Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

The irony in the cable game relative to Sean's post is in trying to get from his paragraph 4 to paragraph 5. (no intent to pick on Sean). It's the fact that cables do change from placement to placement that causes people to spend so much money buying, trying, then selling at half price. If there is any way around this trap, I'd be most interested in hearing it. With a lot of experience, you can characterize how your system reacts with a variety of cable designs, but reducing it to a set of rules that will actually help in avoiding making the same mistakes again is something that escapes me. In power cords, for example, I can take 4 similarly constructed cables used in the same position, and they all sound quite significantly different from one another.
So far, the best method I've found is listening to characterizations by other people. If enough people who are theoretically free of outside influence ... post opinions on a cable's character, you get a reasonable picture of how it usually performs across a fair spectrum of equipment.
Also, can we get a definition of what is electrically backwards in the cable world? Undoubtedly yes, but for starters, would anyone venture a guess as to whether any of the following are electrically forwards or backwards:
- networks and network boxes
- magnets
- padding with rice paper, cotton, ers cloth, etc.
- mechanical resonance controls
- wildly improbable conductor materials
- the need for amorphous non-crystalline metal structure, assuming the conductor is made out of metal
- dc current added to the shield
- water or other jackets for novel shielding

And that's just a start on the list of novel approaches to defeating a list of transmission line issues, real or theoretical or purely imaginary. So as a practical matter, how do you, the user, sort out what a cable will do without a lot of trying ($$$$) :^)

try Goertz MI1 or MI2 speaker cables: http://www.alphacore.com/mispeaker.html
or Kimber 4TC 0r 8TC (not as good as Goertz} and more expensive.

Re. objective characteristics of cable behavior, I've found the audioholics site to be worthwile food for thought:

audioholics site

They seem to be pretty far toward the 'objectivist' end of the spectrum of thought re. cable performance, which some will find more appealing than others. The hard data they provide is valuable regardless of its interpretation and eventual shoehorning into electronics theory (which gets very esoteric very fast, at least for me.)

If one can make use of it, perhaps the data can aid in choosing cable evaluation candidates, and perhaps in understanding cable placement differences as well. (impedance matching, capacitance, etc...)

There have also been a couple of articles in Stereophile re. cable theory, at least one of them was by Herve Delatraz, who makes the DarTzeel amp, if I recall correctly. I couldn't find them on the website- perhaps they are only available in print, or I wasn't looking in the right places online.

Fun thread!

Interesting, Tommy.

I must say this site (have never run across it before) appears to have an axe to grind. For example, they slam the Goertz speaker cables for introducing a large phase shift; the problem is it's out of the audio band and therefore irrelevant. In fact, when you assess their data on the cable, it's quite flat in the audio range.

Seems hard to get an "objective" opinion.

Sean, assuming that a cable meets a reasonable level of design integrity, is it your opinion that the process of evaluating the different designs (sonic evaluation) becomes random and unpredictable?

Would you agree that design integrity could be of a high standard in a $500 I/C, just as high as say a $2500 I/C?
If so, it should then be possible that the less expensive cable could sound better than the more expensive cable, given a sympathetic set of electrical (impedance) properties in system components?
I'm going through cable changes in my system right now, and I'm experiencing a wide range of sonic differences between cable, that seem totally unrelated to price. I won't get into specifics at this point, but it seems to me that spending big bucks on cables does not guarantee any kind of performance advantage over lower cost cables, and that basically it's all about system synergy and finding a cable with the right electrical properties that 'just happens' to compliment the properties of the components to which it connects.
Various things strike me from all of this, foremost is that any written review of audio cables is to be treated almost as a source of entertainment, rather than any kind of resource or reference. Unless you have the exact same setup as the reviewer (impossible, since at the very least, his/her AC will be different) the results of the review are totally system dependant and therefore of little or no relevance outside of that specific system.
A bit too 'black and white' but you get my drift.

Rooze