DO CABLES REALLY MATTER?

elizabeth,

I think you have a general misunderstanding of the implications of what I’ve written.

I simply acknowledge my fallibility, and have no problem doing so. It causes me little concern. Blind testing is just an occasional tool in the toolbox, I’m far from turning everything in to a science experiment and as I said I happily let my criteria loosen whenever I want.

So take cables, the subject of this thread and forum. I can’t remember the last time I gave much thought at all about cables, in terms of being concerned about replacing my cables.  The particular AC cable blind test I referenced was probably in the early 2000s, and I haven’t been bothered about AC cables since. Yet, if I had NOT done that blind test (as well as looked in to the controversies about AC cables) I may well be among all those who fret about AC cables for practically every piece of gear they buy. I’ve got two monoblock amps, an integrated tube amp, two preamps, phono stage, DAC, etc. That right there is a lot of AC cables that I may have thought I had to replace in order to realize the heights of my system. Not to mention my home theater gear as well. But I’m spared all that money and research because I have reasons not to think it’s a priority.

The same goes for all my cabling, speaker wire, interconnects etc. Can’t remember the last time I fretted about the sonic qualities of any of my cables. I’m spared all the extra money and time many here spend on cable swapping.

If I get a new piece of gear, I don’t burn mental energy worrying about burn in - "is it sounding right yet? Is it finished burning in?" - like many on this site.

When it came to that recent music server change and I thought I heard an issue, turning to a blind test actually *stopped* me fretting about the sound. If I’d been like many audiophiles I would more likely have presumed my perception was right, that there was something "wrong" with the sound of my new server. And that mindset could easily have sent me in to the den of computer audiophiles who think everything makes a sonic difference, replacing every bit of the chain they can. God knows how much chasing of "solutions" I may have gone through to "fix" the sonic problem my ears "told me" was the case.

But I knew that the first variable I could check out easily enough was my own perception. So, a pal drops over and in a little over 1/2 hour we’ve done some blind testing that completely relieved me of the impression anything was wrong. Done. No more thought at all about it.

So I think you’ve actually got it the wrong way around: it’s often folks who utterly trust their hearing over any objective evidence to the contrary, who seem to fret far more about their system, with every little thing making a sonic difference, constant upgrading of cables, chasing all sorts of tweaks, etc.

Believe me, I can be an obsessive audiophile, but it tends to be when I’m in speaker shopping mode. Much of the other stuff that audiophiles sweat; I don’t.

(BTW, as I have other audiophile pals including a friend who reviews, I still get to hear and play with occasionally various boutique audiophile cables - sometimes when I need some cables I’ll get some spare or cast off audiophile-company cables, or we will check out new cables at their place. But for my system, even though I have some audiophile cables still sprinkled here and there as they were given to me, I don’t fret much about it, so long as I have cables with the basic specs to do the job I need).


On the other hand, you seem to be uncomfortable with the idea of just admitting your own fallibility (in terms of your perception and inferences form what you believe you hear). I wonder why that is? I think it’s pretty liberating to be able to acknowledge "I could be wrong...."

dlcockrum
It is an audio forum.  But we audio nuts are a wordly sophisticated bunch so we know that to best understand the nuances of audio we have to have context in the greater universe of physics, philosophy and all of mankinds hopes and dreams. Or maybe its the post-op pain pills.

