Audio Cables: All the Same?

I’ll do my best to save you the labor pains, and just give you the baby.

Taking the opposite approach: IMHO, 2 cables with different materials, geometry, gauge, dialetric (insulator) terminations, and termination methods, will sound DIFFERENT. Period.

Way back when, the Monster Cable guy convinced me to bring in the original beefy speaker wire. (It took some convincing. What a ridiculous, overblown spool of audio BS this is!!) It hung on the peg board for months. No sales. (Of course, we weren’t recommending, or even mentioning it).

Seeing dollars hanging on the pegboard with no perceivable return on investment, I decided to take them home and hook, them up to my system. After wresting with the mass of hundreds of strands, and a few curse words later, I finally got the signal from Point A to Point B, and dropped the "needle" on the record. Sitting very low exceptions, I was simply stunned by what I heard. My audio vocabulary was pretty limited back then, and several decades have passed since. I just remember a sound with less strain, more bass, and overall improvement in balance. We started recommending MC, and never looked back.

Part 2 of the cable story was a couple of years later and we had a high end ($80) interconnect on hand. We had just received a flagship $800 CD player from a manufacturer. We also had good success with their $300 unit. After spending some quality time listening to the new player, we swapped the OEM interconnect for the "high end" model. Boom!! This lead to a serious question: "Will a $300 player with a "high end" interconnect sound as good a high end player with an OEM cable?" Well, 6 out of 6 of us preferred the sound of the $300 player with the "high end" cable over the $800 player with the OEM cable. It was at this moment that I took audio cables very seriously as a "component" rather than an accessory. Literally, you could spend $500 on component upgrade and not accomplish what a cable upgrade can do for less than $100.

A few years later, a guy named Bill Low came around doing "training" and cable demos. Out comes a jam box with removable speakers to use for "high end" speaker cable demos. It worked!! Even on a cheap system, you can hear a difference. This stuck with me and continues this day. We’re still an AQ dealer today.

Just did a cable upgrade on a $99 digital amp. Stunning improvement!!. A nasty, gritty little amp that sounded like mono playing out of 2 speakers made bass, produced an image, and had some detail after the cable upgrade.  Actually "listenable."

I developed a metric over the years that I refer to as a "percentage of improvement." So, if a component/cable swap had a modest 10% improvement, then the "math" would dictate that it was worth 10% of the cost of the system. So, bang for the buck comes into play here, and there are many variables. A 30% improvement (WHAMM!!) for a 10% investment in the price of a system is a bargain, regardless of what component/cable/other was added. It’s a metric that’s worked for me for several decades.

Today, we yank the OEM internal cabling out of electronics and speakers and replace them with the good stuff. We’re pretty proud of our work, but are often surprised with what we get. Yes, the "expected" sonic improvements in A, B, and C in spades occurs regularly. But, often very pronounced improvements D, E, and F.

Cables matter. Cheap gear. Expensive gear. Long lengths. Short lengths.

@sstraus 

If I were still a EE student with access to a lab, I would  Right now, life's short and I just want to listen to the music.  

This is the point of the OP's post here, there is no such lab.

There is no machine/equipment/analyzer that can perceive the difference in taste between a Michelin 5 star chef's hollandaise and an inferior one, and the experts would claim what would be the point in developing such a tool when there is the human mouth which clearly can make the distinction. 

Likewise, there is no lab that can fully perceive the difference in sound quality between cables. The known parameters of capacitance, resistance, inductance do not. Also run as many reactance, impedance, susceptance, transconductance and magnetic flux calculations as you like, include all your fancy sine wave and frequency response graphs to impress the flat-earthers, but it will never reveal how the cable will sound. But human's do have ears, so why bother? 

Do you know what soundstage is? Measure that in the lab. 

But hey, feel free to pull out your $78 multi-meter and tell me all cables are the same. Maybe it will work in hollandaise sauce also? 

I was one of the disbelievers years ago. Then, a friend who owns a high end shop let me demo various speaker and interconnect cables from Kimber, Cardas, Analysis Plus, amongst others including variations of each at different price points. What I did was to introduce each into my then system and have my lovely wife give me her opinions. She did not know if what was installed was a three dollar, or three-thousand dollar cable. She made comments along the way such as; what did you do, that sounds muffled, or what did you do, I've never heard those details in that song before. This worked quite well. See, with me knowing what each cable costed, I felt biased. In the end, I went with all Tellurium Q Ultra Black cables and was very pleased. Fast forward thirteen or so years and I recently changed everything over to Audience Front Row. I apologize for any typo's. I have a progressing retina disease and don't see font very well these days. The good news is that my hearing is still very good.

MIT Computer Music Journal published a blind AB test of cables, oh, 20-25 years ago that really should have shut a lot of people up. Some of the listeners could not tell the difference between cables, while others did. One tester (identified by only the initials "JA") responded correctly 100% of the time.

So if someone claims that he or she can’t hear any sonic difference between two cables in a particular sound system & room, then my conclusion would be: i) that person is simply not capable of that degree of differentiation; ii) the system does not have sufficient resolution to reveal any differences (i.e., cabling is not its weakest link); iii) the cables do not interact with some system-specific characteristic in a way that alters SQ; or iv) those particular cables really do sound very similar.

In none of these cases, is it reasonable to assume that a choice of cables cannot under any circumstances produce sonic differences.

And I still groan when I hear about non-experimentalists whining about the sine qua non of double-blind ABX testing.  There are many ways to conduct an ABX test, and some of the most common can be ineffectual when evaluating differences in a listener's perception of sound quality.  You can't simply migrate an ABX procedure  that works for visual or tactile sources into the audio domain -- the way our brain processes sound is not like the way it perceives visual stimulus.  This is a big topic, and probably worthy of its own thread.  But it's quite possible for unblinded AB audio comparisons to produce more credible results than would an ad hoc DBABX procedure.  So again, I have to make a generalization that generalizations are rarely helpful.