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Fatal Audiophile comparison errors!

High end is a con for those with more money than sense

Under starters orders........

Honeymoon over, as predicted yesterday,
Keith wanted more bite, well done, bored with the happy smiley atmosphere.. finally, back to reality.
 
All electrically identical cables should sound the same with unconditionally stable components. But let's be honest, a lot of hifi is shit.

Go watch the benchmark cables test video.
 
Have a link?
I will take a look.

I imagine any electrically identical cables will have equal affect on a given piece of hifi equipment, not all are designed equal though, there seems no perfect cable out there which everyone uses.
A cable should transmit the signal with as little degradation as possible, it's most probably this level of degradation we hear which marks out certain cables from another, along with what effect the cable has on an individual piece of equipment, I doubt there is a piece of equipment out there that is immune to electrical degradation of a signal, it's more about limiting it, the higher you go, I would imagine the aim is to eliminate it altogether, of course this is not the whole story as to what makes good hifi, design is far more important I feel & why I have heard many a budget set up sound on equal terms & improve on hifi costing 10 times the amount, power is probably the only area where you may have to splash out more for quality., if you need 300watts per side, I imagine you will have to pay for it.
 
Lol, hang on while I get some popcorn in. :)

Ahhh! The eternal struggle between Good and Evil! Here we go again, can't imagine how brutal this is going to get. I'm just going to throw a bucket of petrol on the fire and never return.

In the 90s myself and two friends did some auditioning, I think we had around nine interconnects, from these, two interconnects stood out, one was bad (It received excellent reviews) the other was amazingly good, it sounded just like the difference between a budget amplifier and an excellent high end amp, no one could miss it, you could drag someone off the street and they would hear it. I was shocked I'd never heard a cable make that kind of difference before, the other seven sounded pretty similar as far as I was concerned.
I've heard the arguments before, but this illustrates part of the problem, if we just listened to the seven then we probably wouldn't have believed cables could be audible. I had to purchase the amazing cable, it cost £600 in the 90s, expensive but absolutely worth it, sadly the bad cable was already mine it cost £180 then, excellent reviews remember. Almost all of the cables you will ever audition will sound pretty much identical, that doesn't mean they don't exist, it just means you should really get out more.
 
It is perfectly possible to make a cable sound ‘different’ if the designer wishes, but why make a design that is not audibly transparent.
Keith
 
My recent impressions are that expensive cables do sound different to cheap pro ones - and the cheap pro ones are better! (I'm talking about XLR interconnects using Gotham GAC-4/1 - I think Mogami 2534 might do a similar job though I've not tried that.)
 
It is difficult to compare loudspeaker cables because the auditory memory is so short, but interconnects can be usefully compared if you use ,for example two identical DACs wired with different interconnect and switch instantly between the two.
Keith
 
No need to go to the trouble of sourcing (for example) "two identical DACs". Download the free app (WindowsOS) Audio DiffMaker and run the cable candidate No1 from your source or from your preamp into your laptop/desktop sound card, play an actual music track (complex waveform), do the same with cable candidate No2, and run the app. It does a sample-by-sample inversion and generates an audio file with the difference signal only. If you can hear something, there's a difference. If you can't, there isn't.

http://libinst.com/Audio DiffMaker.htm
 
For loudspeaker cable comparisons you would need a microphone.* Don't touch that dial! (the volume control) and do your two tracks. We don't want to equalize the level because that might be part of the difference between the cables, and we want to know that information.

Other fun things to try: examine "Break-In" of components, cables, loudspeakers (your second track, obviously, would be recorded after x many hours of run-in).

Check how clean your power is; run the first track at high demand periods (usually supper time or shortly after) or when you suspect your neighbour has his X-10 devices operating, and the second at, say, 4 AM when there is little demand on the grid.

See if your system needs a "warm-up" time before it sounds best; first track upon startup, second track after 30 minutes (or some other value, if your ears suggest one) of playing music. That should be another test requiring the microphone.

Layout of signal cables vis a vis the AC line cable; try different lays and see if the hum / noise /RF goes up or down.

I'm sure someone can come up with more.

* Ideally, you would make all comparisons via microphone, so that your entire system is part of the equation, since that is how we listen to music. But it's possible to do so without a mic in some cases, and probably won't cost you any money to do some basic testing as you may have all the interconnections you need at hand.
 


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