The answer is Yes it does, but don’t bother spending too much on it as you there isn't any difference other than a subconscious difference
Fixed to remove your not so subconcious bias.
God help us all.... 🤦♂️
When I added expensive cable to my system I guess the frequency response was identical – but it all sounded bigger and richer, with more perceived depth, height and separation.
What scientific instruments exist to measure such perceived musical qualities?
It is about perception as has been mentioned many times here already.
Oh, bindun; ignore me.
Your bank statement?
You could probably test it yourself without any fancy equipment. Run both sets of cables and have a friend connect a set at random without telling you. Listen to the music, blindfolded. Rinse and repeat a dozen times. See if you can reliably tell the difference beyond chance.
(I'll bet you a shiny new pound coin that you can't, unless the old stuff was really nasty.)
It’s nice to have nice things.
It’s nice to have very stupid nice things.
I own a £2500 watch and £250 belt. They are nice.
They don’t function any better than a £2.50 watch or no belt as I don’t need a belt.
It’s nice to have nice things.The only point of expensive speaker cable is the owners joy of having expensive speaker cable.
...Is pretty much the perfect summary. Everything else is just waffle.
Maple syrup, anyone?
When I added expensive cable to my system I guess the frequency response was identical
Maybe. There was a guy whose name I forget did some work on this. The resistance in speaker wire is constant across all frequencies. Speaker coils change depending on the frequency. So an infinitely short cable will most closely reproduce what the amp puts out. So reducing resistance in the wire will help reduce whatever cable length you use to the theoretically short one. To a point. What he and Polk, of Polk audio fame, found was that modern wire was actually introducing weird harmonics. They solved that by putting iirc a resistor across the cables. This was back in the 80s I think. People have been having this argument since the 70s.
So they concluded that your wire should match your application. To thin and to long and your amp will release it's magic smoke. Too thick and you introduce weird stuff.
Don't even get me started on guys who re-cap old amos and then complain the sound has lost its warmth and tone.
Given this a website dedicated to riding around the woods on very expensive adult toys, I'd say if anyone wants to spend on speaker cable because: Reasons...Then knock yourself out. If we're living at the stub end of late stage capitalism, may as well take advantage of it.
This place https://www.russandrews.com/ should cause multiple head explosions and might even finish off a few here completely..... 🙂
Run both sets of cables and have a friend connect a set at random without telling you. Listen to the music, blindfolded. Rinse and repeat a dozen times. See if you can reliably tell the difference beyond chance.
I got into this when I expressed doubt/cynicism about the whole thing in a hi-fi shop on Westover Road in Bournemouth. Without hesitation the sales assistant disappeared behind a counter and re-emerged holding something that looked liked a reel of transatlantic power cable, and told me to go home and plug it all in and listen to it for a few weeks, which I did.
While the exercise convinced my human ears and my soul that cables make a difference, I can't prove it scientifically, and neither would I want to, because music isn't about science and I'm not bored enough to attempt to understand ohms or to assess all of my feelings to a satisfactory level of statistical significance, lol.
Too thick and you introduce weird stuff.
I can't Science this but it sounds plausible. Going back to my "shot in a pint glass" analogy, you would never do that because half of the shot would probably stay in the glass.
Don’t even get me started on guys who re-cap old amos and then complain the sound has lost its warmth and tone.
This is a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't." Old electrolytic caps have a tendency to be a little bit... explody. In the retro computing scene, re-capping rescued hardware before plugging it back in for the first time in 20 years is pretty standard practice.
One could argue that whilst a re-capped amp has allegedly lost [insert audio-babble here], if it has actually then changed it's likely a lot closer to how it was when it was new and is sounding as intended.
Ethernet is a standard of various categories which are either met or not. It’s not like the old analogue hifi world. What goes in == what comes out, or it’s faulty.
Not entirely true @Cougar I have tested various network cables in electrically noisy environments. When the bit error rate increases so does the number of retries etc. It would not be impossible for this to cause audible jitter on a digital audio signal. I have to admit these were quite extreme tests but its not as simple as saying digital is either there or not when you have timing involved.
told me to go home and plug it all in and listen to it for a few weeks, which I did.
