Yes. We are all different in our priorities. I personally have gone through stages from when I became an audiophile. I think first I pursued slam... I wanted my chest to feel the impact of kick drums, then dynamics, then detail, then imaging, then both, then more natural sound, then midrange bloom, rhythm and pace, and finally all of them in perfect balance. Took me fifty years.
What Speaker Cables Taught Me About Audiophiles
Hold on tight because none of this story ends up where you think it will.
Ages ago I did a half-blind speaker cable test with friends in the building who loved Jazz. The amp was a Yamaha P2100 with Focal profile speakers. Cables were Mogami vs. Wireworld. Source was a CD player through a Theta Casanova preamp / processor (oh how i miss it).
I thought i was going to impress my friends with how great the Wireworld Silver 7s sounded. In particular the imaging I thought was so much better than through the Mogami Sound Runners.
To the surprise of many "scientists" here, my friends did in fact hear a noticeable difference between the two sets of cables. They absolutely preferred the Mogami.
I was a little shocked. I tried very hard to keep a poker face, and not guide them either way while switching. They could not see which cables were connected from their listening location.
What happened? Did they not understand how much better the imaging was with the Wireworld?
Well, actually they did and they didn’t care. Richard and his wife did notice that but felt that the loss of treble and beat was not worth it. Hands down for them the Mogami was the clear winner.
What this taught me was:
- Speaker cables can make a small but noticeable difference
- The improved imaging came at a cost of treble energy
- Most listeners wouldn’t make the trade. They’d rather have the tempo and foot tapping experience over my precious deep into the room imaging.
Over time of listening back and forth between my Wireworld collection and Mogami or DH Labs pure silver IC’s and Mogami speaker cables I’ve given that up. I think my neighbors were right. I’d rather have the beat and energy. It’s a fetish I was giving up far too much for.
I'm definitely not encouraging you to overhaul all your cables, but rather saying that we audiophiles need to be conscious that sometimes our preferences are unique to our culture and that the "normal" consumer may not share them at all.
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@erik_squires wrote:
Must say I wasn't surprised by the outcome of your story, not that I knew where it was heading. Needless to say there are differences in preferences among "established" audiophiles as well, but do they necessarily reflect where we are on each of our respective journeys - i.e.: as an example, would a seasoned audiophile like @ghdprentice find similar preferences among other audiophiles with 50 years of experience, and would those preferences represent a tendency even among them? I'm guessing it's more of a rhetorical question of mine, also to say that those of your "inexperienced" blind test friends mayn't be representative in their preferences of the totality of those who are inexperienced in our audiophile adventures. If anything I believe that audiophiles may be prone to veer off at some point in a direction where he or she has cultivated a sound through their setup that doesn't as much emulate a live and/or natural sound, but rather one that has become "audiophile" and something onto itself. I like inviting more or less uninitiated people that are visiting to have a listen to my setup, just to get their spontaneous response and learn of their findings. They mostly don't use an accepted audiophile vocabulary, but I find that freeing in getting a different terminological angle with their descriptions. As it turns out they're sometimes more critical in actually comparing what they are hearing with the "real stuff," whereas audiophiles tend to accept what they hear within a framework of "audiophilia," having perhaps already abandoned any hope of listening to setups that sound like the real deal. |
Over the past few years I've had three sets of speaker cables in my system: Acoustic Zen Hologram 2 Nordost White Lightning Belden 89259 diy I rotated the Beldens into my system about a year ago and I've just never gone back. They don't resolve as well as the acoustic zens, they don't create that 3 Mile deep soundstage like the nordust, but they simply provide more presence, more than one if I go to cables were locking even though those cables are quite quite good. And the Beldens of course were exponentially cheaper than the other two.
My wife ran a blind audio test on me with a three sets of cables see if I had any bias for the ones I made myself, and with just about every recording I prefered the belden's. |
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