Cable elevators - conventional wisdom wrong?

I fully agree with Rushton. Like him, my dedicated listening room has synthetic carpet, and also like him I have used pieces of cardboard (and have for years) to keep speaker cables elevated with the same significant results he has obtained. However, raising interconnect cables off the floor has never registered any improvement in sound for me, but as they say, YMMV.

I use cables that have mass loaded non ferrous dielectric insulator to absorb and deflect vibration and emf. Can it get better....always. Tom

There's a few interesting points here.

Firstly, Justin who has the Shunyata's, says he thinks the lego would have much the same effect. This is what I meant by snake-oil sellers; I'll bet the Shunyata's are a bit more expensive than Lego!

Secondly, Shunyata's own website says that the Dark Field elevators are made of "...electrically conductive foam. This allows static charges to migrate through the elevator eliminating the build up of static field differentials between the floor and cable that would otherwise create noticeable signal degradation."

Now, if you're going to use a material that conducts static charges, you might as well leave the cable in contact with the carpet in the first place, as this will have the same result. Static charges wont dissipate into the air unless the voltage is massive (millions of volts), so all the Shunyata's are doing is allowing the static charge to spread up the elevators to the speaker cable sleeve. Leaving the cable on the floor does the same thing.

And thirdly, I still advocate that the only true way to listen for such small variations (like the 3% mentioned above) is with moderately quick A/B comparisons; trying to compare any sense (hearing, sight etc) to the memory of a sense (what we heard/saw a few minutes/hours ago) is very unreliable. Not only are you relying on your memory for comparisons, but so many other influences can change in the time between comparisons that you can't be sure what caused any difference.

Might I suggest that you first try the following cable lifters, which I suspect must have been mentioned in some previous post. They will give you the opportunity to run a listening test prior to any purchase. Each cable lifter is comprised of three wooden chopsticks and a rubber band that binds them about 1/5 of the way down their length. Spread the long ends into a tripod and secure them down in the weave of the carpet. The shorter ends above the rubber band create a “basket” that should secure most cables. My Supra Swords are not the most well behaved cables and two of these little tripods support a spiral of three passes behind one of my speakers. They also present a very small visual signature.

If your letter carrier delivers your mail bundled with rubber bands and you order Chinese take-out every so often this experiment will cost you only your time. Good luck.

There is no electrical benefit to raising your speaker cable off of the carpet. What noise are you going to couple from a static charge, and how are you going to couple it? The static is not changing so you are not going to couple it via capacitance or inductance. You could run your speaker cable over the top of the terminals of a couple car batteries and it wouldn't make any difference. As to mechanical vibrations, those are not going to get coupled through your speaker cable. You can pick the cable up and shake it and you won't measure a difference in the audio signal (so long as you have good connections at the amp and speaker - and if not, the solution is some type of strain releif of grommet system, not keeping the cable off the carpet.) Try a little experiment. Have someone sit with their back to you listening to music. Pick up a section of cable and move it in front of a CRT. Then take the section of cable and tap it or shake it. Your "blind" observer won't hear any difference in the audio. Perhaps the report of Dark Field elevator only applies to situations involving the Dark Side of the Force. Seriously, from an engineering standpoint this is nonsense, makes about as much sense as passing a magnet over your brachial artery to align the iron in your blood - and I am sure that someone would notice a big subjective difference if they tried that too - they would just "feel better". Spend money on something that actually makes sense. Your carpet is not hurting your audio. Next time you go to a concert see where the cables lie for the recording equipment.