While the exercise convinced my human ears and my soul that cables make a difference,
Was this exercise a blind test as I suggested, or did you swap the cables and convince yourself that it sounded better?
My mum used to work in a pharmacy, for pretty much her entire adult life up until retirement. In her early years she used to fulfil prescriptions for Red Aspirin. They were prescribed for people who'd go to the doctors and go "well, can't you just give me something?" They were little red tablets packed full of pharmaceutical-grade placebo goodness, not a single active ingredient. People swore by them, recommended them to their friends.
It's considered unethical these days to prescribe placebo, unless you're a homeopath. But it does raise rather a large elephant-in-the-room question as to whether it's actually a bad thing if people go away happier.
Enjoy your cables.
It’s considered unethical these days to prescribe placebo
Good. My dad was put on 'trial' drugs for chest pain and died of a massive heart attack 8 months later. After which, we learned his 'trial' drugs were placebo-based.
Was this exercise a blind test as I suggested, or did you swap the cables and convince yourself that it sounded better?
No, I swapped the cables (which were on loan to me, for free) back and forth several times to convince myself they made no difference. Does that affect your argument at all?
I can’t Science this but it sounds plausible.
https://www.passlabs.com/technical_article/speaker-cables-science-or-snake-oil/
This isn't the original article I remember but it talks about some of the same stuff.
I guess I've been lucky with my old stuff. Magic smoke intact in all the caps. I can't imagine what new caps do that old ones didn't that would affect the sound. I've heard all sorts of theories. Lead/Lead free solder. Different mixture of witches brew in the caps. Who knows.
Not entirely true @Cougar I have tested various network cables in electrically noisy environments.
Yes, but we're talking about someone's living room, not a factory plant.
When the bit error rate increases so does the number of retries etc. It would not be impossible for this to cause audible jitter on a digital audio signal. I have to admit these were quite extreme tests but its not as simple as saying digital is either there or not when you have timing involved.
Yeah, I don't disagree, but you're comparing apples with oranges. Digital signals have error checking and correction and it is either there or it isn't. Ethernet can retry and in fact is built by design that collision detection and resending is a core operation, it's not time-critical in the same way that A/V is.
Unless you have two-way communication then as soon as digital audio starts erroring beyond any ECC it's game over. You're not gonna get jitter, you're gonna get gaps. Ever listen to DAB radio in a car? Once you start to lose reception you don't get FM-style static and noise, you get a quick squelch and then silence.
No, I swapped the cables (which were on loan to me, for free) back and forth several times to convince myself they made no difference. Does that affect your argument at all?
No. Because you swapped them, you always knew which was which. It doesn't matter which outcome you wanted or expected, you've got inherent bias there even if it's subconscious. Get someone else to swap them, see if you can still tell the difference.
When scientists are sciencing their preferred method is double-blind, so not even the people setting up the experiment know which thing is which. Otherwise the trial subjects could pick up on accidental clues slipped by the sciencers, that's how strong biases can be.
So, if it's all in your head - how come the first time I bought (slightly) expensive speaker cable I couldn't tell any difference, but then I bought some different and I thought it sounded better?
If it was just money spent make good sound then would I not have noticed it the first time?
There's still a shiny pound coin on offer if you can prove me wrong and reliably tell the difference in blind tests, Mols.
Think of me if you like as a Poundland James Randi.
No. Because you swapped them, you always knew which was which. Get someone else to swap them, see if you can still tell the difference.
Done this with DAC choice a few times - effect is as clear as night and day. Speaker cables is bit of a pain since both need to be connected and disconnected at both ends and blinded. But skin depth for signal conduction and impedance are real things - as is quality of connectors.
Disclaimer - one may have used some Russ Andrews connectors - speaker cable is nothing excessive though and currently 30 year old bell wire that was wired into the speakers from new (Rogers). And my they are nice speakers for the computer!
