This audio cable business is getting out of hand...

[maarten]

Sorry to say but I find all these cable discussions (both on power cords and interlinks) not very useful. They are polluting many audio forums. They are all the same and never lead to a satisfying result. It has become a real plague, every audio forum has meanwhile been infected and suffers from it.

My opinion is that it all has to do with cognitive dissonance. A well know psychological phenomenon that is successfully exploited my many clever marketeers.

Those believers (that expensive cables do make a audible improvement, that burn-in makes the cables better) are in real insecure and are desperately seeking arguments to justify their high expenses or planned high expenses on cables. What's more easier than starting the same fruitless debate again (and again and again) on a forum?

If audiophile cables really sounded better, 'believers' would have no need at all to start discussing its merits. They would spend their time listening and enjoying the sheer magic of those cables.

 

[solderdude]

I think what audiophile (cable and component) believers triggers the most is that they are not believed 'on their word' by technical people that are supposed to explain what they hear instead of question their findings.

Afterall they can very clearly 'hear' the improvements/changes and simply trust their 'findings'.
As science can't corroborate their findings they either claim 'measurements' don't tell everything or not the correct things are measured.
What they hear is as true to them as what a measurement guy reads from their displays.

Generally they are not interested in anything or anybody telling them otherwise.
There is a gap that cannot be bridged by any amount of words, tests and evidence.
It's just human behavior.

Cable business is lucrative.
Either spend your fortune on it and 'experience massive improvements' or buy cheap decent stuff and be happy.


When the seller did not include the card audiophiles would not consider the maker 'knowledgeable'.
I have no idea if the seller/manufacturer believes it or they just want to please audiophiles on a budget.
Any serious audiophile would never even consider cables below a few hundred $ anyway and go for the real brands.

 

[rmo]

I’ve never been able to hear differences between cables unless of course one is defective .

 

[rmo]

People spewing nonsense that the cable has suddenly improved after burn in are DELUDING themselves .

 

[rmo]

By the way , I have had more problems with Audioquest cables being defective than any other brand and that’s by a long shot . I have complained directly to them multiple times . These are their lower priced cables .

 

[maarten]

...When the seller did not include the card audiophiles would not consider the maker 'knowledgeable'.
I have no idea if the seller/manufacturer believes it or they just want to please audiophiles on a budget.
Any serious audiophile would never even consider cables below a few hundred $ anyway and go for the real brands.

Recently I bought an amp and the manufacturer (or better assembler) advised 150 hrs burn-in time. I was angry and told them that if the amp's characteristics changes during initial play, it is not properly designed and who could tell me after it's 'optimum' burn-in time when best sound quality should be reached the amp's characteristics do not to continue to change and now for the worse. I just simply followed their own logic to demonstrate it's ridiculousness... I never got a straight answer but my impression was they advised burn-in time to please those foolish audiophiles. Maybe that works for those but for me it worked the opposite. If they told me before I had not ordered the amp at them. Cannot take such firms seriously.

Meanwhile I contacted Hypex (the amp was built around Ncore modules) to express my worries and they said their modules do not require 'burn-in' time and will also not improve sound along the way.

 

[LTig]

[Mogami 2964]
The Mogami has a double shield and reaches a super-low 0.012 Ohms per meter. And that was exactly what my measurements showed, the PS noise was 10 to 20 dB lower than all other RCA cables I had for testing, the noise nearly vanishing in the noise floor of the FFT diagram.
- only 57 pF capacitance per meter (the StarQuad is a whopping 185 pF)

According to the Mogami homepage the shield resistance of W2964 is 0.025 Ohms per meter. Where did you see 0.012 Ohms/m, did you measure it? Or is it per shield? Also they state a capacitance of 65 pF/m, not 57.

I don't want to question your authority, I just want to make sure that I order the right cable.

EDIT: Just saw that the numbers you posted are identical to RG59 (what I usually use).

 

[Blumlein 88]

Sorry to say but I find all these cable discussions (both on power cords and interlinks) not very useful. They are polluting many audio forums. They are all the same and never lead to a satisfying result. It has become a real plague, every audio forum has meanwhile been infected and suffers from it.

