DO CABLES REALLY MATTER?

Dlcockrum. Lol. You are so right. Round and around wit the Marvin the martian space language 

I gotta step in here (do I dare??).  It just occurred to me that Mapleshade swears by thin wire with minimal  insulation.  They are supposed to know a lot about why this is so good for the sound.  Walker audio also uses skinny wires with little or no covering for their turntable.  Then there are ribbon style cables, with the majority being round thick conductors with lots of insulation.  And it's quite true that in a recording studio reliable sturdy wire with durable connectors are used 'cause they get stepped on and wound up and tangled and thrown into a corner to gather dust until the next time they're needed.  My conclusion to all of this is- if you have usable cable that's obviously well made, it should be a long time before you need to spend significant money on something "better" unless you really can get to audition it first. Some of us (I include myself who owns Transparent cables) take it on faith that I will obtain better performance from audiophile-grade wire, and I do NOT claim that I have gotten my money's worth from doing this. But I do get, after 30 years of upgrading speakers and things like that, somewhat better results than if I still used my Radio Shack "professional-grade" wires.  But I profess that it's a hobby, I enjoy it like the village idiot that I am, and I like good stuff like Beethoven and Brubeck and Steely Dan. Could I go back tomorrow (if I had to) and listen to my Dad's Blaupunkt "hi-fi" radio?  -Absolutely. Of course, back then they had concerts on FM stations and I loved listening to them. Who's to say if I had less fun then than I do now if I can't?

french_fries,

Thanks for the post full of sanity. The road so far has been a little different.

Per aspera ad astra.

It is hard to beat Blaupunkt car radio. Maybe Becker Mexico, but even that is a big "maybe".

It all depends on where you get off and what you’re trying to accomplish. My debutante ball was with Mapleshade at CES way back when. The (Ron Bowman, Pierre’s partner) interconnects are 54 ga or whatever, thinner than a human hair, which produce either almost no skin effect or all skin effect, I forget which. The Mapleshade cables sound really spectacular, by the way. I had brought along my Nimbus sub Hertz iso platform to isolate the Nakamichi Dragon CD System that included a unique feature: when a CD is inserted into the CD player a vacuum is produced around the CD transport for a stage of isolation. All cables and power cords (also ultra thin) were suspended from eye hooks on the ceiling with thread. The whole wild and crazy look of the Mapleshade/Machina Dynamica/Gallo room prompted someone  was it Shannon Dickson?  at Stereophile magazine to write that it look like something out of Plan 9 from Outer Space.

E pluribus unum.

geoff kait
machina dynamica

Everyone should buy more expensive cables, especially if they can't hear the difference between what they already have. You have to consider directionality, skin effect, interference by gamma, cosmic and Wi-Fi signals plus secret government wavelengths.

Then there's 2G, 3G, and 4G. Of course the game's up when 5G comes but in the meantime I advise everyone to send every last cent they have on the most expensive cables they can find. And every time a more expensive cable comes along you must buy that too.

You just can't take any chances these days. The fact that some say a straightened coat hanger sounds just as good as $1000 per metre cable just shows how unrefined their palette must be. No, I don't need any figures on resistance, induction or capacitance. I prefer to trust my ears. I had them recently checked only 20 years ago.

Now pass me another glass of Screaming Eagle Cabernet 1992. At $500k a bottle it's got to be worth every cent.