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I know it’s all been said before but this is madness ….

room acoustic and speakers are 90% of the sound you hear in a room
source would be 6% and amps 4%
cables difference, when they exist, are even less important then upgrading the caps in your speakers and your amps.

even using Sorbothane hemisphere to decouple your speakers from the stand/floor will bring bigger SQ improvement compared to 5k cables.
 
Hi @adamdea - fair enough.

If you largely or wholly disbelieve point 8, then 16 &/ or 17 may well look equally false.

I agree Point 6 is contentious, but not unconnected. In any event, Point 6 may be useful, true or false, if putting it down helps anyone pin-point what we are mostly agreeing and disagreeing about.

Imagine for a moment that I think I can hear a difference by swapping one unshielded old Main interconnect for a WH Morgana. We all know how spurious that can be, esp on a quick and not-blind A/B.

Imagine now that I am a little more sure when I try swapping the cable between Supercap and Naim 52 pre-amp, with much the same description (quieter background, more clean/ neutral and better stereo separation perhaps), but it is all still close to the 'upgrade' available from being more cheerful or picking a different time of day or the obvious fact that I now I just put in the supposedly better cable or anything else that clearly isn't external to me in any way.

Next, imagine that swapping the cable that leads to the power amp seems to have the same sort of effect, but now that effect seems a little more obvious again - to the extent that I am sure it will prove consistently better. However, one of my listeners still isn't hearing an change (never mind improvement). I may have suggested to listeners that what I was doing thus far had all been cable-dressing (and what sounds more Woo than that?).

Now I combine all 3 changes (and hide the cables I just swapped out), and we all think that the sound is better. Finally, spend just 3 minutes swapping all 3 back again and introduce the old wired while leaving the nice WH boxes in front of the rack. Cue suggestions that they are much worse and should be sent back to WH at once.

I understand that the plural of 'anecdote' is not necessarily 'data'. However, someone whose past experience leads them to agree with the list of points including 8, 16 and 17 may well also think that additive small effects (like dropping grains of sand in progressively larger quantities) can add up to something that appears audible and significant, and that that may be what is happening here.

The thread on QED79 cable has comments that suggest that this view of additive effects is not unusual among those who don't believe all sound the same, but I am sure that there will be people with various other views on other points who don't believe my point 6 or think it irrelevant ("There either is or is not an improvement, so it is digital" for example). And I don't imagine myself as spokesman for a faction here, and I doubt anyone else would have had exactly the same list as me.
 
room acoustic and speakers are 90% of the sound you hear in a room
source would be 6% and amps 4%
cables difference, when they exist, are even less important then upgrading the caps in your speakers and your amps.

even using Sorbothane hemisphere to decouple your speakers from the stand/floor will bring bigger SQ improvement compared to 5k cables.

This one confused me a bit.

How literal/ figurative is that 90%?

Is it better/ worse to think about subtractions from 100% source?

The split to me will change with songs and volume in most rooms and systems. If I had to give a straight guess on the split of what I hear on average, I'd say it was about 90% the source data - the music. Of the remaining 10%, a well balanced system would probably have room and speakers at around 3% each, but they are so linked that calling that combo 6% is probably sensible. That leads just 4% for source, amps, cables and supports. I'd probably split that last bit as just over 2% source, nearly 2% amps and well under 1% cables and supports.

Mind you, speakers change the sound I hear more than amps - so speakers matter more for 'different', if not for 'better'. More important, whether that last fraction of 1% for cables and supports is something you can be bothered with is a completely personal call, and so is whether your best guess at the exact number for cables is 0.2% or 0.0000%.
 
I’m not sure there is a dominant voice suggesting all cables sound identical. (Refers to post before previous; crossed in the post, so to speak).

The most obvious type of cable where different will almost universally be agreed to be better is a shielded mains cable. It doesn’t do anything to improve the electrickery feeding the device it’s attached to, it simply stops the noise associated with the AC current from affecting nearby signal cables and nearby sensitive components.

We really would be better off breaking this discussion down by type of cable (including digital vs analogue) rather than speaking about “cables” as if they all somehow shared characteristics.
 