My opinion is that it all has to do with cognitive dissonance. A well know psychological phenomenon that is successfully exploited my many clever marketeers.

Those believers (that expensive cables do make a audible improvement, that burn-in makes the cables better) are in real insecure and are desperately seeking arguments to justify their high expenses or planned high expenses on cables. What's more easier than starting the same fruitless debate again (and again and again) on a forum?

If audiophile cables really sounded better, 'believers' would have no need at all to start discussing its merits. They would spend their time listening and enjoying the sheer magic of those cables.

I don't think they are insecure. If anything the reverse. I used to think it all true. I should have known better. But humans react in human ways. I'd heard it my own self. Takes quite a bit to convince someone their direct actual experience is nevertheless not at all true or correct. It is very difficult to make that change. After you've believe it for quite some time, there is lots of emotional capital against admitting you were just experiencing a perceptual manipulation of your senses.

In fact the key thing for me wasn't hearing something that wasn't there. It was hearing something that really was different, my perceptions were correct. However, what I considered the better sounding version was in fact highly colored. Accurate components could maintain that coloration, not fail to reproduce it. Which lead to a bit of an investigation which lead to understanding the ways we can be thrown off perceptually. There were quite a few experiences prior that should have signaled a problem, but without the insight of how such things happen you just ignore them as an aberration. Like one example, a few friends trying a digital cable, switching between the old and new and hearing the big improvement. Only to find we'd made a mistake and were listening to the same cable both times. We were a bit embarrassed, but made sure we switched and did hear the 'real' difference. You wonder later how you could do that without it raising some doubt.

 

[MC_RME]

@ LTig: I was also confused a bit when I saw that the specs of WBC, posted on Amazon, were partly wrong for both Canare and Mogami. The correct Mogami 2964 specs are in the downloadable catalog. There you will see that they have a dual cable, 2965, which has the values that they put on the simplified webpage (IMHO). The 62 pF might also be the dual cable, don't know.

 

[Blumlein 88]

There are countless blind listening contests held in China. Analog cable is one of the easiest thing to hear difference.
There are also opamp, usb cables, power cables, dacs, amps, digital interfaces etc.

Have any details of this? Why would results in China differ from those elsewhere?

 

[FrantzM]

Have any details of this? Why would results in China differ from those elsewhere?

I would have expected different results in Australia since they are the Land Under thus upside down ....

Apologies to my fellow Australians ASRians .. This is just a lame joke ...

 

[letsgoo]

Inside there is an instruction sheet and it says that again. To their credit they acknowledge that such burn-in will take out of Amazon's 30 day return window so they provide instructions on how to still get a return.

Haha that was the first thing what I thought. Was trying to calculate 175h/24h=7days but nobody is listening the music for 24h per day. So If you decrease it to 6h per day… congrats! 29.1667 days! But normally you are not listening everyday 6 hours long so...…. congrats! you can't return it anymore.

 

[maarten]

I don't think they are insecure. If anything the reverse. I used to think it all true. I should have known better. But humans react in human ways. I'd heard it my own self. Takes quite a bit to convince someone their direct actual experience is nevertheless not at all true or correct. It is very difficult to make that change. After you've believe it for quite some time, there is lots of emotional capital against admitting you were just experiencing a perceptual manipulation of your senses.

In fact the key thing for me wasn't hearing something that wasn't there. It was hearing something that really was different, my perceptions were correct. However, what I considered the better sounding version was in fact highly colored. Accurate components could maintain that coloration, not fail to reproduce it. Which lead to a bit of an investigation which lead to understanding the ways we can be thrown off perceptually. There were quite a few experiences prior that should have signaled a problem, but without the insight of how such things happen you just ignore them as an aberration. Like one example, a few friends trying a digital cable, switching between the old and new and hearing the big improvement. Only to find we'd made a mistake and were listening to the same cable both times. We were a bit embarrassed, but made sure we switched and did hear the 'real' difference. You wonder later how you could do that without it raising some doubt.

I think much takes place on a subconscious level. When one listens to that expensive cable one maybe listening more carefully and therefore hear details that previously got unnoticed. But I think insecurity plays an important role. It simply cannot be that those expensive cables makes no difference... Have you ever heard audiophiles recommending cheaper cables because they sound better ?

