bThe following is the best article I have ever read on audio cables:
http://www.videohifi.com/16_RISCH_ENG.htmInterview with Jon Risch of Cables Asylum
Tell more about you and about your entry in cables "game"….
I am formally trained as an engineer, and like many of my brethren, I accepted the wisdom of the day, that cables were just wire, and wire is wire. I too, was skeptical about audio cables, and when I was assigned to research a US supplier for the raw cable to be used in American-built Gold-Ens interconnects (by Discwasher), I threw myself into my work with a passion, doing what I always do, and finding out as much about the subject as I can to prepare myself for the project work. After researching the optimal materials (based on the technological wisdom of the day), and weighing the costs, I obtained a large number of samples of commercially available cables from Belden, and began comparative listening tests of my own. Once I was actually doing this, I noticed that the el cheapo cables that came with the gear did not sound as good as some of the Belden samples, much less that I could actually hear something different between them. I reported to my supervisor that I had found at least one cable sample that seemed to sound much better than the others, and was even better than the then currently Japanese sourced Gold-Ens. He was also incredulous, and did not quite believe me. So a formal listening test was scheduled to test between the existing cables, and the new sample I preferred, and I was placed under blind conditions (double-blind equivalent). A variation on the original ABX procedure was used, with hand swapping of the cables, instead of a switch box. Much to the amazement of my supervisor and fellow engineers, on the first set of ten trials, I scored 8 out of 10 (still warming up), then 9 out of 10, then 8 out of 10 again. I could tell I was getting fatigued on the last run, and said so. Taken as a whole, the three trials together, for 25 out of 30, approaches near certainty. This was the beginning of my long journey with audio cables, and the why and wherefore. Since 1980, I have been conducting controlled listening tests on audio components, most of which were for audio cables. After literally hundreds of cable listening tests under controlled conditions, I have no doubt personally that cables can be detected and some sound better than others. I know this, and no one can take this away from me, there were too many tests with overwhelming positives, too much rigorous science involved. After conducting many tests, and finding out early on that they were not always so easy to get results from, I found that there were weak spots in the original ABX procedures, and with many of the amateur DBT's that had been, and were being run (mostly by cable naysayers). I wrote and presented an AES paper in 1991, AES preprint #3178, outlining some of the issues connected with listening tests, and based on my own experiences with having conducted so many listening tests.
I have personally maintained that the sonic differences between audio cables is of a subtle nature, and not of the "day-and-night" type of difference. However, when we are dealing with one’s personal home playback system, where the listener has become intimately familiar with it’s performance and overall sound, when something does change in such a system, they are going to notice it much more readily than a stranger would, or than someone participating in a blind test at an institute would. In the context of that persons playback system, a cable change might bring about a "night-and-day" difference, because it has pushed the performance of the system past the edge of disbelief of the playback event. If a new set of cables can allow the music to float free of the speakers, and achieve a sense of separate soundstage, while the old cables did not do this, the sound was "stuck" to the speaker locations, then to the owner/listener of that system, that is a "night-and-day" difference, even though in absolute terms, the sonic differences were small.
Bottom line - audible differences exist between cables - but that are very very subtle. Get all your other pieces just how you like them before investing in upmarket cables. And if you are tempted to invest $3000.00 or more in cable I suggest listening to SP Timepieces and see if spending it on them would not be wiser.
Thanks
Bill
