Can we objectively rate speaker cables?

Rove wrote: " 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."

The implies that there is a single standard to which any particular component should be designed.

That's simply not the way engineering works, whether one is building airplanes or stereo equipment. Every choice one makes when designing a product has advantages and disadvantages and the accumulation of those choices represent an overall compromise the designer is willing to live with.

For example, in an airplane you can add bigger fuel tanks that allows the plane to fly farther. However, this increases weight and has implications that ripple through the rest of the plane's design.

Same thing with the design of audio products. One amp's designer may choose circuit topology that offers superb performance in one area but leaves the unit more sensitive to cable parameters.

Your comment would suggest this design is simply wrong, regardless of the other benefits the designer believes it offers.

However, it is not uncommon for a designer to choose performance with restrictive requirements over options that offer more benign compatibility.

That is why it is important to treat the amp, cable and speaker as a lumped circuit. In order for music to come out of the speakers, they must all interact. Take a speaker wire out of one circuit where it works fine and it may not work as well in another.

I don't think there is anything particularly magic or mysterious going on, other than the fact that most home users have to discover the best combo by trial and error. That easily leads to the incorrect assumption that what ever works for them should be the same for everyone else.

Finally, just for the record, I'm not in the camp that finds "massive" differences between wires (unless there is just something horridly wrong, such as unshielded telephone wire being used for a turntable interconnect.) Pay a bit of attention to resistance, look at capacitance and inductance parameters, consider shielding issues, have good connections and I'm fine to leave the obsessive/compulsive mental gyrations to others. ;-)

It has been proved in blind test after blind test that amps sound the same. These tests "prove" nothing except that the people involved did not hear a difference, not that others wouldn't. I guarantee you that I would not have bought the expensive cable I did [used at one third new cost] if listening to a lot of wires over the years had not convinced me that it makes a difference. My experience is somewhat different than most as I have dealt in audio equipment most of my life and this involves constantly assembling and disassembling a system, I never set up more than one at a time. So I hear many combinations of components and wires and get some idea of their relative contributions. I see many cables that offer a totally excessive mark up, I never carry these. Very good ones do cost a lot of money to make and stay on the market for years.

These tests "prove" nothing except that the people involved did not hear a difference, not that others wouldn't.

Agreed. It proves absolutely nothing at all.

I think we can also all agree that there must be some (even if ever so small) difference and that the output of some gear may be a great deal more sensitive than others to a very small difference of this type (a speaker with a low impedance point of 4 ohms, for example, on the end of a 50 foot cable).

However, before we jump to conclusions, where are the blind tests that "prove" that there are "some others" who can indeed hear the difference on those high quality very expensive cables? (...and then logically what type gear specifically requires careful attention to cables?)

And I am not referring to the Misleading Monster cable in store demo which you can read about on Roger Russel's website and where a difference is very obvious.

Little if anything in audio related to cables can be objectively rated. What is good in one system/combination with "X" is horrible in "Y" and thus cannot be independently analyzed except for measuring capacitance, resistance, inductance, etc. Thus, cables can be only rated relative to the system they are inserted into. And, unfortuntely, they do make things sound "different" but not always better or worse. This is what keeps "audio" interesting. Moving\bending cables changes the sound and when comparing them, movement introduces another variable, so blind testing is worth little in this situation. The sound changes especially for the solid core stuff with movement. A good idea for a standard, but...Jallen

First off, what type of music people listen to and their frame of reference relative to live music events will inevitably influence how they hear and judge any audio product. What is possible can only be appreciated if you have a physical ear/brain experience or memory of live events/instruments and how they can sound in any given environment. Those with limited exposure to great music performed in great venues need not apply if they are conditioned to listening to electronicaly reproduced, poorly recorded, mass marketed material. If you have been around live music and frequented some of the best venues around for mucial events as I have, then it takes little imagination or effort to hear the differences in cables or gear. The realm of difficult discrimination becomes less of an obstacle you see because it is a physical sonic memory. Going to a few rock concerts and listening to mismatched/conventional components all your life affords one an extremely limited sonic imagination.