As a latecomer, after reading the first few messages in the other thread, I didn't want to read the remaining 9 pages. There is a great tendency in "debates" to miss the whole point, particularly this "debate."
No one who understands Ohm's Law would ever deny that cables can make a difference to perceived sound quality in a system. Ohm's Law guarantees that enough difference in the resistance, inductance and/or capacitance of a cable will create predictable, audible differences in amplitude and frequency response. There can also be other less obvious causes for audible differences, e.g. amplifiers that become unstable when driving reactive loads, or output protection circuits that behave differently with different loads.
However, that's a far cry from saying that a given cable has particular sonic qualities of its own. For any cable (for example) with enough capacitance to create audible high-frequency losses with amplifier "X" driving it (because the output resistance of amplifier "X" an RC low-pass filter with that capacitance forms at some frequency--a real concern with long microphone cables), you could generally find an amplifier "Y" with lower output impedance and raise that filter's corner frequency high enough that no one can hear the effect.
Many audiophiles, in the preceding example, might consider amplifier "X" better than amplifier "Y" because of its "superior ability to resolve differences among speaker cables." That is a totally arbitrary standpoint; one could equally well prefer amplifier "Y" because it tends to eliminate sonic differences among speaker cables. But audiophiles don't tend to take that point of view, whereas most engineers, I think, would do so.
Engineers generally consider the quantities involved more than audiophiles seem to do. If you say that you hear a difference between 1000 feet of speaker cable X versus 1000 feet of speaker cable Y, I will believe you much more readily than if you claim to hear a difference with only 10 feet of each. Engineers also understand that the source and load impedance are considerations which make certain types of connection far less vulnerable to cable effects than others. Ordinary line-level connections for example are essentially immune to the sonic influence of cables, though to judge from the ads in Stereophile you would never know that.
To repeat, engineers don't claim that "all cables sound alike"--it is dishonest rhetoric whenever anyone is accused of claiming such an absurd thing. The engineering-oriented viewpoint is more subtle:
[1] Whenever two cables seem to sound different, the observation should be checked via controlled listening both to verify the observation itself and so that all factors other than the two cables are eliminated as variables. Sometimes a perceived difference in sound is reliably, repeatably observed--but it stems from some other cause than the one we may assume at first. Also, it's a plain fact that when you're careful about matching gains and listening levels, many initially perceived differences vanish.
But strangely (and very interestingly), a listener who has indeed heard a difference with unmatched levels will sometimes, with total sincerity, continue to believe that he is still hearing that difference after the levels are matched--until a controlled test is carried out and the negative results are made known (and sometimes even despite that). In other words, some people realize right away when they're simply guessing, while others apparently don't realize it, but are doing it anyway. To me this says a lot about why each side thinks that it's better than the other.
[2] Once it's clear that a difference in sound really is due to cables--which, I repeat, no one who has had one week of an electronics course would ever deny is possible! --"objectivists" believe that the difference is due to system behavior which can be measured and compared in a meaningful way to the perceived difference. We don't believe that the motto "our ears are more sensitive than any measuring equipment" (which is arguably true in some respects) is a good excuse for ignoring what can indeed be measured.
If for example 100 feet of cable X is used in a certain system and is associated with a certain audible quality, and this turns out to be reliably perceived by even one human being in the whole world, then an "objectivist" would say this: Measure what that system is doing when 100 feet of cable X is being used in it--and sooner or later, you will find something which accounts for the audibility of whatever this audible quality may be.
From this standpoint, at least 95% of all verbiage on this topic tends to be misdirected; people are arguing mainly with what the other guy never said in the first place. Maybe the cables should be checked, because people seem not to be hearing one another very well ...
--best regards
Topic: James Randi Offers $1 Million If Audiophiles Can Prove $7250 Cables Are Better (Read 3893 times)