jafreeman,
IMPORTANT: Use the best available speaker wires and interconnects.
Audio Research cannot emphasize this enough. As better components and systems are developed, it becomes increasingly important to avoid the limitations of inferior system interconnections.
The thing that tends to get buried in the effusive praise for audiophile cables is that a good cable, that can send a high quality signal, just isn’t that hard to achieve. It doesn’t take thousands of dollars. It takes mostly getting the right cable for the job.
Take, for instance, Belden cables. They were founded in 1902. So they’ve been making cables for well over a 100 years and they are standard fare in the professional recording/broadcasting industry. These guys know more than a little bit about how to construct a cable with the required properties to pass along all sorts of different signals with high fidelity.
And they are not charging anything like the crazy prices your local high end dealer will charge you.
I needed a fairly long run of speaker cable so I chose Belden 5000 series 10 guage for it’s low resistance, high conductivity (which was probably overkill even for what I needed).
I’ve had expensive cables in my system (before I switched to the longer run of Belden I had little need to buy cable as I had audiophile buddies giving me various cast off or spare high end speaker cable, or just lending me stuff - some being the garden-hose-thick variety).
Does my sound "suffer" from having gone to meagre Belden cable ("meagre" as in "industry standards quality"....)?
Not that I can tell. My system sounds a glorious, open, detailed as any other system I’ve had.
And as I’ve said, when I go to listen to other systems - and since I used to review a bit myself I still have friends who are reviewers and aside from having a parade of great gear, they usually cabled up with the best of the best (e.g. Nordost etc.) and my system sounds just as good - as my pal with vasty more expensive cabling often acknowledges. I've also auditioned speakers in a good high end audio store - hooked up to expensive cables - and then at my own home, and found no loss of fidelity due to my lower priced cabling. So there is no apparent lack of fidelity holding back my system from not having spent thousands of dollars on upmarket audiophile cables.
That’s not to say (as I feel I must repeat) that "cables never sound different." I think there are plausible reasons some cables can sound different (though many of the reasons given by high end companies seem like quite a stretch). But the point I’m making is that cables are not some Black Art. The main body of knowledge behind constructing good cables has been known for a long time. As I said: all those incredible sounding classic audiophile recordings were made with cables before all this high end stuff started coming out.
I just think that it’s good to offer some other perspective, as newbies coming to the average audiophile site will tend to take away a message that, unless they spend a lot on audiophile cables, their system won’t be high fidelity. And that the more they spend on speakers and other equipment, well the more they have to spend on cables.
