A butt-load spent in cables - how much improvemt?

I believe the expression is "...a boat load of money..." rather than "butt-load". But wait, are you incarcerated?

Jim Davis has the right of it. However if you spend more and hear a difference, then you do, and thats all that matters! Can you imagine Mike Lavigne, with his excellent system, with lamp cord as speaker cables... He would be mortified but the vast majority in a DBX test would NEVER hear the difference. A sad but true fact. I think Randi has a million dollars for anyone who can hear the difference.

I wonder what group of people participated in the double-blinds. It may be the masses. For example in double-blind tests, the results show most people can't tell the diff between Coke and Pepsi. A friend of mine said I couldn't tell the difference on that as well as some other items. I proved him wrong in every case. I think it would be the same with cables as well.

I think it's the same with audio. My wife says she can't hear any differences in my various audio setups. I can clearly detect differences in cables alone. I found the differences became more pronounced the more I upgraded my system. I'm running a Krell now and find it's very sensitive to not just cables but to any sort of source. On my previous two systems (Marantz and NAD) the differences were noticeable but considerably less than the Krell.

Cables have inherent capacitance and conductance. These attributes and resistance are the components of a filter. With high input impedance you can imagine the multiplying effect this is going to contribute the filter parameters. My ears tell me there's a difference and scientifically there's a basis.

regards, David

I don't think anyone will argue, for instance, that capacitance will affect sound. However, it's not going to cost a lot of money to simply find a lower or higher capacitance cable.

Where people start to wonder what is going on is when the cable makers start to use a lot of other "science" to explain why you should spend thousands of dollars on their product. R&D costs something,ads and small part manufacture are issues for making small quanities of anything (though they don't have machining costs in cable manufacturing generally) but wire is fairly cheap.

The very idea that 30K speaker cables exist scares a lot of people.

Bin, I would go one step further and contend not only that the vast majority would hear no difference in a double-blind test, but that the vast majority of those who claim they CAN hear a difference would likewise fail said double-blind test. This has been pretty well demonstrated and documented.