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Are cable recommendations worth anything?

I am a Denafrips dac owner. I use the Denafrips Facebook site for the same reasons I use this site.

Discourse, basic information and hopefully some enlightenment.
Recently one of the contributors asked the default question of "Can you recommend RCA cable brands that match well with Denafrips from dac to amplifier?"

Am I the only person that is confused when someone asks an open-ended question like this about cables?The sheer variety of "highly recommended" cables, lends me to believe that the cables are much less important to the sound than the component itself. Recommendations ran the gamut from the Tellurium Q Black Diamond cables at $1,100 CDN per metre, to the Blue Jeans cables at about $50 CDN per metre.

How does that make sense and how can this possibly help the poor slob that asked the question?
tony1954
djones51
4,947 posts
 
To simply answer the question "are cable recommendations worth anything?"
To me, no they're not. 
audio2design
1,351 posts
 
Care to give examples of something 100% provable where results came back 50-50 with a double blind test?   How can you skew bias when you have no idea what is being tested. That makes no sense.

Double blind tests are nothing more than a parlor trick, right up there with seances. You can take something 100% provable and subject people to a DB "test" and come back with 50-50 results. All it proves is that uncertainty increases under the guise of testing. Bias is never eliminated but skewed for all the wrong, unanticipated reasons.

djones51
4,947 posts
 
If we eliminate double blind tests what should science replace them with to control for bias? I always thought they were critical in understanding if something worked independent of our wants. Double blind testing could substantiate cable claims as easy as refute them. 
douglas_schroeder
3,281 posts
 
Recommendations of cables apart from the manufacturer recommended use, in sets, are pretty well worthless. 
tony1954's avatar
tony1954 OP
1,281 posts
 
@soix

And what exactly was the "right question"?

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