A-B testing of cables

Cable questions of the profound "what is the meaning of cable" are always entertaining by right of how many clueless people are going to give you their profoundly ignorant and useless advice. Unfortunately far too many dealers and "experts" will give you advice that is almost as useless.

The advice you got about starting from the source to preamp had an element of validity due to the fact that this is the key interconnect. The catch 22 here is that unless the rest of the cable in the system is neutral regardless of how transparent it is, each colored cable adds another layer of coloration or veils detail in the case of inferior cable resolution. So you are in theory revealing more detail at the front but it won't be heard because other cables are acting as a filter.

So... while the first i/c is the one that will reveal the most detail, your other cables have to be able to allow you to hear both the detail and a lack of added coloration or distortion.

The price of cables means nothing, what is important is that you pick a company that knows what neutrality is and the importance of it. When a cable is neutral their $150 cable does what their $450, $800, and $3000 models do, just with extra levels of detail resolution. The entry level neutral cables are better than many manufacturers mid grade $3500 cables because those have coloration that cause the tonal balance to be out of kilter.

Once every cable in your system is neutral you can start doing single cable upgrades from the front back and you will see staggering differences.

In closing the reason you didn't hear differences is likely because the other cables in your system aren't letting you hear them.

I was a dealer several years ago and have tried the majority of big name cables, and by that I mean the manufacturer would send me full sets of every cable in their lines, I spent months properly breaking them in before doing tedious comparisons.

One last thing, most cables have break in periods of at least three weeks of nearly full time running. During that break in time they can sound so bad it's hard to listen to them, then they start coming around and the magic starts coming around. My guess is that many people have given up on great cables due to that.

Good luck

"10-21-15: Aintitgr8
Cable questions of the profound "what is the meaning of cable" are always entertaining by right of how many clueless people are going to give you their profoundly ignorant and useless advice. Unfortunately far too many dealers and "experts" will give you advice that is almost as useless."

Lets see where you fit in. If neutral cables are so important, define them. How do I know cable A is more neutral than cable B?

There is no such thing as neutral with anything in audio, everything has it's own flavor of sound, some artifacts are more apparent in some products than others, my opinion, when someone tells me something sounds neutral, I question how long they been doing high end audio,and what equipment have they experienced, even state of the art in any given product has it's own particular sound, however, do I hear profound differences in cables, yes!, but the sad part of it all is the performance to cost ratio is lousy!, an example in my experience was that it took going from a $3,000.00 I/C to $15,900.00 for one meter to get an incredible, astounding, difference in sound performance, do I agree with cost of cable's these days, of course not, it's ridiculous!,did I pay it, I have never paid full retail for cable's, and I suspect most of us have not,do I think the op is going to hear significant sound differences between $250.00 to $600.00 cables with the brand he is referring too, no!, very few brand's out there can manage very little differences with sound performance at this cost point!

Can't be done. Cables have to break into your system. Just moving the cable slightly changes the sound for worse.

BDP you hit it on the head, the upstream i/c is the critical one, but it's improvements can't go much beyond the downstream cables which will have a cummulative degradation of what would have been possible had all the cables been upgraded.