A hard look at the effect of cables

Shadorne, I'm not used to seeing you respond with so many paragraphs littered with all-caps. I'm also surprised that this little cable item has led you to call for a moratorium on passive loudspeakers with an eye toward examining the possibility of an all active speaker world:]

Unfortunately, most if not all of the most highly regarded speakers in existence are passive.

Cables, themselves, do cause significant differences in sound regardless of how unsuccessful engineers are at properly understanding those differences.

I gather from the article several points. Correct me if I am wrong.

1. Amps, speakers and cables all interact and therefore the amps and speakers will change the characteristics of the cables. Cables will potentially sound different in different systems.
2. The longer the cable, the more it picks up interference, especially RFI.
3. The configuration of the cable, coax or parallel, will show measurable change in the level of interference measured.

If I am summarizing several of the many points correctly, then I propose that:

1. Reviews of cables are meaningless because they are not using the equipment that you will be using.
2. If you have long runs, you may need shielding to prevent the pickup of RFI, and maybe EMI.
3. Metal content, physical configuration, dialectric and length will all contribute to measurable differences in cables, and may give them different sounds. Therefore all cables can potentially act as tone controls, some more than others.

Did I understand the article? Did anyone else come to the same conclusions?

Dave,

Sorry for the caps - too much coffee this morning I guess,

As for moratorium on passive speakers....no I don't believe that. I agree that that the vast majority of the best speakers are passive.

I believe that for a well designed amp and for well designed speakers ( that are a suitable match) then the cables should have minimal effect (barely audible). I know many audiophiles vehemently disagree with this concept. I suspect the links in this thread to respected researchers who have discovered distortion when an amp and speaker complex load are coupled by a cable is intended to prove what many believe; speaker cables are a significant issue in home hi-fi and they dramatically affect the sound.

So my suggestion to those "cable worried people" would be to simply investigate Active Speakers - because this largely eliminates the problems with cable choice and matching amp to speaker load by leaving these critical choices to the designer with their skills and lab test equipment. I also gave justifications for why active designs will reduce this problem significantly . The most compelling argument, for those non technical minded, is to realize that the cable is almost eliminated altogether (it becomes at least 10 times shorter...an order of magnitude less important)

hi shadorne. there are two cable interfaces that you may be overlooking, namely the source to preamp and the preamp to amp. what about transport to dac. and what about line cords ?

ihave personally observed affects of line cords with respect to the above mentioned interfaces.

by the way, i am not aware of any panel that is fully active. some provide an amp to a woofer driver, but then the owner must furnish the amp for the panel.

Nothing is truly passive. Even what we call passive is reactive.

I still find it hard to fathom how a speaker cable can be so important, considering the inductors, capacitors and windings in the drivers of the speakers. It's almost comical after the mile of wire in an output transformer. Yet, I've heard amazing changes, at least once.

It should be noted that IC's are completely different and capacitance/inductance play a bigger role.

I'm disappointed that this thread isn't more controversial and misunderstood.