Cable Costs Relative to System

Chrfor, never say never. Some day you may be lucky enough to be enlightened, perhaps.

It's interesting to me, when this thread was started it was full of people who spoke without knowledge, and argued for the sake of argument. During these past years more development dollars have been placed on cable materials and methods of construction. This effort has taken us from one step above Monster cable to some jaw dropping products.

I hear the comments about blind a/ab comparisons and double blind testing, with these camps continuing to speak with such conviction that we would not hear a difference. How absurd these comments have become. No one with any experience with high end equipment could continue to have this view, yet somehow they continue to exist.

I simply shake my head and laugh. For the rest of the people here, we continue to learn and experiment, finding more and more from the electronics. When we started this thread, I was in the camp of the absurd in that 1/3 of my budget was spent on cables. As I look at the virtual systems posted here, I'm now seeing more and more people learning that the cables may well be the most important factor in our system.

Chrfor, perhaps you need to re-examine your confusion. You state our cables will only point out the poor electronics. You are correct, but if you had good electronics then all you would hear is your bad cables. Your system is only as good as the weakest link. I read from your comments this is your electronics. Sorry for you, but as I said, never say never!

jd

You are correct, but if you had good electronics then all you would hear is your bad cables. Your system is only as good as the weakest link.

Well put, JD. I certainly wouldn't expect Pavarotti to stretch his lungs with a Mr. Microphone.

go with the cables you can afford (new or used ) which sound best in your system...

also it makes sense to isolate your lines if possible..

The reason cables cause as much controversy as politics is because most companies that have a great sounding cable made it by accident and can't duplicate the performance in other models because they don't know how. I have heard expensive cables sound bad and expensive sound good. I have heard some cheap cables sound good too.

Add to the confusion the fact that a lot of respected audio equipment is not as good as believed and you have cables compensating for bad equipment like Firestone did for Ford.

The way to really hear huge differences in cable is to have electronics capable of bandwidth in the mega hertz ranges. There are 4 or 5 good cable engineers out there that understand electrons on a molecular level and those are the ones that make the best cables regardless of the price. Most of these companies of course are unheard of brands that magazines ignore and so the true artists go hungry as they always have.

Some of these people have had their designs stolen from well known names who can't design beyond their first fluke.

Allot $100 per interconnect, $200 for your speaker cable and $100 per filtered mains cable and get the whole lot custom made. Solidly enginered cables from any reasonably competent engineer will match anything out there at even a 100 times the price. The whole cable issue is vastly overrated IMHO. The concept of "bad wires" is fallacious - wires just have varying LCR that may make some SLIGHT difference to your system. Of far more importance is the earthing and connection arragements - the rest is voodoo. I have a $60k system and I spent less than $1k on all my filtered mains cables, interconnects and speaker cable. I tried nordost valhalla, kimber etc and they were all worse, or at best no better.