Who says cables don't make a difference?

mitch2: "... or when listening outdoors in a thunderstorm. I suspect geoff is all about "Safety First". That explain's it. Mitch hit the nail on the head. Geoff got hit in the head by lightening!!! 

No wonder he is enlightened.

Pretty much mahgister. One side will never admit the potential for a sonic difference, even when from a technical standpoint, there can be in some circumstances, and the other side will always make wild claims that they will refuse to submit to anything approaching scrutiny. It's a lost cause, but why so many insist on creating threads that add absolutely 0 to the argument? That I have no idea.

mahgister2,669 posts07-02-2020 11:14amThese debates about cables are generally without interest.....

Defenders and opponents are like 2 cats reading the other's grin with a replicating grin, and the 2 cats disapearence at the end let only their 2 grins mimicking one another, without any cats anymore like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll....

:)

I think that any component in a system is dedicated and focused on doing the least damage to the signal from the front end. And even the front end is dedicated to capturing the signal and transmitting it as uncolored as possible. The proverbial “straight wire with gain”. Certainly, there are characteristics of value to some but, certainly with cables, it is the most pure example of the “straight wire” part of the equation. And even the “with gain” part comes in when factoring in any resistance. The ultimate conclusion is that most very expensive cables are, truly, worth every penny.
Strange that most pros only care about whether a cable can come undone and handle long runs by being balanced. However many of the world’s top recording studios put a lot into their playback systems. Skywalker Sound uses top line MIT cabling who make the world’s most expensive speaker cable at $80k!

When I say that cables can’t add anything, they can only subtract, I’m pointing out the passive nature of wire. It is not an active component; ie, it has no gain over any part of it’s pass bandwidth. Therefore cable is what we call lossy. This general description applies equally to the cheapest and the most expensive of so-called “boutique” cables.
Of course, I hook-up my system with interconnects. I buy quality made cables,
purchased exclusively from mycablemart.com. These interconnects have gold plated hardware, good quality molding on the strain reliefs, and most importantly, the wire used is RG59. The cables have the added advantage of being extremely inexpensive while being almost identical in construction to the much more expensive “Blue Jeans” brand interconnects.
Of course, I have no idea what these cables “sound like” vis-a-vis other cables, but since I don’t ever compare cables, it really doesn’t matter, does it? All interconnects sound subtly different, and since none are 100% neutral, whether the cables cost $thousands or pennies, there’s no way to tell which is the most neutral (total neutrality is what I believe the goal of cables to be. Otherwise we are compromising the aim of high-fidelity; i.e. a high degree of faithfulness to the original performance or recording). Hope this answers Oldhvymec’s question.