A-B testing of cables

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.

labyrinth, you overstated your case on neutrality, there is neutrality, it's just hard to find. By definition neutral cable would be an absence of coloration, distortion, or imbalance of the complete tonal range. Anything that affects any tonal element differently than it does the rest is going to throw off the tonal balance. The fact is cable manufacturers put a lot of engineering into "doing" specific things coloration wise so as to make cable that "does" something different with specific systems like tube or solid state. Neutral as heard in a few cables made by companies that put all their focus toward neutrality has a couple of distinct strengths. First thing noticed is that all the frequencies are in a more natural relationship as they were recorded. The cable that emphasizes highs so as to make high frequencies pop out of the sound stage like Nordost Valhalla loses mids as they get lost behind the high detail popping out louder. The other thing is that unnatural emphasis is harder and edgier and hurts your ears after half an hour or so. Neutral is smoother and easier on the ears, and can be listened to for hours on end without the same degree of listener fatigue. Your ears get very acclimated and used to neutral very quickly to where cables that are not neutral are objectionable.

Believe it or not women tend to have better hearing for higher frequencies. My wife, while she was clueless as to what she was listening for as pertains to critical listening, could hear edgy hardness in friend's systems and would remark that they were "nasty and hard to listen to". She'd tell me I needed to fix their systems.

I had a couple of lines of neutral cables, and they cost a fraction of many that they outperformed at different price points. I call a $2500 speaker cable that sounds way better than a $10,000 one or an $800 interconnect that goes up against $3500 ones while maintaining equal or better resolution a bargain.

"By definition neutral cable would be an absence of coloration, distortion, or imbalance of the complete tonal range. Anything that affects any tonal element differently than it does the rest is going to throw off the tonal balance."

Great. But like I asked you before: "If neutral cables are so important, define them. How do I know cable A is more neutral than cable B?"

Give us an example of a cable that you know is neutral. And not just because you say so. Prove it. All of the differences that you've listed in this thread, and your other one, can easily be explained by the interactions of the components themselves, and not the cables. Cables make a difference, but active components make bigger differences. (Yes, I understand that there may be the occasional exception, as there always is.). With all your talk, you make it sound like the components don't have anything to do with how the system sounds.