Can we objectively rate speaker cables?

I like the reviews of cables in HIFICRITIC. They have been quite helpful to me. But cables are very system specific. That said, my system is quite fluid and the same ones usually sound better when I change amps, speakers, sources. My experience has been, unfortunately, that the best sounding cables are expensive. But not all expensive cables produce sound constant with their cost. On the other hand I have tried some of the GIANT KILLER wires and found MIDGET DISCOMFORTERS a more apt description. You pays your money and you takes your choice, if you go in believing there is no difference you are unlikely to hear any. The advance of audio has mainly consisted in discovering that things we thought made no difference in fact do. Remember "all amps sound the same"?" All turntables sound the same"? Wire is not magic but it performs a complex function that is still not perfectly understood. If a low powered , high distortion SET tube amp can be regarded as the acme of performance by respected listeners then the fact that wire can make a difference should be no surprise. I will not even go into the difficulty of sorting out preferences for one kind of sound or another. A friend of mine and I can usually agree on the characteristics of a cable but often disagree on which is the "better" one. Arthur Salvatore has a lot to say about almost everything, most of it interesting but also mostly around the bend and narrow in focus. He mostly focuses on extremely exotic items but when he descends to the level of things that you might actually have heard I find his judgement somewhat strange. I also like and use the Denon 103 but find it strange that he never mentions the Denon 304, which has far greater detail resolution and is a better cartridge.

No, you cannot rate speaker cable this way. Speaker cable has no "sound" of its own. A speaker cable can "sound" warm and slow in one system but detailed and open in another. Amp, speaker cable, and speaker must be viewed as a whole.

06-18-09: Sidssp
No, you cannot rate speaker cable this way. Speaker cable has no "sound" of its own. A speaker cable can "sound" warm and slow in one system but detailed and open in another. Amp, speaker cable, and speaker must be viewed as a whole.

Hmmmm....gets complicated doesn't it?

OK, no wire or cable has a sound of its own, but because it is an imperfect transmitter of signals, a wire or cable can change the sound of a system. So, you are correct that the system is important to the discussion. This also means that the change for one system will not be exactly the same for another system. However, all designers of cables should be trying to eliminate the imperfections of the transmission medium to give the best reproducted sound. From this perspective cables that get closer to this ideal goal should have similar characteristics and hence be less sensitive to system parameters. We should be able to identify and quantify these characteristics.

However, I suspect part of the problem with this line of ththougt is the flaws in other parts of the system. To explain, I beleive many owners may be using one component of a system (cables for example) to compensate for flaws in other components in the system. Perhaps your speakers have a tendancy to sound a little "hot" so when you use speaker cable "X" the sound is somewhat tamed and much more neutral. In fact you could be using a small flaw of the speaker cable as a filter in your system. For someone else this flaw in the speaker cable shows up as a terrible hindrance to the overall sound. Hence different opinions for same cable. I don't know how we can get away from this problem until will learn how to properly "measure" all the important characteristics of a component (not simple to do at all).

I will agree that because the speaker side of the system is fairly low in impedance and the wire characteristics and flaws likely have much less impact because of this. However, for interconnects the wire flaws and characteristics play a much bigger role due to the higher impedances involved.

ROVA

>>For example, I think many would agree that copper is generally warmer than silver.<<

And they would all be wrong.

The purity of the conductor, its' geometry, and the dielectric influence the sonics far more than the choice of metal(s).

IMO

Shadorne -- Very interesting article you linked to. I was particularly struck by the last sentence under paragraph number 4. I see no reason to doubt that sentence is factual.

Rova said: I will agree that because the speaker side of the system is fairly low in impedance and the wire characteristics and flaws likely have much less impact because of this. However, for interconnects the wire flaws and characteristics play a much bigger role due to the higher impedances involved.

I disagree. The "wire flaws and characteristics" which are significant for speaker cables simply are different than the ones which are significant for interconnects. Inductance and gauge (resistance) clearly can be significant for speaker cables, depending on length and on the impedances of the amplifier and speakers. For interconnects, those parameters are almost always insignificant, while capacitance and shielding are important.

Stan said: The advance of audio has mainly consisted in discovering that things we thought made no difference in fact do.

Stan -- I agree in principle with your comments, but only up to a point. If the concept behind a product is sufficiently unconventional, or the price seemingly absurd, I will want to see some rationale which is at least half-way plausible before I will spend my time and/or money investigating it. Besides their apparently outlandish markups, what I find to be the biggest turn-off about super-expensive cables is the design rationale which is typically offered in their "white papers" and other literature. Which, as a technically trained person, I KNOW to be largely nonsense in many or most cases, designed to sound good to the majority of audiophiles who are not technically trained.

I am not saying that the products will not be good performers in many systems, just that I find the design rationale (as well as the price) to be a turn-off. Even though I know it will never happen, I would much rather see cable purveyors simply say something like "we used the following very expensive materials and construction techniques, we voiced it all on very high resolution systems, and we don't know why those materials and techniques make it sound so good but they do." Which is what it all amounts to, at best.

Regards,
-- Al