Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

Good answer Drubin. I'll try not to type / think when i'm asleep next time. Or this time : ) Sean
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Hi Sean,

Thanks for an incredibly content-rich post!

Actually, I also have you to thank for helping me choose Goertz cables as one of the candidates for my recent cable comparison exercise- I spent a lot of time following your discussions with John Risch and others over on the asylum. As I mentioned elsewhere, (see previous post for link) the Goertz sonic performance in my system was unequaled by anything else that I tried.

Without doing a lot more reading, and probably taking a community college electronics course or two, I can't comment that well on your evaluation of design advantages in Goertz cables- I'll trust you ;-).

However, I can make some subjective comments on what these cables 'do right' and hope that you can suggest some ideas for causality based on your electronics knowledge.

The overwhelming difference between the Goertz and everything else (my system, listening environment, musical tastes, etc. etc.- disclaimers and qualifiers get annoying after a while so I'll stop from here on out...) has to do with coherence of the spatial image. There are also frequency balance differences, etc, but for these, other cables are on relatively more even footing with the Goertz.

I tend to break spatial coherence down into two components- for the first, I've heard the term 'splashiness' used- basically, this is a tendency for the image to expand and contract with volume changes, for inner detail and soundstage layering to contract at higher volumes, and in extreme instances, for instrumental images to break up into false echoes. The most clear-cut 'reference track' I use to evaluate this is the Maria Joao Pires/Chamber Orchestra of Europe recording of the Schumann Piano Concerto on Deutsche Grammophon- great playing, but until recently, a frustrating recording to listen to.

What can happen on this recording is that the piano image expands and contracts with volume, and has poorly defined reverbations and echoes that give the impression of coming from virtual and shifting surfaces within the performance hall. The same is true for orchestral passages- these can tend to pop out of nowhere to create a large soundstage with lots of reverb and echoes during loud passages, then contract back during softer passages.

Using the Goertz cables, these effects are gone. What I hear instead is a focused, stable piano image, with reverbations now coming from within the piano's body, and consistent echo cues coming from a performance space whose surfaces and dimensions don't change with volume. The orchestra is all there, and more importantly, stays in the same place- again, spatial cues from echoes give none of the shifting virtual surface impression.

The second component of coherence is a tendency for different frequency components emanating from the same sonic source to become spatially decoupled. As a reference example, I use the Earl Wild Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #2 on Chesky- again, a beautiful performance, but really hard to listen to until recently.

What can happen here is that the massed, unison string passages get completely swamped by 'hash and grit' that seems to float over everything. Think 'orchestra accompanied by bee swarm'. This effect is particularly horrible for muted playing.

With the Goertz cables, this tendency goes away- what I hear instead is that the massed strings are now fully localized, and their fundamental sounds are coherently associated with the higher-frequency bow/rosin 'buzz' that comes from the rapid bow speed they are using. The perceived 'harshness' arising from the 'hash and grit' is gone.

I could toss out uninformed hypothesizing, but it's probably better to leave it at that for now, and let you use it as food for thought.

Cheers,

Sean -
A comment on your comment on mechanical resonance in cables. I don't argue the existence of microphonics at all. Though cables that can shake a component chassis have to be *really* big and heavy; it's much more common that a cable attached to a component at one or both ends will have vibration transferred to it by the component.

Anyway, I've experienced at least a dozen cables with various implementations of resonance damping. The common property I've heard is a lowered noise floor, so that more low level information is audible, but an annoying lack of clear focus in the imaging. There may, or may not, also be a damping of dynamics. In other words, what appears to be a loss of fine phasing and timing information. I can't provide the hardware analogy, but I'd characterize it as reducing an additive noise floor while convolving the signal with a broadening or smearing function. So there may well be a problem either at macro- or microlevels, but [some] solutions may be worse than the problem. And of course, this is all second hand conjecture as to causes. The sonic effects may be due to something else entirely. Cable issues could stand a large research budget.

Cables have been researched extensively in both aerospace and computer science, but I suppose you'd have to say, with different objectives. Not with respect to audible effects, and not for the highly 'experimental' geometries/materials tried out by audio cable designers. Some audio companies do use designers with this background and make extensive use of modelling (e.g. Nordost, according to their website). But it would cost serious money to study what the effects of, say, mechanical resonance do in physical and electrical terms, and there are no percentages in it unless it affects something besides audio.

I wonder also how many sonic effects are just due to poor construction and quality control in audio cable manufacture.