Presented purely for interest.
TLDR:
1) Differences in cables exist and can be measured at the audio level and achieve statistically significant differences
2) The differences are vanishingly small, so it doesn't make sense when listening to audio
3) The differences may make a difference when measuring gear
4) These tests will be repeated when my E1DA Cosmos Grade-A unit arrives later this week.
I'm going to tell the whole story and the process I took.
Background, Korg DS-DAC-10R in loopback mode. This isn't a high performance DAC/ADC but it does have a clean power supply, easy to access RCA jacks and it's pretty consistent. It's consistently noisy and consistently distorted from run to run. My main goal was to run through a few different software options in preparation of my incoming E1DA Cosmos ADC.
Cables on test:
1) Silver plated copper, flat ribbon cable, unshielded. I thought it sounded pretty good and then I tried it where I had RF interference and ditched it. I actually wanted to send it to Amir a few years back, but cable testing was a low priority. This is the cable shown here:
and here is proof I thought they sounded different.
2) Monster Cable Ultra Series 800 "THX" Certified
Got these as a freebie with something I bought.
3) Straight Wire Virtuoso 3 (JBL Synthesis branded)
Got a bunch of these and I also thought it sounded noticeably better than I bought more. These came from eBay from a pulled system.
First Experiment
RMAA loopback.
I ran the cables A->B->C->C->B->A sequentially and got this:
No real difference but it was interesting that the noise and dynamic range of the silver cables were very different from the Straight Wires. If you just throw them as aggregate as unpaired student's t-test, it's p < 0.0001
Next I ran multitone tests, no real difference. I felt as if there were differences in the subjective SHAPE of the noise in the bass area
This is where it gets very interesting
1. I don't know why the Straightwire delivered an extra dB during one run. I didn't change anything.
2. Notice the humps at ~15 kHz and 20kHz.
I then decided to run a test tone at exactly 15kHz
These tests are run serially. That is, I ran the full set of 50 Hz test tones. Then ran the full set of 15 kHz test tones. (I changed the cables 6 times not 3 times).
With these sets of tests, it was pretty clear that the left and right cables were different with the straight wire. We're still looking at a difference that is vanishingly small, but you do see differences.
Reversing the cables shows that the humps follow the cable.
Since I had multiple StraightWire cables, I found some replacements and measured them again. Boom. Really clean results. This was about 1 hour later.
Immediately after getting these flat results with the newer cable, I went back to the broken cable 1 hour later after the original set of tests to ensure that it wasn't random noise in the system somewhere
If you compare the 15 kHz results between the Monster Cable and the working Straight Wire cables:
TLDR:
1) Differences in cables exist and can be measured at the audio level and achieve statistically significant differences
2) The differences are vanishingly small, so it doesn't make sense when listening to audio
3) The differences may make a difference when measuring gear
4) These tests will be repeated when my E1DA Cosmos Grade-A unit arrives later this week.
I'm going to tell the whole story and the process I took.
Background, Korg DS-DAC-10R in loopback mode. This isn't a high performance DAC/ADC but it does have a clean power supply, easy to access RCA jacks and it's pretty consistent. It's consistently noisy and consistently distorted from run to run. My main goal was to run through a few different software options in preparation of my incoming E1DA Cosmos ADC.
Cables on test:
1) Silver plated copper, flat ribbon cable, unshielded. I thought it sounded pretty good and then I tried it where I had RF interference and ditched it. I actually wanted to send it to Amir a few years back, but cable testing was a low priority. This is the cable shown here:
2) Monster Cable Ultra Series 800 "THX" Certified
Got these as a freebie with something I bought.
3) Straight Wire Virtuoso 3 (JBL Synthesis branded)
Got a bunch of these and I also thought it sounded noticeably better than I bought more. These came from eBay from a pulled system.
First Experiment
RMAA loopback.
I ran the cables A->B->C->C->B->A sequentially and got this:
No real difference but it was interesting that the noise and dynamic range of the silver cables were very different from the Straight Wires. If you just throw them as aggregate as unpaired student's t-test, it's p < 0.0001
Next I ran multitone tests, no real difference. I felt as if there were differences in the subjective SHAPE of the noise in the bass area
This is where it gets very interesting
1. I don't know why the Straightwire delivered an extra dB during one run. I didn't change anything.
2. Notice the humps at ~15 kHz and 20kHz.
I then decided to run a test tone at exactly 15kHz
These tests are run serially. That is, I ran the full set of 50 Hz test tones. Then ran the full set of 15 kHz test tones. (I changed the cables 6 times not 3 times).
With these sets of tests, it was pretty clear that the left and right cables were different with the straight wire. We're still looking at a difference that is vanishingly small, but you do see differences.
Reversing the cables shows that the humps follow the cable.
Since I had multiple StraightWire cables, I found some replacements and measured them again. Boom. Really clean results. This was about 1 hour later.
Immediately after getting these flat results with the newer cable, I went back to the broken cable 1 hour later after the original set of tests to ensure that it wasn't random noise in the system somewhere
If you compare the 15 kHz results between the Monster Cable and the working Straight Wire cables: