If boulder is tops what is second tier?

Rich; you said;

"Suffice it to say, there are a number of things regarding the engineering of electronics that should prevent them from being affected by the cables connecting them."

i am one that has a great deal of experience with different gear and lots of cables. no matter what gear or combination of gear i have tried the sonic performance has always varied with the cables i used. cables are a component.....whether one likes it or not. OTOH if someone sees it different no problem.....i feel no need to convince anyone. it is typically the cable non-believers that have some inate need to convince people differently.

i have recently had an experience that does say a bit about cables/gear interaction though. Herve Delatraz, the darTZeel amp and preamp designer/manufacturer, wrote an article for Stereophile back in November 2001. this was prior to him introducing any commercial products. this article focused on how impedence interaction between electronic gear reduced the ultimate performance of any cables. he theorized that impedence matching would basically eliminate most cable differences.

a year ago i recieved his new preamp (i already had two of his amps). both his amp and preamp are designed to work with 50 ohm BNC cables both in and out (he calls this design a 'zeel' connection). he represents that any length up to 1 kilometer will sound the same (which is to say much better than standard cables due to impedence matching). after listening i must agree with his representation.

the only thing is that even though the Zeel connection outperforms any standard cable approach......after comparing various 50 ohm BNC cable brands there is still a variance in how each type sounds (i prefer Herve's version).....and the differences are quite easy to discern.

conclusion; we are not finished learning about what cables do.....but there is no doubt in my mind that different cables many times sound differently. which does not mean that everyone can/will hear the differences in their situation.

one more issue; there is no place in the audio chain where cables have more effect than the phono cable.....the tiny signal that the cartridge produces combined with the need to boost it 40db to 70db will multiply cable influence many times. if you can't hear phono cable differences look to your system performance and resolution and not proof that cables don't matter. it is very clear.

Rich Maez sez:

Any changes in sound are simply the losses, omissions, or distortions of that particular conductor's filter characteristics and should NOT be the result of a cable's electrical characteristics affecting the electrical operation of a piece of gear.

Goodness me, Mr Maez, *everyone* seems to have noticed that: i.e. a change in wire seems to affect the (sonic) end result... The causal reference you make is of little import isn't it?

Even IF you are referring to the power connection, the result seems to be the same. Whether this "(affects) the electrical operation of ... gear" is a moot point really unless you define what you see as "operation". You seem to be saying that a component's sonic result should not, on paper, be affected by the power chord variable IF that component's PS is implemented properly -- and, amazingly at the same time, that it does --

{BTW you obviously know that the connection to the wall socket is not always directly linked to the "operation" of the component (if that's what you mean by operation)... It is directly linked if by operation you mean switch on and remain on.}

Again, that's what most people are saying: that changing a wire often changes the sonic result. Uncanny, no?

Dear friends: I think that what Albert was questioning to Boulder was the Boulder people attitude ( not the Boulder performance ) where Albert offer his help about and they give not only a wrong answer but in a not very nice way.

Now, what Rich posted: +++++ " If a product is properly engineered, it shouldn't care less what's used to connect it and the given product's response should remain stable with any reasonably designed cable. Any changes in sound are simply the losses, omissions, or distortions of that particular conductor's filter characteristics and should NOT be the result of a cable's electrical characteristics affecting the electrical operation of a piece of gear.... " +++++, is absolutely right. One of the critical factor ( between others ) in the design of electronics and in particular with a phonolinepreamp is that its output impedance remain at less or around 100 Ohms and in an amplifier less or around 0.05 Ohms, these electronics figures almost asure that the pre/amp will not suffer any change in their design performance response, obviously all the quality sound changes that we could percieve from those gear comes from the different cables/connectors that we are running.

We can go on and on: a not to good phonolinepreamp design could react ( change its performance response ) not only with the cables but with the amplifier input impedance, in the same way the amplifiers react not only against the cables but with the electrical speaker impedance.

I have to say that there are many " big names " out there that react against other audio devices in the audio chain and only a few of them really are on target on these subjects.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

Rauliruegas...In my experience vacuum tube preamps, typically with output impedance around 600 ohms, are much more sensitive to interconnects than are solid state preamps, typically with output impedance lower than 50 ohms. Not to say that tube preamps can't sound good, but they do like short interconnects and power amps with input impedance higher than 100K.

It seems that the only person who read my post carefully and understood exactly what I said was Raul.

Very simply: cables can affect the sound of the audio passing through them via their unique characteristics, however they should never affect the operation of electronics if those electronics are properly engineered. If the function of an amplifier is changed because of the cable attached to it, then the amp has either been designed with a specific cable in mind and should ONLY be used with that cable, or it is an unstable product.

For those who wonder what audio cables we think are the most neutral, we really don't go looking. We're not in the cable evaluation business. Most of the sonic changes wrought by any sort of cable and its internal winding are inversely proportional, meaning that as one goes up, another goes down, etc. Because of that, the choice of cable is really user dependent - we all pick our favorites.

How do we do measurements? Everything is connected directly to a variac and tested on the bench. AC is supplied at either 50 or 60 Hz only, so there would be no issues regardless of what is used to carry power as long as it does not limit current delivery.

Power cables: most products do not build line conditioning and filtration into the AC line input sections of their products. We do. We have extremely high common mode rejection in our power supply designs, so there is little that a power cord can achieve with our designs other than greater possible current delivery if a smaller gauge cable had been used. We believe that any product that claims to be of high performance should take external factors into account (and in the real world, not just on paper) as well as internal operation, thus we do everything that we can to eliminate the need for external tweaks. For what you're paying, it should be optimized right out of the box.