Audio Engineering Society and cables

4 CONCLUSIONS
High-end audio is a subject that is shrouded in controversy. Aside from loudspeakers, consumers exhibit varying degrees of skepticism as to what affects sonic performance. The most contentious ingredient in the chain is the interconnection between components, which concerns both the topology (balanced versus single-ended) and the characteristics of the cable itself. This work shows that two system configurations differing only by the interconnect pathway are audibly discernable, even by average listeners with no special experience in music or audio.

Well if all cables sound the same then God probably did something wrong.  

@thynamei



I will admit, it is hard for me to understand how there can still be a controversy after all these decades. I got my first high quality interconnect about 45 years ago. I had relatively cheap equipment and it just pass more of the poor signal through instead of limiting some of it… so no change. But the second cable I bought so completely changed the sound I was astounded… sounded like someone took the component out and brought in a new and better one. From that instance on, after every upgrade I would carefully choose and upgrade my cables and interconnects. Each time they have provided a very significant contribution to the overall sound quality. Btw, I pulled out that old first set of interconnects a few years ago… the ones that didn’t do anything… they made a profound impact on my contemporary system in a good way… my audio guy had steered me in the right way… only my equipment was not good enough to be improved by them.

Well, maybe I answered my own question. If you have a relatively poor signal to start with, passing through a cleaner version of the signal is probably not noticeable.

Also, some folks are under the incorrect impression that something like sound reproduction can be fully characterized by a few scientific measurements. I was trained as a scientist and worked as a scientist and engineer for over a decade and very quickly abandoned the idea that I could characterize the performance if audio equipment with a few simple variables and used listening and professional reviews as my evaluation criteria.

Thought the following interesting.........

The temporal discriminability  of the human auditory system is much finer than one might infer from the upper audibility limit of fmax <18 kHz [44], and not directly related to it. Previous experiments [45]–[46] set an upper bound of ~ 5 s. But it should be noted that those listening trials used an SSC protocol with a very simple form of stimulus (7 kHz square wave tone) and therefore may have overestimated . The experience of the present work suggests repeating those experiments with music, rather than a tone, and following an EMP approach to determine a more accurate (and probably shorter) estimate of . Similarly, the theoretical value for which was estimated to be as low as 2 s from neurophysiological modeling [45], was also based on SSC and is potentially an overestimate. Furthermore, there may be possible exotic time-domain effects that prolong the decay beyond the nominal decay times calculated here, which are based on idealized reactive behavior. These questions are worth revisiting in future.

Hearing a difference is not always an improvement, and there is little correlation between improvement and price.