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speaker cable vs speaker model

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genesisaudiorack

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i was in another post and a overzealous mod accused me of trying to propagate misinformation which i did not believe to be such because my experience was first hand. thats okay it doesnt hurt my feelings. yesterday i had a old analog head (one of my clients for work) at my place and i was having the same discussion with him. he reminded me that he himself BOTH was on the fence about the cable break in but was not entirely discouraged of the concept & he mentioned that most people will never be able to achieve upgraded results. let me elaborate.....and my intenet is to be detailed and respectful.

he was also sneakily reminding me during my journey i went through three speakers just in the last year alone. the discussion took a hard turn instantly when i was reminded that the entire cable and speaker tech journey was not anecdotal but rather results driven. was it based on money? or was it solely based on "audible qualities".
what am i talking about?

he referenced a specific point that i was not able to explain at the time;
(ill always argue the devils advocate before making a claim, so ill deny till i can explain or hear for instance)
the concept that speakers themselves have a clear benefit to determine if a user can establish results themselves, or if it becomes UN-noticeable. technically both in amps and cables.

i went through three floor standing speakers, klipsch, monitor audio, to a revel.
i was encouraged to reflect back on exactly the environment changes i made, procedures and testing i did to determine what i would settle on.

first i had klipsch reference premiere rp-8000ii and i knew i probably should have went with the rf-7 but i didn't because i thought my room was too small at the time. i used three different cables, but ended up on a pine tree audio second set, that was his highest copper cable offered. i enjoyed this as it was better than the other cable i got from him and a previous ofc copper cable i got. side note, out of the three other intercoonect cables ive tried the morrow were the quietest. i did get some interference with pine tree on the braided set but not the sheilded set, but the shielded set sounded a bit soft. this is not relevent to the post here....i degresssssssss.

the klip speaker sounded a bit glassy and untammed, so i upgraded to the largest monitor audio model and then used the same cables as tests, and applied many hours on them. settling on the pine tree audio. after some time, either my listening style or arrangement in the room changed. i felt like i was not get the concerto i expected or got when the cables and monitor audio speakers were more new. subjectively this may be the speaker and cables breaking in and smoothening out. i felt like i lost that punch or snappy snare sound in the drums. i decidced to start trying better cables. i got morrow cables. installed them and listened to them for like 100 hours at high volume for days straight. i may have beleived they were properly broken in but there was no way to tell. even at 100+ hours it was entirely inaudible to my ear. when i say this i mean major anticipation was lost.

i dont need to get into why i made my next decision or who convinced me to take the leap, but i bought revel 328be speakers. i was on the fence going to send back my morrow audio cable. so i started back up with the pine tree audio and listened to them for maybe a week or more to develop the ear for the combination. prior to selling the more expensive cables.....i put morrow back the revels. and it was a absolute audible difference. i went back to the monitor audio and i still had them as i was selling on craigslist...and tried both cables again. no audible or noticeable difference both sounded the same-ish. i started back up morrow on the revels and put 200 or so more hours on them. maybe about 2 months ago i put the pine tree audio up on craigslist and decided to do a test again to see if i was on one and would get more money selling my morrow cables and boy was i in for a validation. there was a difference.

yesterday i was remninded the character of a speaker/cab and different cables can lead to more brittle, soft, or null sound. there are articles ive read in the past for audiophile testers as well as youtube videos where people will experiment and swap cables to round out the sound they want from testing speakers. is this a direct material science thing? or just a materials and application result.

ive come to conclusion that if you take any set of wonderful sounding speakers, and some speaker wire tests. you may not actually get results. but why is it that when more expensive or higher grade speakers are used, you can actually hear the difference and its not small by any means. he was confident that unless you use a high end setup, you may never hear the difference in cables. if you use a floor model basic rig and middle of the road speakers - and try and do a blind test it may not be the best way to make a determinatioon. it would be in the sense that if you are buying middle of the road hardware maybe you can only really validate spending a certain amount of money on cables based on your hearing and capabilities or the hardware. why buy expensive cables if your entire stereo setup is a few grand at best or less. it would be illogical, insensible, and not worth it.

post directed to the guys who have or own now exceptional speaker combinations with high end wire and amps..... did you guys notice these subtle and immediate performance and audible quality differences in your begining journey in home audio. or did it come when the painfull upgrades were accomplished.
 
It's psychoacoustics and self-conviction.
Invest your money in improving the acoustics of your environment (passive or active correction).
There you have a roller coaster to flatten.
Good afternoon
 
Is this about wire or about speakers, or something else.

We have an active thread about wire.

The site is biased toward speakers that measure we’ll, but no one claims that speakers that measure nearly the same will sound the same in an actual room.
 
