Cable vs. Electronics: biggest bang for the buck

Bigtee: Actually "we" are closer to good measurements correlating with good sound than you might think. The trouble is, they are not necessarily the same measurements, taken the same way, that manufacturers report specs or magazine reviewers do measurements.

Floyd Toole has a white paper (a few years old now) on the Harmon Web site (www.harmon.com, I believe) on the art and science of speaker design, in which he discusses the relationship between speaker measurements and listener preferences. Of course, he's doing his measuring in a real anechoic chamber, and he's doing his listening tests blind. Neither of which you get in a Stereophile review.

Agree with Rcrump. In fact 10% was my rule of thumb. I make my own cables (it's not rocket science) so I can get quite nice looking and sounding cables for my whole system for a few hundred dollars. (My system is about $4k).

Bomarc, One tiny little problem. In the Floyd Toole article, it seems that he is out to justify the means (so to speak{er}.) It is a know fact that frequency response alone can be adjusted to reflect a "Certain" sound as in laid back or up front. However, how do we account for the difference in transparency, soundstaging, proper timbral allocation and the like? Speakers test perfect on whatever test and still sound like crap. I haven't seen this measured myself. Another good example of measurements gone astray is electrostatic speakers. Because of their inherent design, they are not going to measure very flat. They are subject to unreal reflections from the room and unless you are using multiple panels, one cannot reproduce the entire frequency spectrum without problems simply because the whole panel wants to vibrate at the same frequency. With the constant changes in amplitude, it is not going to be an accurate speaker frequency wise. However, there sure are a lot of people who like them.

Bigtee: Well, Toole is justifying his own (well-regarded) approach to speaker design. What he shows is a correlation between frequency response (measured in an anechoic chamber) and listener evaluation (blind, of course). There are a lot of reasons why that correlation may break down somewhat outside the lab; e.g., speaker-room interaction (which, along with the recording itself, is where much of your soundstage information comes from). And it's quite possible that people would prefer one speaker if they were looking at it and another if they weren't. No formula is going to explain every audiophile preference.

Biggest bang for the buck...
Kimber and 6500.00 worth of vinyl!