I’m not sure there is a dominant voice suggesting all cables sound identical. (Refers to post before previous; crossed in the post, so to speak).

The most obvious type of cable where different will almost universally be agreed to be better is a shielded mains cable. It doesn’t do anything to improve the electrickery feeding the device it’s attached to, it simply stops the noise associated with the AC current from affecting nearby signal cables and nearby sensitive components.

We really would be better off breaking this discussion down by type of cable (including digital vs analogue) rather than speaking about “cables” as if they all somehow shared characteristics.


Absolutely right that we should be more specific of course - thanks.

As suggested, it may be that there is a mundane reason that I seem to be preferring an eminently suitable shielded signal-&-power cable to a broadly similar and eminently suitable unshielded cable. It would be surprising if that were true (something not yet robustly tested) without your comment on shielding power leads also being relevant.

I will get around to trying different power leads one day, but an unwillingness to dig into walls for cables may limit how much real change I can make in that area, and that has probably reduced my enthusiasm for investigating power issues at all.

On the either hand, I have such a strong conviction (despite not having tested it in any way) that upgrading ethernet cables and the like cannot possibly give a real and consistent gain in sound quality that I can't imagine myself investigating. I don't feel bad about that.
 
Absolutely right that we should be more specific of course - thanks.

As suggested, it may be that there is a mundane reason that I seem to be preferring an eminently suitable shielded signal-&-power cable to a broadly similar and eminently suitable unshielded cable. It would be surprising if that were true (something not yet robustly tested) without your comment on shielding power leads also being relevant.

I will get around to trying different power leads one day, but an unwillingness to dig into walls for cables may limit how much real change I can make in that area, and that has probably reduced my enthusiasm for investigating power issues at all.

On the either hand, I have such a strong conviction (despite not having tested it in any way) that upgrading ethernet cables and the like cannot possibly give a real and consistent gain in sound quality that I can't imagine myself investigating. I don't feel bad about that.

Aha!
Re power cables, I tend to use the good old LAT International AC-2 when they come up on the market (eBygum) as they're usually sub-£100 and are foil-wrapped rather than any sort of mesh. They're heavy gauge and as stiff as a stiff thing at StiffFest but do a very good job.

Re cables in walls: there lies madness. Forget it. In-wall cables are (or should be) in aluminium trunking anyway, so leakage of noise will be minimal. Also, proximity is key here, so a shielded cable powering a hifi device with signal cables nearby is going to make a much bigger difference than the same shielded cable powering the microwave in the next room.

Re ethernet cables: as per my post elsewhere or earlier, ethernet cables are meant to be unshielded so they do pick up noise. Best way of dealing with that is not to do anything with a fancy cable but simply install a network switch which has galvanic isolation (it's a design feature of most, possibly all, ethernet boards) stopping noise in from becoming noise out. A £30-ish Zyxel 108B will do the trick. I took a punt and was delightfully surprised. An audiophile switch should have better shielding to stop noise getting into the box and reaching the circuitry and top quality components generating very little noise of their own. Fancy clocks are irrelevant if you know how ethernet works (via data packets).
 
Sticking to the point- numbers 1-7 were supposed to be things that most posters would agree with. I would move it out of that group.

Apologies - I completely missed your point.

You are dead right - my point 6, though not a rare view, doesn't belong in the first block, but should be moved down to about point 8 or 9.
 
This thread veered off about wives and girlfriends.
Much more interesting than waffle about cables.
Let's get back to wives and girlfriends.
They're much less complicated than Naim and Nordost cables
They do have one thing in common.
They can put up some resistance...
 
This thread veered off about wives and girlfriends.
Much more interesting than waffle about cables.
Let's get back to wives and girlfriends.
They're much less complicated than Naim and Nordost cables
They do have one thing in common.
They can put up some resistance...

Fair enough. If people want a different thread all about their partners/ domestic arrangements, and without the distraction of those trying to swap ideas/ views/ facts about hi=fi, I for one would be supportive.
 


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