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Cables Do Make A Difference

Posted by Jon Risch on June 18, 2001 at 00:51:21

In Reply to: Cable-mania! posted by Big Ed on June 13, 2001 at 13:48:41:

Some will say that lamp cord is good enough, others that home wiring wires are good enough. They are entitled to their opinions, as are we all.

Just don't let anyone tell you that there is no evidence for audible differences in cables, or that there is somehow some sort of "proof" there aren't.

See:
http://www.AudioAsylum.com/audio/cables/messages/19902.html

for starters, and note the second half, which provides convenient web based references.

My own DIY notes are contained within this Annotated Bibliography, and they discuss some of the audio cable quality issues.

My own controlled double-blind listening tests have confirmed for me that audio cables do have a sound, and that they are not all the same.

Art J. posted " Wire is intended to be a neutral media to transfer
power/data from one device to another. If a wire makes any changes
of any kind to this information, it is considered to be in a faulty state."

Well then, I guess even the very expensive asudio cables are faulty, because even they are not totally neutral and without an effect on the audio signal.

It is one thing to say that a given cable will sound neutral, because it merely has some wires in it, and quite another to show it is so.

A good thing to realize is that speaker cables have more of a problem with inductance rolling off the HF's. Zip cords and house-wiring/romex can do this, and the HF roll-off is a direct consequence of their realtively high inductance for the loads involved.

The high performance speaker cables that attempt to minimize inductance via intimate geometry end up having higher capacitance than zip cords, but in no case, is it enough to actualy roll-off the HF's as several have posted here. Enough sheer cable capacitance CAN cause unstable power amps to oscillate or shut down, but this really is a power amp problem, and the amp has not been (properly) designed to be unconditionaly stable.

In most cases, even for these poorly designed power amps, use of a Zobel network across the speaker terminals will usually stabilze things adequately. All these topics are touched upon and expounded upon within the reference URL's in the Cable Bibliogrpahy I gave the URL for.

If someone wishes to discuss this in detail I suggest they do so in the Cable Asylum.

Jon Risch

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

VH Audio

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