I was a sceptic until I recently did my own tests. On interconnects I did repeated testing playing the same 1 minute section of music over and over. I was swapping the $4 per pair generic black interconnects you get with most cheap stereo gear, with Kimber Select KS-1030 silver interconnects $800 per pair. The effect was quite pronounced. In particular, with the cheap stuff, a section with a tambourine on top of a drum which was being hit, was muffling the drum and blending in with it. The drum was just a "thumping" sound. With the great interconnects, the entire effect was different: the drum was hit first, it was nicely pronounced and tonally rich. A fraction of a second later, the tambourine rattled and jangled... it was clearly subordinate to the drum. Here is an example where the entire sonic precedence of instruments changed by varying the interconnects.
Are the Kimbers 400 times better than the el-cheapos? No. But they are much much better.
Speaker cables: last night I decided to experiment with ultra-cheap 20 gauge zip wire speaker cable. (I lived with this stuff all through my twenties. :-) I removed my 12 gauge thick copper speaker cables with gold plugs and replaced with the cheapo zip cables. Did repeated swapping on a well memorized 2 minute section of classical music.
With the cheap stuff, the imaging was much blurred. There was no crip 3D soundstage either. Many instruments congealed together into a fuzzy, ill-defined image. Bass tonal richness was gone (color, as they say, went from bronze to grey). I repeated the test over and over and it was clear that the thicker cables we much improved.
I will repeat the test soon with some nice Nordost Blue Heavens, which have more silver content.
It's pretty obvious to me now that the material of the cable (silver versus copper) can make a big difference. I cannot really quantify the effects of wire topology or biwiring without more experimenting.
--------
Methodology. It seems to me that the best way to test all this stuff would be to put a computer on the end, next to a speaker, and to AtoD what comes out of the speaker cable. Swap the cables. Then compare in the digital domain the differences. It would be pretty possible then to have a quantifiable way to measure what is going on.
I say to put the AtoD in parallel with the speaker only because speakers create demand on the current that will affect what comes across, whereas replacing with a computer will have completely different current characteristics.
Is there some nice hardware and software for a PC that can do this? Must be.....
Are the Kimbers 400 times better than the el-cheapos? No. But they are much much better.
Speaker cables: last night I decided to experiment with ultra-cheap 20 gauge zip wire speaker cable. (I lived with this stuff all through my twenties. :-) I removed my 12 gauge thick copper speaker cables with gold plugs and replaced with the cheapo zip cables. Did repeated swapping on a well memorized 2 minute section of classical music.
With the cheap stuff, the imaging was much blurred. There was no crip 3D soundstage either. Many instruments congealed together into a fuzzy, ill-defined image. Bass tonal richness was gone (color, as they say, went from bronze to grey). I repeated the test over and over and it was clear that the thicker cables we much improved.
I will repeat the test soon with some nice Nordost Blue Heavens, which have more silver content.
It's pretty obvious to me now that the material of the cable (silver versus copper) can make a big difference. I cannot really quantify the effects of wire topology or biwiring without more experimenting.
--------
Methodology. It seems to me that the best way to test all this stuff would be to put a computer on the end, next to a speaker, and to AtoD what comes out of the speaker cable. Swap the cables. Then compare in the digital domain the differences. It would be pretty possible then to have a quantifiable way to measure what is going on.
I say to put the AtoD in parallel with the speaker only because speakers create demand on the current that will affect what comes across, whereas replacing with a computer will have completely different current characteristics.
Is there some nice hardware and software for a PC that can do this? Must be.....