Another thing to think about: why aren't cables burnt-in by those same manufacturers that strongly recommend burn-in ? Well if you buy those expensive cables, you might expect they are already burnt-in... as a customer service ... I do not think it is that difficult to build equipment to achieve that on a large scale. But then the customer might still be disappointed when he hears no difference between his old cheap cables and those high-end cables...

The customer experiences a cognitive dissonance which feels very uncomfortable and which is no good for the customer's perception of the seller... so this cognitive dissonance has to be taken away and there it is... they do not sound at their best but will certainly do so after 250 hours burn-in ! So it's not the customer, it's those expensive cables that need time to settle... giving the customer the perfect excuse to (on a subconscious level) trick his own mind in the weeks to follow. Mission accomplished !

It's common knowledge in marketing that it is utmost important that cognitive dissonance at customers' need to be taken away since lasting cognitive dissonance seriously impacts the customer's perception of the seller in a negative way, which is of course not in the interest of the seller. So the 'burn-in' myth is a sheer marketing trick to take away cognitive dissonance that undoubtedly will be experienced by a vast majority of customers that are in fact paying way too much for their cables.

 

[GGroch]

As the StarQuad effect is completely bollocks on a short unbalanced cable, and also the one sided connection doesn't bring any advantage on such lengths........

A 2nd sincere thank you for chiming in. And a 2nd "I sincerely do not want to question your authority but"

Canare confirms that their Star Quad cable was designed for balanced use. However they endorse the single point directional shield connection when the cable is used unbalanced: "Two conductor twisted pair cable such as L-2B2AT (or 4-cond L-4E6S Star Quad) are intended for Balanced circuits, but may also be used for Unbalanced assemblies. One of several wiring tricks, is to solder the blue conductor to the connector's center pin and the white conductor to the shield ground contact. An installer may then choose to "float the cable shield" by not soldering the overall braid (or drain wire) at one or both ends of the cable. This technique may result in better "unbalanced" circuit noise rejection."

Single end shield grounding of unbalanced cables aligns with what I read about minimizing noise recently while building a DIY amp. One example here from a DIY Audio thread. It refers to grounding the 2534 Mogami star/quad cable that is the same one used in the World's Best Cable Mogami RCA option on Amazon). The poster has written white papers on the topic but that does not mean he is correct.

So, is single ended shield grounding fake science...or is it simply unnecessary in short runs for home use, in the same way balanced cables might be. It appears that many here believe that directional markings on a signal cable automatically put it into the snake oil science category.

 

[confucius_zero]

What about blue jeans cable?

 

[LTig]

@LTig: I was also confused a bit when I saw that the specs of WBC, posted on Amazon, were partly wrong for both Canare and Mogami. The correct Mogami 2964 specs are in the downloadable catalog.

You're right, the catalog has the values you stated, so someone at Mogami must have made a mistake when they transferred the specs onto their homepage.

Do you think the RG59 DS would be even better? The numbers are 0.0085 Ohms per meter and 67 pF/m, and it's double shielded (and due to its bigger diameter probably easier to solder into my RCA connectors). I have the RME ADI-2 PRO fs, an old Edirol UA-25 and a DSO, would this allow me to measure the cable as you did?

 

[Umlautica]

What about blue jeans cable?

Fantastic RCA and coax cables. BJC terminates their RCA using the Canare RCAP which have leaf-spring loaded neutral contacts.

These lead to a solid connection that's doesn't feel like it's going to rip off the jack (Monoprice) or fall out (Rean). I like using them more than the expensive WBT. The only downside is that the strain relief is a little long. They post the cable specs but I don't think it matters much for the short runs of home use.

 

[amirm]

OK, I ordered the Mogami version. It better not come with a burn-in note!!!

 

[GGroch]

OK, I ordered the Mogami version. It better not come with a burn-in note!!!

It looks like it does from the product description. It uses the same quad topology as the WBC Canare but has a full served(?) shield rather than a braided one.

 

[Timbo2]

OK, I ordered the Mogami version. It better not come with a burn-in note!!!

You know that you now are going to have to measure and compare them both!