Bless you op. You have just joined. You have donated which is great.
But you do seem to want to discuss, highly un ASR like, tosh?
im kind of a scientist of sorts
 
post directed to the guys who have or own now exceptional speaker combinations with high end wire and amps..... did you guys notice these subtle and immediate performance and audible quality differences in your begining journey in home audio. or did it come when the painfull upgrades were accomplished.
I think most people interested in quality audio reproduction and the related equipment have experienced technically unexplainable performance enhancements from certain wires and cables, speaker burn-in, upgrading DACs etc. Upon further study all of these very real experiences can be shown to be placebo effect.

Audio perception is 100% in our brains and we are really good at convincing ourselves of "realities" that can not be backed up by objective fact.
 
Not if you believe in cables having a "sound".
i thought i was clear when i mentioned that i believed each cable has a performance characteristic (materials) where im suggesting it effects the sound of say a speaker or the audible quality to the ear in the end.
 
i thought i was clear when i mentioned that i believed each cable has a performance characteristic (materials) where im suggesting it effects the sound of say a speaker or the audible quality to the ear in the end.
Except if you were asked to identify said characteristics in an audible test where you weren't allowed to view which cable is being used, you would do no better than randomly guessing. Cables really have zero audible impact in audio. This site can save you a ton of wasted money on cables. But you seem to be digging in.
i was in another post and a overzealous mod accused me of trying to propagate misinformation which i did not believe to be such because my experience was first hand
Please stop this line of argument. Your firsthand experience is not really valid given how fraught human hearing is at actually discerning differences in sound. The mod wasn't overzealous, you are spreading misinformation, a bunch of anecdotes, etc.

You are new here. Don't seem to understand the reason and practical utility of this forum. If you think this is a good place to share anecdotes, repeat some of the marketing FUD that permeates the industry, then it will be a difficult ride for you. You seem to understand this since many of your posts are taunting, and you repeatedly admit that you are saying provocative things. Provocative is fine if you actually have data to back the statements up, but so far you don't.
 
i thought i was clear when i mentioned that i believed each cable has a performance characteristic (materials) where im suggesting it effects the sound of say a speaker or the audible quality to the ear in the end.
But they don't. Let your audio science journey start here.

Speaker cables need to be of sufficent cross sectional area to have low impedance compared to the speaker. For typical 3m (10ft) runs then 14 guage (2.5mmsq) is well beyond where you need to be. After that nothing makes an audible difference. You can make it out of copper, silver or gold - even aluminium, (but it'll need to be thicker due to higher resistance) - it'll not sound audibly different. Messing about with different and increasingly expensive cables buys you precisely NOTHING.

(Exception - Ferrous materials can result in distortion which is why you never find steel cables. But even that is rarely audible - see coat hanger speaker wires and nails for speaker terminals)

Even more so on interconnect cables where the input impedance of analogue inputs is so high that cable impedance becomes totally irrelevant. All you need to pay for here is sufficiently robust construction. But I have some old cheap RCA cables from 50 years ago that came with the hifi we bought when I lived with my parents, that still perform perfectly and will be audibly indistinguishable from any £10K audiophile jewellery.

All those other things you've read about - eg crystal structure of the metal. Long crystals. Nano structures (FFS) Oxygen free and so on and so on. It is all pseudoscience and snake oil. If they exist at all they only have influence on resistance, capacitance and inductance - these are all easily measured, and within the limits I've described above are not a problem for audio frequency signals.

So, "why am I hearing all these differences" I hear you ask. There is an answer for that too.

Perceptive Bias
We know that our hearing is subject to perceptive bias (call it placebo effect, or expectation bias if you like). What we hear is impacted by what we know, what we believe, how we feel, our life experiences, what we see etc etc. No-one is immune to this if they are human - it is how we are built. In fact we would be unable to function if our senses were not filtered by our subconscious brain. Everyone is subject to this, it happens at the subconscious level, and it is not possible to avoid it - even when we are aware it is happening.

All those differences you describe can (and in the case of your cables do) come from perceptive bias. The only way to scientifically prove otherwise is to test level matched and blind with at least 10 repeats.


You will get no traction on this site from claiming "but I can hear it" Our brain does all sorts of stuff to the signal between the ears and our perception that can dramatically change what we think we are hearing. You need to go back to the drawing board and think again about how your want to interact with ASR on this topic.
 
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But they don't. Let your audio science journey start here.

Speaker cables need to be of sufficent cross sectional area to have low impedance compared to the speaker. For typical 3m (10ft) runs then 14 guage (2.5mmsq) is well beyond where you need to be. After that nothing makes an audible difference. You can make it out of copper, silver or gold - even aluminium, (but it'll need to be thicker due to higher resistance) - it'll not sound audibly different. Messing about with different and increasingly expensive cables buys you precisely NOTHING.

