Are cable recommendations worth anything?

ahofer

Seems that the moderator has taken sides here and spuriously deleted multiple posts that contained no abuse, no profanity, and no personal attacks, unlike some of the responses.  They are facilitating the epistemic closure evident among some on this site. Shame on him/her, whoever they are.

I think the mods here do a great job.  Your posts weren't "spuriously deleted." The moderators deleted your posts because you were trying to hatch a scam, a financial hustle, the audiophile equivalent of Three-card Monte. I know you may have thought it was a clever approach, but it really wasn't and has been tried here many times before.  You'll have to find your marks somewhere else.

Beware the audio guru.

“Their system sucks, and everyone knows it- except for them! Because they haven’t learned to listen. “

It always comes back to this. “My ears are better than yours/better than thousands of others”. It’s pure nonsense, incredibly juvenile, and contains no useful or compelling idea, let alone scientific logic.

Stereo Review started debunking the cable myth in 1983, Head-if tests hundreds of people and only one can correctly identify cables from the sound, and on and on (within the links in the thread I posted above) but all you’ve got is your claimed exceptional abilities.

Look, you can argue there is a problem with blind tests (i reluctantly disagree, but ok). You can argue that all the tests done so far are flawed (large task, but at least it makes sense), but combatting science with snobbery is kid stuff.

And I enjoy the hell out of my system, especially as I’ve learned where applying money actually makes a lasting difference for me, instead of a temporary placebo hit that inevitably fades and keeps you on the hedonic audio jewelry treadmill.

The Archimago link within the text above is a great place to start on how to actually think about finding truly audible differences, as well as the story of a fellow audio junkie’s search for an audible difference in any kind of cable (power, interconnect, digital, etc.).

I always get a kick out of this slide in Floyd’s presentation. Start watching at this time location:

https://youtu.be/zrpUDuUtxPM?t=3220

It will of course be noted that "Audio Reviewers" did poorly. Retail audio sales, better, but not great. Selected and trained did by far the best. Selected mainly by good hearing (which I suspect many here no longer have), and trained to listen for specific defects for loudspeakers.

Listen very closely to what he says at 56:38.

Before you try to refute someone who has forgot more about audio and sound than most of us will ever remember, he said the two most important things for a speaker are flat on-axis performance and smooth off axis performance.  Someone in this very thread appears to be presently having a love affair with a speaker that for whatever other faults it may have, its on axis is quite flat, and its off axis is very smooth.

This cable stuff is tiring and really seems to bring out the worst in people.  Why can't people share their listening experiences and make their cable recommendations without it turning into a competition and argument? 

Is is so hard to simply try the cables, listen for yourself, and then buy/keep what you like best, without the perpetual arguments between science and hearing, good ears and bad ears, resolving systems and boom boxes, expensive and cheap cables, and the contribution a cable makes to the overall sound of a system?  Why care if somebody else has a different opinion?