Which cables go with what?????

What i can't understand is how someone like Audioengr can say and believe what he did when he understands ( i think ) how cables and signal propagation works. I can understand how S23chang and Ridge Street Audio could make and / or agree with such a statement, given that ( i'm assuming here ) they don't have the technical background and / or test equipment that Audioengr does. I know that Steve aka Audioengr knows / understands / has experienced the effects of loading / signal reflection in his work. I don't understand how he could disregard the effects that this has on sonics / loading & transfer characteristics. I also don't know how he could overlook the variances that one can run into from component to component and system to system. As such, my comments were primarily aimed at Steve aka Audioengr, especially since he was the one that opened this can of worms.

According to S23chang: "If the cable is well designed, it should perform well in all systems. A good cable should enhance what you already have. i.e. A better cable can bring you more detail and image without changing the tone."

What is being said here is that a cable can be good even though it doesn't transfer all of the information that was fed into it. A better cable will lose even less signal / convey even more information without altering tonal balance. Well, guess what ? I think we all agree with that premise in basic theory. What i think that most of us here would like to know is how do we find these cables and know which ones they are ? If it is not something that we can measure and / or quantify by some type of physical or electrical characteristics, we are right back to trial and error and ludicrous claims based on marketing hype and / or personal preferences. Sean
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Nrchy wrote:
"We have had these disagreements before when I asked the question about what makes a bigger difference, new componants or very good interconnect or speaker cables? My experience shows that cables can make differences which are beyond belief. You poo pooed the whole ideal. Inspite of the fact that you could not measure the difference every one of the people I had come over and listen was amazed by the huge difference."

I never said that cables could not make a big difference. In fact, I believe that they can make a HUGE positive difference, if they are neutral cables. Non-neutral cables can change the sound, but not in a positive sense. What I actually said in the initial post was that I believe that trying to find SYNERGY between particular cables and particular components was a fruitless proposition.

Sean - Robert (of Ridge Street) and I have come to the same conclusions for a reason. It is experience. When you design a truly neutral cable, any system that it goes into benefits from it. The cable is really like no cable at all. There is really no "synergy" between components and well-designed cables. People sometimes ask me whether my cables will sound good with their components. I frankly don't know how to answer this. They expect me to have a magical file listing certain components that play well with certain cables of mine. All I can answer is that my cables are neutral and extremely revealing, so if they have a poor sounding component in their system, it will likely reveal this component. The trick is to replace the offending component rather than wasting money swapping cables until you convince yourself that it sounds better.

At least if you are starting with neutral, low-loss revealing cables, you can pretty-much rule-out the cables as the cause of any objectionable system performance, with perhaps the exception of noise issues, such as hum and RF pickup.

Sean wrote:
"What is being said here is that a cable can be good even though it doesn't transfer all of the information that was fed into it."

No, what I said was that certain cables do not mate synergistically with certain components, at least without degradation of some sort, such as dynamic compression or HF roll-off. In other words, cables that are said to be synergistic only with a particular component are usually "tone control" cables.

"A better cable will lose even less signal / convey even more information without altering tonal balance."

No argument here.

"Well, guess what ? I think we all agree with that premise in basic theory. What i think that most of us here would like to know is how do we find these cables and know which ones they are ?"

Unfortunately, you have to take the word of either: a reviewer, a trusted friend, or a manufacturer and ultimately try the cables for yourself. However, if you are not a super-sleuth, you may still have an offensive component in your system that you have not identified and thus end-up in the vicious circle of cable swapping etc.. I try to help as many customers in this sleuthing as I can but it is difficult to do this remotely. One thing that I am doing is offering a "reference source system" to try with a refundable deposit down. At least with this source, you KNOW that the source not the problem. Then the only things to consider are the preamp, the amp and the speakers.

"If it is not something that we can measure and / or quantify by some type of physical or electrical characteristics, we are right back to trial and error and ludicrous claims based on marketing hype and / or personal preferences."

I never said that a neutral cable did not have measurable quality metrics. They certainly do and I believe in these metrics, such as capacitance and dielectric absorption for an interconnect cable. Furthermore, I believe that I am nearing the point of diminishing returns for these metrics. Not all quality metrics for cables are easily measurable however. The quality of the silver wire for instance plays a big part in the neutrality and quality of an interconnect cable. I have my theories as to why this is and I know what to do to make the silver sing, but I have no effective way to measure this, at least which makes any sense at audio frequencies.

Audioengr: "No, what I said was that certain cables do not mate synergistically with certain components, at least without degradation of some sort, such as dynamic compression or HF roll-off. In other words, cables that are said to be synergistic only with a particular component are usually "tone control" cables."

The comment that you responded to here was meant as a response to what S23chang said, not what you had said previously. He said that a good cable would work in any system and a better cable would give you more of what the good cable already offered without altering the tonal balance. I simply pointed out that if one cable "bettered" another cable, one of the cables was simply "losing" more info than the other ( all other things being equal ).

Other than that, i think that you are still missing the point that i was trying to make. We are not listening to any single component in a system. We are listening to a conglomerate of equipment that are all loading into and reacting to one another that can be summed up as being equivalent to Thevenin's Theory. System A is no better than System B even if System A uses "neutral" cables / coloured electronics and System B uses "flavourful" cables with "neutral" electronics. We hear the end result. If both systems are deemed to be "accurate" and / or "musical", etc..., then it really doesn't matter HOW we got there. The end result is the same, we just took different paths. The fact that changing a cable CAN alter the sonics / electrical characteristics of a system / component simply means that synergy DOES come into play and IS measurable.

As a side note, try measuring the actual load impedance that a source sees during dynamic use conditions with various cabling. You can even try this with the same cabling of different lengths. Make sure that you vary the amplitude of the signal as you are doing this. Then compare their waveforms using a dynamic passage of music on a storage scope and / or tone bursts at each frequency extreme. Once you get done scratching your head, then swap in a different source or load and do it all over again. Then come back and talk to me about "universal cabling". I think you'll have a slightly different opinion and outlook on things.

To sum it up, what you'll find is that the input VSWR that the source sees changes as the amplitude and frequency are varied. When you find a cable that can "buffer" these variations that the source sees, this cable will tend to present a consistent sonic "flavour" due to the fact that the source sees a consistent load. The cable is NOT "flavoured" so much as you are now hearing the effects of consistent loading characteristics of the source device itself. It is helping to negate the varying levels of reactance of the load component that the source would otherwise have to deal with. In effect, it is acting as an impedance transformer. Whether or not one likes the "flavour" that such a cable provides, power transfer and signal linearity are probably operating at or near peak efficiency. That is, so long as the impedance being presented to the source via the cables "transformer action" is to its' liking. Changing to a different cable will present a different impedance / level of reactance and therefore cause the level of power transfer / signal linearity to be altered. Depending on the load component and cables being used, the sonics could get better, worse or have varying levels of consistency due to the aforementioned variations in input vswr as drive levels / frequency are varied.

Too bad we live so far apart. Between your Digital background and my RF background, i'm sure that we could come up with some real "wonderous" stuff. We might want to kill each other getting there, but it would be fun and i'm sure, quite enlightening : ) Sean
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