Strange Cable Experiment

Makes a person wonder how often inexpensive gear gets bad reviews because it was tested with cheap interconnects.  I certainly wasn't using expensive interconnects with my first systems. 

I recently experimented with some $200 interconnects that were considerably less expensive than my Black Cat Silverstar 88.  I listened with the real expectation that the less expensive cables could be as good, or even better.  Alas, they aren't.  Very good cables for the money, but not better than the Black Cat.

I remember way back more than 30 years ago when I first started getting interseted in better gear and sound  I bought an M&K subwoofer as my first "better gear" purchase and at the time M&K had a very patient and polite telephone tech guy, Doug Osborne, who patiently took my barrage of phone calls with countless questions, and as we were discussing "better sound" I remember he asked me:  "Which do you think would sound better--a $500 CD  player using the cables that came with it, or a $200 CD player using $50 cables?"  Obviously it was intended to be a rhetorical question.

(To JasonBourne71) I totally respect your observation above. The mind is a funny thing. Since the blind experiment train has passed, I critically revisited more LP's and told myself it was mere placebo effect. I did discover some vinyl only sounded marginally better. Nuance. But some records, especially well recorded ones with vocals were profoundly better in many ways. Crappy recordings were still crappy, maybe even more annoying. The value of quality cables is camouflaged by the typical audiophile habit of creeping up product lines to hear only debatable improvements. Jumping from Pangea ($50) cables to $1000 cables exposes clearly  that some pricey cables do dramatically reveal more of what's in the media. Not just a different sound but more details, more musical, and engaging. As stated cables act as filters in a sense. Apparently cheap cables do more than their share of this filtering. Now I'm thinking where else I might be "strangling" my music!

Now I’m thinking where else I might be "strangling" my music!

power. Get good quality outlets and power cords. Don’t have to be super expensive.