DO CABLES REALLY MATTER?

Old thread and ancient topic, but my .02...........Worked on top shelf military electronics for 45 years and we never worried about "better"
cables until well up into the Ghz range.............Any cable, properly designed and terminated for the prescribed use should easily pass any electrical signals passing through it, period. Can cables sound "different" ? I guess they can or people wouldn't spend ridiculous sums for them. I suppose it comes down to your money, your choice, but I honestly think there are far better ways to improve your system sound than mega-buck wires.....................it is after all, simply wire with a dielectric. It should do nothing more than transfer a signal from point A to B.............If you have money to burn and it makes you happy, enjoy.

edgewear,

You are making a claim that others have made here: that it takes a really high resolution system for cable differences to become apparent.

1. But as I keep pointing out: People with "lower res" systems have been talking about and reporting differences between cables for ages.  You can go to Amazon and find hundreds and hundreds of customer comments on speaker cables and interconnects there, many of these people clearly are not using super high end gear. In fact you can look up cables on amazon costing a mere 14 bucks, and find a hundred people commenting, many on how they clearly made a sonic difference in their system.

Now, if you really need a high resolution system and/or high end cables for the differences to really show, then that implies all these "bottom feeding" folks are imagining things. And if all those people can imagine they are hearing differences every time they buy new cables on their lower end systems, then it just implies the role of imagination in hearing cable differences, which is a problem for anyone, high res system or not.

But IF these people....and the great many over the years with modest systems...are really hearing sonic differences, then it puts the lie to the idea that you need a super high res system to hear them. (And that’s usually the first thing some audiophiles claim to cable skeptics - "you must not have a high resolution enough system!")

2. The scale, and character of audible differences audiophiles often attribute to changing cables are not "subtle" but are often declared as "so obvious, you’d have to be deaf not to hear it." With changes in all manner of sonic attributes. There is no reason to think such obvious differences require some Super Special system. Even a modestly priced, well designed speaker for instance can easily show you very subtle sonic differences (for instance, between one album master and another, even subtle remastering, etc).

I think it’s what you personally look for and enjoy. I like to hear the decay of the cymbals, great drum work, piano playing and like very complex jazz material some wires will give you more of what you personally look for. I think this more the case when you have digital front ends. That’s why to me the digital and the analog systems are different to me. Digital has its own set of challenges. 

"A rich man has about as much chance of entering audio Nirvana as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle."

That must be a really big needle.


Why is being rich/able-to-afford  so frequently mentioned as a negative trait on this forum?