Cable elevators - conventional wisdom wrong?

Might I suggest that you first try the following cable lifters, which I suspect must have been mentioned in some previous post. They will give you the opportunity to run a listening test prior to any purchase. Each cable lifter is comprised of three wooden chopsticks and a rubber band that binds them about 1/5 of the way down their length. Spread the long ends into a tripod and secure them down in the weave of the carpet. The shorter ends above the rubber band create a “basket” that should secure most cables. My Supra Swords are not the most well behaved cables and two of these little tripods support a spiral of three passes behind one of my speakers. They also present a very small visual signature.

If your letter carrier delivers your mail bundled with rubber bands and you order Chinese take-out every so often this experiment will cost you only your time. Good luck.

There is no electrical benefit to raising your speaker cable off of the carpet. What noise are you going to couple from a static charge, and how are you going to couple it? The static is not changing so you are not going to couple it via capacitance or inductance. You could run your speaker cable over the top of the terminals of a couple car batteries and it wouldn't make any difference. As to mechanical vibrations, those are not going to get coupled through your speaker cable. You can pick the cable up and shake it and you won't measure a difference in the audio signal (so long as you have good connections at the amp and speaker - and if not, the solution is some type of strain releif of grommet system, not keeping the cable off the carpet.) Try a little experiment. Have someone sit with their back to you listening to music. Pick up a section of cable and move it in front of a CRT. Then take the section of cable and tap it or shake it. Your "blind" observer won't hear any difference in the audio. Perhaps the report of Dark Field elevator only applies to situations involving the Dark Side of the Force. Seriously, from an engineering standpoint this is nonsense, makes about as much sense as passing a magnet over your brachial artery to align the iron in your blood - and I am sure that someone would notice a big subjective difference if they tried that too - they would just "feel better". Spend money on something that actually makes sense. Your carpet is not hurting your audio. Next time you go to a concert see where the cables lie for the recording equipment.

I have also been trying out these techniques with my Cardas speaker cables.
To the contrary, the effects were mixed! It worked at first. The mids and highs were cleaner, the image rose higher. But after a few days, the system sounded as if some bass had been cut off, the mids were also coloured. At the end, I took off all the treatments and it just sounded more natural!

Musicnoise, Thank you! Very entertaining, and very much to the point.

When we talk about elevating speaker cable off the floor, we never talk about the embarrassment factor. What do you say to your mother-in-law? I finally concluded that, if there is a difference, I don't want to know. I'm glad to hear that there are some technical reasons why I need not lose much sleep over this one.