2. cables
  3. 1104460335

Need Good Advice - Speaker Cable

I have an Audio Refinement Complete driving Soliloquy 5.0 monitors and a Rotel 855 CDP. I've had them a year hooked up with well seasoned original Monster Cables. The last couple of months, I've been auditioning speaker cables to get rid of some grime in the highs and some thinness to some vocals.

The system with my Monsters is actually quite pleasureable. It has a vibrant, room filling, holographic kind of quality that is very exciting even at low levels. Bass is very good and the midrange can really be wonderful with terrific tone and color to the music. Highs can be very transparent also.

I've now tried in my system Transparent Audio The Wave 100 (lifeless and veiled sounding), Analysis Plus Oval 12 (pretty good resolution and good purity, but too rolled off sounding, not exciting), Mapleshade Golden Helix (amazing stuff really, very pure high end, a bit too bright, some sibilance and some nasality to vocals). Just received and now listening to Monster Cable Z-1 (it has the expansive Monster sound that I'm used too, fair resolution, decent bass, but some grime in the midrange so far).

Almost everything has a cleaner high end than my old Monster's, but nothing is as exciting, enjoyable and colorful as they are. I was thinking of trying a low to mid priced Nordost cable next.

This business of testing cables is still fun, but I'm not sure when/where it will end. Can someone who is familiar with my experiences give me some direction?

Thanks,
Chris
ssglx
donbellphd
205 posts
 
Well, Dragon1952, forced-choice comparisons are a staple of scientific study of perceptual evaluations, as are double blind procedures. To do otherwise is simply unsupportable. You may dislike such protocals; they can challenge strongly held predispositions, and you may feel they are a test of your ability to discern a difference. But if you cannot consistently identify which is A and which is B in an ABX comparison, then any difference is irrelevant to you. No amount of hand waving nor hyper verbiage will impresse a technical/scientific community. Fortunately for the HIFI business, ABX comparisons are usually cumbersome for consumers to perform, so predispositions prevail, hand waving and hyper verbaige thrive.

db
dragon1952
181 posts
 
Attempting to distinguish differences during a relatively short term experiment is absolutely beside the point and irrelevant. Who cares? That's where these tests fail to be pertinent. Preferences are the point and cannot ever be made in that type of test and environment. Some people will never understand that.
larryb
101 posts
 
Well said.
donbellphd
205 posts
 
Dragon1952 & Larryb,

If you can't listen to a passage as speaker cable is switched and identify which is which, your preferences are based on something other than your auditory experience. If you can reliably distinguish among the speaker cables, then I grant it could take substantial listening to determine which you prefer. But I'm sketpical about your ability to tell the fancy speaker leads from 10 - 14 AWG zip cord, unless the fancy leads distort the signal, i.e. provide a "warmer" sound that covers up defects by effectively low-pass filtering.

I've been a HiFi enthusiast since the early '50s, then did research in binaural auditory processing -- I was attracted by the professional audio gear in the lab, before becomming director of a high tech research center. I do love this stuff, but I recognize that mystic and lore, as well as hyper advertising plays a large role in what we hear. Certainly loud speakers, the point where electrical is tranduced back to acoustic energy, are not accurate reproducers of recorded sound, and we all grow accustomed to particular distortions we prefer. Thus, you get the tube vs. solid state, analog vs. digital preferences, and the devotion ot particular speaker systems.

Still, the challenge I suggest is can you tell the difference. If you can't, why waste money on expensive cable that might be better spent on better speakers?

db
larryb
101 posts
 
It takes more than a random passage to get to know the sound of a component/cable etc. That's why, as already stated, blind AB testing is limited in usefulness and probably misleading more often than not.
More to discover