Interconnects and non-believers

I still maintain that cables can only mess up the signal. The less they mess it up, the better. And plenty of cables from many companies in many price ranges mess up the signal. Noise, response anomolies, and other issues can abound. I think it comes down to finding which cables mess up the signal the least, and in a way that you can live with. I recently also upgraded my IC between my DAC and preamp. It cured one of the most vexing problems that I had with my system - the bodies of vocal sounds were oddly detached in space from the consonant sounds. The sibilant "s" sound would be to one side of the stage, while the syllable that followed would be in the middle or to the other side. Wierd and terrible, and I always thought it was my room or source gear. A new cable reduced this issue by about 95%. Amazing.

bondmanp,

You may indeed be right, but it doesn’t change things.
Different cables sound different from one another, no matter what the reason.

The human ear is very "threshold/complex-harmonic/temporal-mixing/micro-differential" oriented when it comes to realizing or distinguishing signals, or more specifically distinguishing transient structure. Almost all of how the ear works is tied to complex transient structure.

(fuses,BTW, are all about transient structure, ergo, humans and their hearing hear what fuses do. As simple as breathing, if you are analyzing the correct data in the formulation of the question)

Then, this ear thing...is tied to the most complex and capable computer known to humanity, the human brain. And one of the most complex system involved, is the ear-brain system. We are far from knowing it’s full capacities and intricacies, even today. World’s finest FFT analysis system, the ear-brain is. Individual examples have large variance, so we are all different. Some are ear smart, some are ear dumb.

Part of why we are more sensitive and capable than the measuring hardware and the engineering analysis.

And the ear dumb part is why some rail against the whole high end audio package. They may have smarts, some of them, but clearly not in the ear-brain package area.

It’s an ego projection problem, not a science and engineering problem. To make that ’fixed’, you have to find a way to gently introduce to the naysayer ...that some part of what they are -or how it is currently programmed- and understood, in their mind and body, is simply not up to snuff with dealing with the issue itself.

They might fix that but only after they get past the projections. Projections are a standard full spectrum (all individuals) problem, where no one is exempt. In this case, some don’t have it in the human hearing realm as much as the next person.

We’re foolish enough to argue over this, in some cases.

deleted cuz the above was deleted...