There’s still a shiny pound coin on offer if you can prove me wrong and reliably tell the difference in blind tests, Mols.
It's too much faff to set up.
Make it 1000 gold pound coins and it might be worth someone getting off there arse and setting up a test environment, but for one pound its not much of an incentive or much strength of conviction...
Is there a TL;DR version of this thread? Does speaker cable actually make a difference?
I've only skimmed that first article but it seems basically to imply that we're not equipped to tell the difference. Which rather has the opposite effect to the one they intended, if that's the case then it destroys in a stroke any audiophile's claims that they can.
And yes, Enjoy The Music, I recognise that name, it's the website that gave us this piece of comedy gold:
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm
If there's a greater source of abject bollocks about Hi-Hi than EtM then I've yet to find it.
Make it 1000 gold pound coins and it might be worth someone getting off there arse and setting up a test environment, but for one pound its not much of an incentive or much strength of conviction…
I mean, you could win an argument on the Internet, it's hard to put a price on that.
It doesn't need a "test environment" anyway. It needs your living room, two sets of cables, a blindfold and a glamorous assistant.
Make it £1,000 both ways - so you pay me the same if you lose - and I'd be half-tempted to make that wager. It's probably a safe bet because I highly doubt that anyone here would actually take me up on it if I did.
I mean, you could win an argument on the internet
I don't need to, do I? I'm happy with my system and the £30 or so I spend on cables 20 years ago. I don't think that's excessive.
I have a suspicion that at some point in the future someone will discover a tiny vestigial organ embedded in the brain that can detect super high frequencies via a different pathway to normal aural processing and it is connected directly to the amygdala or something, and it is only present in some people. If this happens I will laugh at all people quoting 'hard science' about the truth of Hi-Fi.
"There’s still a shiny pound coin on offer if you can prove me wrong and reliably tell the difference in blind tests, Mols."
"It doesn’t need a “test environment” anyway. It needs your living room, two sets of cables, a blindfold and a glamorous assistant."
I'd also like to see what you would accept as 'proving you wrong' to even part with your mythical gold coin. Cause I could tell you I have done it and proven it but I know you wouldn't believe me no matter what I said - and you would be perfectly correct in doing so, its the internet after all. So in summary a pretty pointless and useless offer ...
I’d also like to see what you would accept as ‘proving you wrong’ to even part with your mythical gold coin.
If you were going to give me a grand I'd come round to your house and run the experiment myself.
We could video it. If you can reliably tell the difference between say three sets of speaker cables in a fair blind test, we'd make a **** lot more than a grand on the back of it. You'd have places like Enjoy the Music selling a kidney for that sort of footage.
You'd think, really, that it'd already exist...
I don’t need to, do I?
Of course you don't. But here we are. You're happy with your cables, I too have bought 'proper' speaker cable in the past and I was happy with that also.
If this happens I will laugh at all people quoting ‘hard science’ about the truth of Hi-Fi.
It doesn't need hard science (whatever that is, opposed to 'science'). If you can tell the difference then the how and the why doesn't matter, we can worry about that later. This is the homeopath's "science doesn't know everything" argument.
I'm positing that you cannot in fact tell the difference, and that it would be trivial for you to prove me wrong. Yet you're happy to sit here arguing the toss for hours but actually demonstrating it would be too much faff.
Is that perhaps because, deep down, you know I'm right?
I could tell you I have done it and proven it but I know you wouldn’t believe me no matter what I said
I don't know you from a cheese sandwich, but I'd likely take Molgrips at his word.
Yep; I'm with Cougar on this. The "hard science" as molgrips puts it - agrees that beyond a minimum spec to actually cope with the power required there's little difference between £2 cable and £2000 cable. I'm caveating "little difference" because different cable sizes and configuration might have slightly different inductance and capacitance - to avoid the 'hah; but...' crowd.
I'd flip the question actually - what level of proof would people like petercook80 accept as proof that there *isn't* a difference ?
This is the homeopath’s “science doesn’t know everything” argument.
