How does cable construction affect sonic character?

Interesting video. 

A good sommelier can determine by taste which particular area a wine comes from, which grape, even which particular vineyard and which year. It comes from experience and his/her hyper-sensitive taste buds and smell. Can a laboratory instrument capable of chemical measurements do the same? I doubt it.

I think our listening skills are like that. Some of us are more sensitive to sounds than others. I think listening over a long period of time, and listening to lots of different systems and components brings experience to be able to discern like a good sommelier does. Once you have it, it’s very easy to hear very subtle differences.

Its only miraculous if you deny that an application of well understood mathmatical principles is responsible for achieving what believers applaud.

This is possibly not something those who have been reading audio reviews (perhaps for decades) have been taught to believe.

Cable construction, specifically spacing between connectors, can affect the capacitance and inductance, which, if large enough, have measurable effects on frequency response at the speaker. The science guys do not say all cables sound the same. They say that cables that measure the same sound the same.  “Cable believers” as many refer to them, believe that cables that measure the same can sound different. Take your choice. It’s your money and ears. 

@asctim
"I have yet to see any solid evidence that the standard accepted set of audio and electrical measurements are inadequate to account for perceived differences in sound quality, but I remain open to new discoveries."

Thank you for your most intelligent and interesting response. Your testing results are very insightful. I quoted your comment above because this is exactly where an email debate with a well known bass trap producer and I foundered. He was firm that everything that could be measured physically that is related to audio has been measured. My counter-claim was that since we are still in the medieval ages when it comes to perception and brain research, we simply cannot know for certain that we are measuring all that is necessary on the physics side. That’s where we broke off our correspondence -- not least when he started throwing words like "dupes" and "shills" got into the mix. He argued well up to a point but then went ad hominem on those who claim to hear differences.

@rodman99999

Thanks for re-presenting your post! Trying to digest it...

@teo_audio ​​​​​​@noske 

TEO: With eyes, we can discern VERY small changes in color and tonality, the kind that the finest measurement systems MISS ENTIRELY....the same sort of things happen in the world of measurement of audio signals and the human ear. There is a huge body of work regarding ears and hearing, and all which is connected to that.

cables make a difference, and people can hear it reliably. Get over yourself and your limitations and stop beating up others because they can. Jebus.

this subject is so tired, that if I owned this forum, I’d have a period of banning people (week and then month long on the second offense, etc) who keep bringing it up, until the insistent finally take the hint and give it up.

Thanks for your post. I always learn from you. I cannot actually tell if you think I’m a cable skeptic or not. I’m not a skeptic. Indeed, the very point of my cartoon is not that cables don’t make a difference. I’m actually getting at YOUR point, namely that the connections between physics, physiology, perception, and interpretation are so poorly mapped out that the lack of a specific answer -- in the cartoon, that’s the "miracle occurs" joke -- causes some people to become skeptics. But, and we agree on this, that is bad reasoning. In other words, I’m trying to add some detail to the breakdown point in the inquiry, not take a side. (Maybe you see that, but I cannot tell for sure.)