerned the different approaches taken by cable manufacturers.

Some companies attempted to control electromagnetic effects primarily through increasingly massive physical construction. This produced the legendary audiophile cables that were almost as thick as a person's arm. According to my source, thickness itself was never the objective. The objective was always the control of unwanted electromagnetic interactions. Different manufacturers eventually pursued different solutions, but the problem they were attempting to solve remained essentially the same.

Why Do So Many People Still Not Believe?

At this point we can finally return to the questions raised at the beginning of the article.

Why did I hear a clear difference when a power cable was changed in the store, yet hear almost no difference when I repeated the experiment at home?

The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple.

The showroom system had been installed correctly. The loudspeakers were positioned well away from the rear wall. The room was large. The system was capable of creating a deep and convincing soundstage.

According to the explanation I had been given, spatial information and soundstage depth are among the first casualties of electromagnetic contamination. But soundstage depth is also one of the first casualties of improper placement. At home, I had been forced to place my speakers close to the wall. In practical terms, much of the depth had already disappeared before the cable comparison even began. If the soundstage had already collapsed because of placement, there was very little left for the cable to damage.

The second question is equally interesting.

Why did the designers of vintage Japanese equipment seem to manage perfectly well without specialized audiophile cables? And why do so many owners of those systems sincerely claim that they hear little or no difference between cables today?

My conclusion is that the answer is not particularly mysterious.

Most of the cable experiments that shaped today's cable industry began in the mid-1980s, around the same time that the great era of Japanese audio was beginning to fade.

With all due respect to classic Japanese equipment, most vintage systems cannot match the resolution, soundstage depth, and realism of the best modern high-end systems. That does not mean they sound bad. Many of them remain wonderfully musical and deeply enjoyable. But their performance ceiling is generally lower than that of the finest contemporary designs. As a result, cable differences may be much smaller—or effectively inaudible—in those systems.

The same principle applies to many blind tests.

People often conduct cable comparisons under conditions where hearing a meaningful difference would be extremely difficult.

A mid-level system.

Suboptimal speaker placement.

Entry-level or mid-tier cables.

Many cable comparisons begin with assumptions that may not reflect the mechanisms being tested. If someone believes cables primarily improve conductivity, they may replace one or two cables in an otherwise unchanged system and conclude that nothing happened. But a single untreated cable located near sensitive components may be enough to limit the benefits of several better cables elsewhere in the system.

Under those conditions, no audible difference may exist. But that does not prove that differences never exist. It only proves that no difference was audible in that particular system under those particular conditions.

If you want to conduct a meaningful experiment, the process is relatively simple. Find a highly resolving system operating close to its potential - a system similar to the one featured in the video linked through the QR code in this article. A system capable of producing a deep soundstage and revealing subtle spatial information. Listen carefully. Then replace a couple of critical cables with ordinary ones. You are unlikely to be searching for microscopic differences. The change will often be substantial. The system may lose a surprisingly large portion of its capabilities.

Over the years, I have stopped thinking about cables as a matter of belief or disbelief. For me, they have become a matter of observation. Reasonable people can debate the size of the effect. They can debate value for money. They can debate which cable manufacturers genuinely solve meaningful problems and which rely primarily on marketing.

Those discussions are worth having.

But the question of whether cables can influence an audio system's performance at all was settled for me long ago. I'm not interested in converting anyone. My goal here has been to describe the path that led me to my own conclusions after years of experimentation and observation.

I will add only one final detail.

Since my conversation with that European manufacturer, new technologies have appeared that attempt to address electromagnetic contamination in entirely different ways. Some rely on small active devices that create an environment around the equipment intended to minimize unwanted electromagnetic interaction without relying solely on cable construction. But that is a subject for another article.

       

Paul Gerbert, Independent Audio Consultant

Helping audiophiles navigate an expensive and confusing hobby through smarter decisions and long-term planning.