What's the last word on audio cable?

[bodhi]

This is terrible advice. Ignore anyone selling unsupported bunkum.

It seems like there has been a lot of cable discussion in several threads lately. This is kind of bad as it leads to the infamous "discussion on subject is ongoing even in ASR" claim that I think could already be found somewhere.

I mean if you know the scene you know that there has been no new developments, no new facts, in this area and you can ignore the babble, but that's hard to do if you have just started your journey.

 

[fpitas]

I mean if you know the scene you know that there has been no new developments, no new facts, in this area and you can ignore the babble, but that's hard to do if you have just started your journey.

Well, that's the sticking point. Easy to say, ignore the technobabble. But then the noobs won't know what is real, or internet noise.

 

[Ricardus]

Cables obviously matter. Everything the signal passes through matters. It's just basic physics. Cables all have different material composition, filament density and number, layers, termination, solder, shielding, etc. Whether you can hear a difference and whether the difference you hear is enough to justify the cost in your opinion is an entirely separate and entirely personal issue that only you can resolve.

My advice would be to pick the ones you can afford where you seem to enjoy the music most.

Ignore anyone who says you can't hear differences. Just the way some people wear glasses and some don't, we all have different hearing. And what matters is what you hear, not what anyone else says.

Cables literally don't matter.

 

[Ricardus]

You must be new here.

I'm guessing it's just a troll account. I mean look at it. It's about 8 hours old.

 

[fpitas]

I'm guessing it's just a troll account. I mean look at it. It's about 8 hours old.

Yes, and only special people can view it. Fishy.

 

[Mnyb]

It does have a certain tendency towards breaking / becoming intermittent though.

It's funny how 25-30 years ago, using CCAW voicecoils in headphone drivers was considered a premium feature - mind you, it does make sense in this context, with Al being not that much worse in conductivity but substantially less dense, so you can reduce moving mass like that.

I think my dynaudio speakers I owned way back had ccaw or possible pure alu voice coils ?

Never seen ccaw in speaker cable format in Sweden ( or as installation wire ) . Pure aluminium for 3 phase power or motors sure see them every day, but these are thick as my arm .

My advice would be buy normal speaker cable from reputable vendors , done .

I would not trust Ali express or similar

 

[egellings]

Cables obviously matter. Everything the signal passes through matters. It's just basic physics. Cables all have different material composition, filament density and number, layers, termination, solder, shielding, etc. Whether you can hear a difference and whether the difference you hear is enough to justify the cost in your opinion is an entirely separate and entirely personal issue that only you can resolve.

My advice would be to pick the ones you can afford where you seem to enjoy the music most.

Ignore anyone who says you can't hear differences. Just the way some people wear glasses and some don't, we all have different hearing. And what matters is what you hear, not what anyone else says.

What you imagine you hear...

 

[Veri]

Ignore anyone who says you can't hear differences. Just the way some people wear glasses and some don't, we all have different hearing.

What the actual fuck is that comparison though..

 

[fpitas]

What the actual fuck is that comparison though..

It's almost as if we're being being, uhm...there's a word for puzzling, insincere posts that inflame. It will come to me in time.

 

[DonR]

It's almost as if we're being being, uhm...there's a word for puzzling, insincere posts that inflame. It will come to me in time.

 

[Waxx]

It does have a certain tendency towards breaking / becoming intermittent though.

It's funny how 25-30 years ago, using CCAW voicecoils in headphone drivers was considered a premium feature - mind you, it does make sense in this context, with Al being not that much worse in conductivity but substantially less dense, so you can reduce moving mass like that.

there it's advantage (light weight) is bigger than it's disadvantage (higher resistance), but in speaker cables that extra weight is irrelevant, and the higher resistance is relevant as it affects the damping of the driver, altough with minor effect on relative short distances. And the faster breaking is also not good, but also not a big problem. But if we are nitpickig, cca is not good compared to copper.

But for other applications cca or even pure aluminium cable can be good. I used to work (as IT consultant) for the Belgian railways and copper cable theft is a major problem there, so now the new cables that are laid since a few years are all aluminium as the copper theft causes massive delays and angry customers. Aluminium cable theft is not profitable (prices for aluminium are to low) so where those are there are no thefts anymore and the delays and cancelled trains because of that are disappearing slowly...

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Oh heavens. Yet another cable thread. What’s allegedly new this time and hasn’t been discussed a gazillion times before?

 

[delta76]

Cables obviously matter. Everything the signal passes through matters. It's just basic physics. Cables all have different material composition, filament density and number, layers, termination, solder, shielding, etc. Whether you can hear a difference and whether the difference you hear is enough to justify the cost in your opinion is an entirely separate and entirely personal issue that only you can resolve.

My advice would be to pick the ones you can afford where you seem to enjoy the music most.