Well, it doesn't. Those tests with frequency analysers and so on, they are testing within the bounds of the equippment they are using. Popular science books are stuffed with conclusions that were drawn from measurements that turned out to either be not measuring the right thing, or the equipment wasn't working the right way but appeared to be for some other reason, etc etc. they are important lessons in interpreting the results of experiments.
Not entirely true @Cougar I have tested various network cables in electrically noisy environments. When the bit error rate increases so does the number of retries etc. It would not be impossible for this to cause audible jitter on a digital audio signal. I have to admit these were quite extreme tests but its not as simple as saying digital is either there or not when you have timing involved.
This comes up in audiophile reviews of network cables and reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of *what* is being transmitted.
Audio is not being transmitted over a ethernet cable (unless you're using Audio over Ethernet, but at home you're not). A digital representation of the audio, at least chopped up into chunks and typically compressed, is transmitted. The playback device will stream and buffer a chunk of audio that will be at least many seconds and easily a minute long. There's no way jitter or retransmissions can impact the digital signal that is being transmitted when it's not being used in realtime.
You cannot measure anything like this accurately as putting the measuring device into the system changes it. Basic science
’m positing that you cannot in fact tell the difference,
cougar - do you agree you can hear a difference between bell wire and proper speaker cable? I am sure i even could tell the difference between using 2+e and proper speaker wire
Its just that you get into diminishing returns very quickly and after a certain price point ( few quid a m?) then any "improvements" are insignificantly small.
You cannot measure anything like this accurately as putting the measuring device into the system changes it. Basic science
You don't need to put something inside the system; this is audio; you can measure the output of the speaker using a calibrated microphone. If that's not accurate enough for you then lousy organic ears haven't got a cat in hells chance of finding a difference either 😀
Well, it doesn’t. Those tests with frequency analysers and so on
And again, this is irrelevant.
The claim is nothing to do with frequency analysers. The claim is "I can tell that it sounds better" and my counter-claim is "no you can't."
Even if it's just for your own amusement and curiosity this could be readily resolved with no more fancy hardware than a bag of cables, a notebook and a lazy Sunday afternoon. No spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes or PKE meters required.
Prove to yourself that you can in fact hear a difference in a fair test and then we'll worry about how that might be.
This comes up in audiophile reviews of network cables and reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of *what* is being transmitted.
You need to read the link I posted earlier. It is glorious.
do you agree you can hear a difference between bell wire and proper speaker cable?
Maybe; but it really depends on the bell wire and what volume you wanted to listen at. You might notice a *volume* difference between the two; as the bell wire is likely to have higher resistence and therefore greater attenuation. But we're at the extremes here - something as cheap as possible vs something that's not.
bell wire v couple of quid a metre speaker wire was an obvious difference - not just volume but tone
You cannot measure anything like this accurately as putting the measuring device into the system changes it. Basic science
Basic hogwash.
Even if that were the case, it'd change every test by the same amount. But, what Steve said.
cougar – do you agree you can hear a difference between bell wire and proper speaker cable?
Honestly, I don't know. The last time I hooked up speakers with not much better than bell wire it was a Midi system in the 1990s. I want to say that I could (and it's why I have a bagful of the stuff in the cupboard) but that's likely my own bias, I'd have to test it to be confident in what I could hear.
TBH with the cable being the speakers' only power source I'd have greater concerns over the wire melting. (-:
I am sure i even could tell the difference between using 2+e and proper speaker wire
Bullshit you could. Shiny pound coin Jezza, shiny pound coin.
You don’t need to put something inside the system; this is audio; you can measure the output of the speaker using a calibrated microphone
the microphone changes the environment :-). Its a really nitpicking thing but any attempt to measure something changes it. Observer effect I believe its known as
Measure it with your ears.
This is, after all, how and why we listen to music.
Cougar - the bell wire to proper cables was very obvious. 2+e to speaker cable - I am quite happy that I could hear a difference but also happy to ascribe that to placebo
State my ears are in now tho................
