Do expensive cables/wires REALLY make a difference

Yes, yes and yes, cables are hughly important. And no, one need not spent a small fortune to potentiate your high end pieces. There are excellent bang for buck products out there that often trump the more expensive offerings. Check out the cable company's lending library and try to bring home as many products as you can. The profit margin is hugh when it comes to cable so never pay retail. It's a mine field out there and everyone has a different opinion.Take your time. On a personal note, I just changed out some of my cables (not for the first time) and my system has gone from mid-fi to hi-fi. Want to buy some cables? Just kidding.

When I played around with interconnect cables a while back, there was an obvious difference between, say the Anti-cables and the Audio Art IC3. The IC3 was more open and detailed.

Sebrof
yes they do happen. Double blind testing and yes the chance of picking out is usually just chance that means no better than 50/50. If you don't believe why not conduct your own and maybe just maybe you will walk away a little more humbled.

01-10-13: Schipo
Sebrof
yes they do happen. Double blind testing and yes the chance of picking out is usually just chance that means no better than 50/50. If you don't believe why not conduct your own and maybe just maybe you will walk away a little more humbled.

Wow, that sounds like a win/win or lose/lose proposition depending on your POV. If you get it wrong, congrats, cables don't matter, if you get it right, cables still don't matter, you just got lucky. WTF???

Seconding a point that was made earlier in the thread by Nick_sr, the degree to which cables will make a difference depends not only on the intrinsic characteristics and quality of the cable, and on the quality and musical resolution of the system, but perhaps just as significantly or even more so on interactions between the technical characteristics of the cable and those of what it is connecting. Impedances, for instance, among many other dependencies that could be cited which have no direct relation to the sonic quality of the system.

See my post dated 12-15-12 here for a summary of many of those interactions and dependencies. That post also describes a couple of examples of how a given cable can sometimes even have exactly opposite sonic effects depending on what it is connecting.

It should therefore be kept in mind that the ability of a system to resolve musical detail, and its ability to resolve differences between cables, are two different things. And sometimes there may even be an inverse relationship between the two.

Finally, it should be kept in mind that the sonic effects of line-level analog interconnects and speaker cables will be proportional to their length. A reduction in length will bring the performance of those cables closer to neutrality (i.e., closer to having no sonic effects), everything else being equal. That is not necessarily the case, though, with digital cables, phono cables, and power cords, due to the complexity and/or unpredictability of the interactions that are involved.

Regards,
-- Al