Ignore anyone who says you can't hear differences. Just the way some people wear glasses and some don't, we all have different hearing. And what matters is what you hear, not what anyone else says.

You are kidding right?

Cables are done deal. I don't think Amir should spend time test just any cables (maybe one or two with ridiculous price or "features"). His time is not unlimited and we have way too many equipment which reviews are much more meaningful

 

[JRS]

Cables literally don't matter.

They do if you don't have them. Back in the day cables were speaker wire and anything else an interconnects. I'm a 16 gauge buy it by. the spool kinda guy--prefer flat for runs of more than a few feet that I can tack to walls. I have some dressier blue/black braided stuff I use when I can (under 8 feet} I bought 30 years ago. So far no signs of wear, but god knows those copper atoms must be getting tired.

 

[threni]

What’s allegedly new this time and hasn’t been discussed a gazillion times before?

Some people wear glasses. Do try to keep up!

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Some people wear glasses. Do try to keep up!

Yes very enlightening. You made my point.

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

The glasses comparison is quite funny (despite the obvious trolling of the poster). I mean I wear glasses because without them I literally can't make out letters on a page 2 feet in front of my face. Glasses on - clear as a bell. Glasses off - blurry unreadable mess. if boutique cables made a difference like that nobody would be calling them snake-oil. A more accurate comparison for the audio cable snake-oil would be two different pairs of glasses, both of exactly the same magnification, and both providing perfectly sharp vision such that if you didn't know which you were wearing you wouldn't be able to distinguish them at all - but the more expensive pair supposedly provides better "clarity" thanks to the chemical composition of the special frames.

The last word on cables is unless there's something terribly wrong (aka defective) about them, you won't be hearing anything differently. Get decent, reasonably-priced (pretty inexpensive) stuff and you're set.

 

[simplywyn]

@simplywyn, my advice is, don't listen to people who tells you that you can hear something others can't and measurements and common sense don't support.

We all hear differences from run to run, with or without changing cables.

I'm an electrical engineer, and I've never understood "speaker" wires in general. Let me tell you how stupid and ridiculous this entire industry is:

We buy expensive wires because of two things (according to speaker sales people)
1. Picking up radio interference (I will tell you how wholesomely stupid and idiotic this is)
2. Reducing so called "impedance" to the speaker

So how radios work is that they have long antennas (which are likey our speaker wires) that pick up micro watts of radio frequency. You then send this radio frequency, which is saturated with noise in some kind of filter to find the actual information, then you AMPLIFY that sound to produce what we know as radio.

Now, when these crazy lunatics talk about radios frequencies interacting with our speakers, where exactly do these frequencies come in? From Computer to DAC, usually a tiny USB cable, and that's DIGITAL doesn't matter how much noise you're sending, the bits are getting there digitally. Hence the DIGITAL TO ANALOGUE CONVERTER, in the name (duh, idiots). The only thing you'll be able to hear is maybe some sonic difference in terms of how they convert the sound due to hardware.

From DAC to Amplifier, if you use a RCA cable, you MIGHT pick up radio frequencies here, but then again at 5V, I don't see how and radio frequency will even enter this equation. On top of that, both DAC and Amp have tons of filters that remove and reduce this unnecessary noise. AC noise from your power port is far far far stronger than radio freuqncies travelling through the air. Furthermore, your cables are typically shielded, any basic RCA cable that isn't super thin is shielded from radio frequencies. On top of that, once you go XLR all external freuqncies are gone, donezo.

But I'm not done, we're just getting to the good part.

So now this is where we buy the expensive $500 cables, from AMP to SPEAKER. And this is where when I put on my electrical engineer hat, where this industry becomes a complete fraud (read my fraud post). Power that comes out of a AMP to SPEAKER is at up to 700W. Radio frequencies have less than 2 x 10^-24W since they fly through the air!

Tell me exactly how a radio frequency or any frequency of that matter (wifi, cell phone, etc) can even remotely affect your cables from AMP to SPEAKER? You're amp is already pumping out enormous power, think of a dam opening it's locks and incredible pressure water comes out. And now you're saying, if you throw some bottled water into that water, you'll be able to discern the difference between resevoir water and dasani?

On the talk of impedance - the impedance of a wire is almost neglible in the distances we're talking about. We're talking about milliohm's of impedance. There's zero chance you can even hear the difference. And more interestingly, all it does it reduce the power going to the speaker, and all you have to do is increase the power to match (that is impedance overall). That's all it is, nothing more. If you want to feel what it is, just put a tiny resistor in the path of any speaker to see what impedance sounds like. You'll find that it's nothing at all.

Having said that, I've taken out my 4x$170 speaker wires and put in amazon basic 10AWG wires. Sounds the same.

I'll be selling them on my nearby audiomart for the next sucker.

Selling broken in wires for cheap! Burned in wires!