(Exception - Ferrous materials can result in distortion which is why you never find steel cables. But even that is rarely audible - see coat hanger speaker wires and nails for speaker terminals)

Even more so on interconnect cables where the input impedance of analogue inputs is so high that cable impedance becomes totally irrelevant. All you need to pay for here is sufficiently robust construction. But I have some old cheap RCA cables from 50 years ago that came with the hifi we bought when I lived with my parents, that still perform perfectly and will be audibly indistinguishable from any £10K audiophile jewellery.

All those other things you've read about - eg crystal structure of the metal. Long crystals. Nano strucrues (FFS) Oxygen free and so on and so on. It is all pseudoscience and snake oil. If they exist at all they only have influence on resistance, capacitance and inductance - these are all easily measured, and within the limits I've described above are not a problem for audio frequency signals.

So, "why am I hearing all these differences" I hear you ask. There is an answer for that too.

Perceptive Bias
We know that our hearing is subject to perceptive bias (call it placebo effect, or expectation bias if you like). What we hear is impacted by what we know, what we believe, how we feel, our life experiences, what we see etc etc. No-one is immune to this if they are human - it is how we are built. In fact we would be unable to function if our senses were not filtered by our subconscious brain. Everyone is subject to this, it happens at the subconscious level, and it is not possible to avoid it - even when we are aware it is happening.

All those differences you describe can (and in the case of your cables do) come from perceptive bias. The only way to scientifically prove otherwise is to test level matched and blind with at least 10 repeats.


You will get no traction on this site from claiming "but I can hear it" Our brain does all sorts of stuff to the signal between the ears and our perception that can dramatically change what we think we are hearing. You need to go back to the drawing board and think again about how your want to interact with ASR on this topic.
ergo, why i posted a detailed experience of mine. if you're just suggesting that my discerning reaction was fabricated by my psyche im not sure about that but its not out of the possibility of reality i suppose. i specifically posted this asking what other people encountered when scaling up in quality through the power stages, cables and speakers in their journey.

note my commentary has suggestion to industry claims(as you've described) that lead to my purchase; not making specific statements to any industry claims that are undeniable fact of fiction.

maybe my comment wasnt clearly structured but i had a series of questions laid out to users who encountered cables that sound differently with upscaled' speaker compliments. and i do understand and i do agree with you in the nature of analytical results are the empirical leg to stand on when making a factual undeniable claim.
 
But they don't. Let your audio science journey start here.
Thanks for taking the reins on this one. ;)

i thought i was clear when i mentioned that i believed each cable has a performance characteristic (materials) where im suggesting it effects the sound of say a speaker or the audible quality to the ear in the end.
 
‘upscaled’ = more expensive?
Keith
 
Speaker cables have measurable effects. It's questionable whether those impacts are audible, though.

Google for Fred E. Davis' paper from 1991. He develops a mathematical model of cable, amplifier and complex speaker load and compares it with lab measurements of various cables, complex loads and different amplifiers. His conclusions seem to favour lower inductance + higher capacitance cables.

His initial conclusion:
"These tests have shown that the best way to achieve adequately low resistance and inductance in a cable is by using many independently insulated wires per conductor rather than one large wire." Fred E. Davis 1991

He also notes: that bigger gauge cables are not necessarily better and may be worse for normal figure-of-eight designs, due to bigger cables having more inductance. For "zip wire" construction 12 AWG is consequently optimal
"Of the two-wire cables, 12 AWG provided the best performance with reactive loads, while both smaller and larger gauges (3-7 AWG and 18 AWG) showed greater high-frequency drop and interaction with capacitive reactance in a load. 12 AWG seems more than adequate, even for demanding systems, high power levels, and reasonable lengths." Fred E. Davis 1991
My bold of his quote.

His final conclusion is:
"Low-inductance cables will provide the best performance when driving reactive loads, especially with amplifiers having low damping factor, and when flat response is critical, when long cable lengths are required, or when perfection is sought. Though not as linear as flat cables, 12 AWG wire works well and exceeds the high-frequency performance of other two-conductor cables tested." Fred E. Davis 1991
 
Being an active reader of this forum, I can state that most colleagues here are likely owners of Class D amplifiers, where a slight increase in inductance caused by speaker cables can even have a positive effect on the amplitude response of the system. It effectively creates a low-pass filter, which is necessary to cut off frequencies above 400 kHz.

Tube amplifiers with Russian tubes, as you know, have an output transformer, which in itself has a very high inductance. I dare say that an increase in inductance in speaker cables will have no noticeable effect on your system. You see, we generally use power amplifiers with outputs starting from 60W and above. Small devices, such as amplifiers offering 45W at 10% THD, are not within our scope of interest.

Using high-quality components allows us to use standard speaker cables without the need for matching them specifically to high-end Hi-Fi amplifiers. Perhaps you’d consider testing an amplifier based on the TPA3255 chip. In this case, the brand doesn’t matter, only the external design. These amplifiers are small, consume little power, and acoustically outperform massive Class A units sold for astronomical sums.
 
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