Do you realize that inside every beloved High End component, there is an enormous mass of wires, sorry, electrical conductors of all kinds and purposes, functions, etc., carrying signals through and through every tiny little piece of a PCB board. And you accept to pay outrageous amounts of money for them. Ok, and then how you hook them all, these beautiful and expensive boxes, milled from aluminum, with expensive, isolating feet, with spikes of certain steel alloy or another rare metallic material. And you put them in special isolating bases, and you buy ultra expensive loudspeakers some of them made in aluminum, or MDF, or very special kind of woods, some of them used to build musical instruments. And… and how do you hook them? Some times they come, the components, in separate enclosures: where the juice is received, and going left and going right and then the beautiful component is driven not by Ac current, but by Dc power… And do you realize, that everything in High End, what it really is about, is about the permanent and relentless epic battle to suppress noise, electrical noise in every single measure or interpretation you can think of; and strange acronyms start to flow… THD, IMD, DB, jitter, impedance, you can add and arrange a list, endless list of names, and all referred to measuring noise.
Noise is the enemy! It stays unabated between us and the music or better, recorded music in different media, physical, virtual, streamed, wireless, and submitted to that monster killer of the pure reproduction of sound, musical sound. Noise… Cardas and Nelson Pass used to love to explain some of this babbling of mine through the analogy of water, like Class A amplification, and balanced vs unbalanced outputs, and the conduction of the signal through a cable as trying to enter through a narrow causeway with an ultra high speed and powerful boat and do it not disturbing the water… or you can end crashing your expensive speedboat and destroying it against the edges… or running out of water to reproduce either the highest, lowest, loudest, finest, fastest frequencies of sound and stalling, because there is no more water, the tank is empty, you have to wait and wait and wait, time and time again to regain strength, stamina, volume transient speed, resolution, etc, you can add as many adjectives as you like to that salad of the High End Audio.
Sounds that make you tremble, and vibrate through your fragile human condition, and make you cry, or make you dance, and you start singing and one hour of serious listening becomes 4, 6, 8 hours of a sonic extravaganza that many times you have to eat it by yourself alone, because no one else can keep on in this manic and permanent battle and conquering of the dreadful Noise… Zero distortion, that is the goal,bellow the threshold of our ears, or so far beyond, that no one, I mean no one can hear, but anyone can feel and that is how we distinguish one voice from another, one instrument from another. A piano that reproduces sound smashing strings with little hammers in a fascinating, violent and vertiginous way; that if it is a Bossendorfer played by Grimaud or Uchida, a Steinway, music comes through a recording and we are one with Ravel and Schubert, at their finest and sometimes even feeling like them, they were prophets in their own. Or distinguishing between Montserrat Figueras and Polly Jean Harvey and going to their worlds, and accepting that both are great, an one can takes us to the world of Monteverdi and the lamenti and the other to the realms of the raw and ominous rage of the rock, punk music with an utter and unflinching sense of humor. Well, and how all this little and big boxes are hooked together… with cables.
Our love for music is what makes us fall into this expensive folly of High End. And it doesn't matter if they are ultra expensive or not, they just have to be good and we have to try and experiment and atone our ears to them. Many times I've felt that when I am comparing or testing a component, I can hear my cables doing their job, if they are reasonable good they keep their timbre no matter what. One day, listening to a nice rig with TAD speakers and Viola amp and pre and a EMMS DAC, I remember I could distinguish the age of Mick Jagger and Robert Plant throats, just unbelievable. I bought the Violas, used… Other times, with the help of my beloved cables, I just listened how this heinous sense of time disappears and it becomes kind of endless, Like listening to the laments of Mr de Saint Colombe in a seven strings viola with Jordy Savall, you just forget your common and provincial  sense of time, and then you start to find similarities between Savall and Keith Richards and realize that Jeff Beck is distorting the guitar on overdriven amps, all the time… and that experience comes with the help of a set of good cables. So CABLES DO REALLY MATTER, enough said and by the way people that are devoted fans of live music enjoy all this without spending a dime in expensive cables and rigs, just the ticket price, maybe the parking, and they enjoy music sometimes better than someone with the most expensive state of the art High End rig you can imagine.

prof, you sure talk a lot about blind testing and test protocols and how thorough testing protocols will minimize errors and so forth but have you conducted cables tests yourself or even know anyone who meets your criteria for testing - whatever they actually are - who has? Surely you must realize the word *thorough* means different things to different people. And minimizing errors. Those are what we call loosely goosey terms. Pseudo skeptics chant, if you do this, if you do that, if you ...... Heaven forbid they ever test anything themselves. This is all just hand waving. And who exactly is the lucky guy who is elected to determine what the test protocols are? You? AES? Some famous pseudo skeptic? Lol

Unless someone is on board the cable directionality train, the break in train and the re-settle in train I don’t care what they say. Not to mention the boatload of other variables many audiophiles are blissfully unaware or dismiss. That’s why I insist negative results mean nothing.

So, unless I see some new information or something other than hand waving I consider the skeptics’ argument completely stalled out and ineffective.