The truth about interconnects - can you handle it?

Amen, brother Bomarc.

BTW, Twl, I care as much as anyone here about the faithful reproduction of music. As I attend many concerts each year, I have live music to compare my system to. I listen very carefully, and converse with many people who do as well. My responses here ARE based on my listening tests.

Enjoy your music,

Charlie

While I believe their are some great cables out there that can make an improvement in the sound of your system, I also believe their are some cable manufacturers that are fradulent, and their is no protection group to police it.
And even if their was it would be difficult to prove given the complexity of why something works, especially in system A and not in system B. Never the less a manufacturer can make up any mumbo jumbo for advertising purposes and suck in the audiophile whose never ending quest is for the perfect sound. For me the true test is would I be willing to wager money I can tell you the difference between cable A and Cable B. I own several cables I would be willing to bet a $1000.00, I could tell you the difference blindfolded. I own other cables that I would not bet a nickel on.

As an electronic design engineer, and a fervent believer in the scientific approach to understanding our world it saddens me that so many "scientific" people are so closed minded to anything that they cannot explain with their limited science. Be skeptical, by all means, but don't be closed minded, because once you reach that point all progress halts. Remember Einstein .. imagination is more important than knowledge. Or the saying "To those with limited knowledge there are infinite possibilities ... to those with great knowledge there are few".
I'm skeptical that time travel or teleporting will ever be a reality, but I will never say never ... can you imagine explaining to a person of 500 years ago that people would travel to the moon, or that the rate of progression of time was altered by gravitational fields, or that the mass of an object increases with the speed of that object ?
I was very skeptical of cables, and I remain very skeptical of the amounts of money paid for cables, but I have heard with my own ears that they do make a difference.

Sean: The question isn't, can cables sound different? Of course they can, and I know of no one who would argue otherwise. The question is, when they do sound different, can we explain why? And the answer is, yes we can. Now, it might turn out that someday someone will discover that our current explanation is wrong. But, as in the cases you cited, that will happen because we happen upon things we cannot explain, which forces us to look for new explanations. So far, nobody's come up with any unexplainable phenomena.

Bomarc ... I'm pretty much in agreement that so far I haven't heard of any audio phenomena that could not be explained scientifically, including the science of the perception of sound. I must have miunderstood your previous post because I think we're in close agreement.

There have been many times when I've managed to improve the sound of my system by making a change that I was convinced would have no effect, and then afterwards I have been able to think through why it has worked. For example adding an external DAC to my mid-fi CD player made almost no difference, even though the DACs, power supplies and output stages were much better in the external DAC. Then I added a monarchy DIP and suddenly the external DAC sounds much much better. I then did some reading on timing jitter and it's pretty clear what happened. Same with interconnects, speaker cables etc etc.