 

[Mnyb]

Yes large cross section and short , that’s all you have to do , the amazon cables are one choice that works

 

[xaviescacs]

I'm an electrical engineer, and I've never understood "speaker" wires in general. Let me tell you how stupid and ridiculous this entire industry is:

We buy expensive wires because of two things (according to speaker sales people)
1. Picking up radio interference (I will tell you how wholesomely stupid and idiotic this is)
2. Reducing so called "impedance" to the speaker

So how radios work is that they have long antennas (which are likey our speaker wires) that pick up micro watts of radio frequency. You then send this radio frequency, which is saturated with noise in some kind of filter to find the actual information, then you AMPLIFY that sound to produce what we know as radio.

Now, when these crazy lunatics talk about radios frequencies interacting with our speakers, where exactly do these frequencies come in? From Computer to DAC, usually a tiny USB cable, and that's DIGITAL doesn't matter how much noise you're sending, the bits are getting there digitally. Hence the DIGITAL TO ANALOGUE CONVERTER, in the name (duh, idiots). The only thing you'll be able to hear is maybe some sonic difference in terms of how they convert the sound due to hardware.

From DAC to Amplifier, if you use a RCA cable, you MIGHT pick up radio frequencies here, but then again at 5V, I don't see how and radio frequency will even enter this equation. On top of that, both DAC and Amp have tons of filters that remove and reduce this unnecessary noise. AC noise from your power port is far far far stronger than radio freuqncies travelling through the air. Furthermore, your cables are typically shielded, any basic RCA cable that isn't super thin is shielded from radio frequencies. On top of that, once you go XLR all external freuqncies are gone, donezo.

But I'm not done, we're just getting to the good part.

So now this is where we buy the expensive $500 cables, from AMP to SPEAKER. And this is where when I put on my electrical engineer hat, where this industry becomes a complete fraud (read my fraud post). Power that comes out of a AMP to SPEAKER is at up to 700W. Radio frequencies have less than 2 x 10^-24W since they fly through the air!

Tell me exactly how a radio frequency or any frequency of that matter (wifi, cell phone, etc) can even remotely affect your cables from AMP to SPEAKER? You're amp is already pumping out enormous power, think of a dam opening it's locks and incredible pressure water comes out. And now you're saying, if you throw some bottled water into that water, you'll be able to discern the difference between resevoir water and dasani?

On the talk of impedance - the impedance of a wire is almost neglible in the distances we're talking about. We're talking about milliohm's of impedance. There's zero chance you can even hear the difference. And more interestingly, all it does it reduce the power going to the speaker, and all you have to do is increase the power to match (that is impedance overall). That's all it is, nothing more. If you want to feel what it is, just put a tiny resistor in the path of any speaker to see what impedance sounds like. You'll find that it's nothing at all.

Having said that, I've taken out my 4x$170 speaker wires and put in amazon basic 10AWG wires. Sounds the same.

I'll be selling them on my nearby audiomart for the next sucker.

Selling broken in wires for cheap! Burned in wires!

Haha nice post. I have a physics degree earned 15 years ago and that gives me some scattered knowledge, but I don't have any professional experience working with EM.

There is a whole marketing strategy based on using real physical phenomenon like induction to justify tweaks and alleged improvements on cables.

I believe we can then classify each tweak in three categories:

- Tweaks that just make no sense from a physical point of view. Pure scam.
- Tweaks that physically make sense, theoretically, but the difference in orders of magnitude make them completely negligible. This is another scam, but more subtle and difficult to identify.
- Tweaks that make sense physically and can be more or less proven to be meaningful in some extreme cases, like star quad design in balanced cables. Here each one has to decide if the scenario is likely to happen and the price difference is worth it.

For some time I didn't fall victim of this jargon but almost, because all that explanations about induction and some other things can make sense at first glance if you don't have the numbers in your head, which I hadn't. So it's kind of cruel because the more you know or you think you know, the better prey your are, more reliable it seems all that marketing, or at least some of them. But then someone with experience starts making some calculations and some simple examples like the energy one you propose...

The tricky thing here is because most of the time is a matter of magnitude, one can still construct situations in which one can approach a transformer or a magnet to a cable and hear some noise, amplified of course. I believe setting the threshold to decide whether an effect is relevant or not can't be done generally, and one should look at each specific case which of course is not possible, and that leaves always an open door to create doubts, suggest situations where a better shielding may be necessary, etc.

Personally, after reading many post by experts and very experienced people here like DonH56, SIY or solderdude my take out is that as a general rule, cables don't matter as far as signal transmission. Length, terminations, flexibility, durability... those are the variables that matter. My rules to buy cables are very simple: for speaker cables buy any copper cable and add decent terminations. For other cables just trust pro brands like Cordial, Sommer, Klotz, Lindy and buy the shortest possible for the application. My current threshold price is about 30 € and I don't buy the star quad story.