The most common mistake in audio?

[david ellwood]

Having a nice rug to tie everything together.

 

[naka]

You’re regressing!

Not at all, according to what I am experiencing! You should try it

I would love to experiment with different cables. I've only ever bought one set of speaker cables - chord silver screen I think they'll are called, bi-wired.

Try to borrow some first and then preferably buy used ones. Have fun

Nice. Similarly I have several amps, two DACs and two pairs of speakers to rotate around. However, I only have two pairs of speaker cable, and only one is used all the time (Chord Signature XL) while the other cable (Naim NAC A5) had been in cold storage for a long time. The Chord is superior to the Naim cable with all components and speakers I've tried.

Although I had plans to acquire another alternative speaker cable earlier, it had not happened as I don't usually go for cheap cables. I will only consider cables which are fairly costly when I have the funds. I've recently placed an order for a Wireworld Silver Eclipse 8 XLR interconnect to play around.

Another aspect often neglected is the equipment rack. I recently invested in a Solid Tech Rack of Silence Reference, my first "high-end rack" after more than 20 years of abstinence. To be honest I was not expecting the rack to bring such an impact to the system or sound although I was hoping for one. I was truly shocked. My speakers sounded different, much improved in a good way. I wouldn't expand on it too much here and will just say that the rack has proven to be the final piece of the jigsaw which addressed all the shortcomings of the system.

If not bought used (usually for €50-100) my choice was always very affordable cable, sold by the meter, and doing the terminations myself.
The Van Damme LC-OFC 4mm, Canare 4S11, Mogami W3103, SommerCable SP240, Neotech NES-5001, are good examples, just add good quality banana plugs - my favorite are Hicom.
My experience has showed me that it is very much possible that a €100 set of speaker cables can be more adequate to a system than a €500 set - I had that kind of results many times - so I would be careful to buy expensive cables without testing them first.

Yes, racks can be amazingly effective, and that is indeed another interesting topic

The cable bit should never really be a large consideration.

I personally cannot think of anything less interesting than sitting in a room with a dealer trying 7 different cables out.

I totally agree with you, as I would not have neither the time or the patience to do it.
Therefore, good dealers must:
- be experimental with speaker cables
- be willing to let you try them at home - at least a pair of different types, well burned-in.

 

[david ellwood]

I suppose one old chestnut is the pursuit of clarity and imaging at the expense of musicality.

 

[John Phillips]

In my most humble opinion the most common mistake in audio is listening to the hifi rather than the music. We've all done it and do it still. ...

I agree with some degree of nuance.

It seems to me that people pursuing this hobby have their own specific levels of engagement with equipment, with sound, and with music. I got to an approximate understanding of my relative levels of engagement a long time ago which I am sure has evolved but it's still music at the top, then sound, then equipment. I do have some notional percentages none of which is zero. In others I have observed big differences if I interpret their contributions correctly.

I do have favoured brands. Then the sound has to be good enough, in my specific ways, to not be distracting. Then I can just listen to the music.

On cables as in the OP's post, my level of engagement dropped to near zero after I spent some time in the early 1980s experimenting. I couldn't find a basis for any ongoing enthusiam. For others it is their hobby to enthuse about what pleases them as long as different priorities are OK too.

 

[tuga]

I suppose one old chestnut is the pursuit of clarity and imaging at the expense of musicality.

Musicality is whatever one fancies. What if one fancies clarity and imaging?

 

[naka]

The most common mistake in audio is believing anything you read on audio forums.

Anything?!

Not at all, I just see constant cable swaps & moving gear around as the opposite of what I seek to achieve. OP asked for opinions & he's getting them.

Many thanks for your opinion, you’re welcome.
I do it in the first place to better listen to music, and I do it while listening to music. So nothing is lost there

Every 2 or 3 months I roll the speakers or the amp, or both.
I have around 8000+ recordings (5000 CDs and the rest on different formats) and listening to them in different system combinations is very revealing and fun.

Each time, I spend usually 2 hours until I figure the right speaker to connect them. After that that combination is memorized and set for good.
It really pays off, because the results around just one (good quality) cable are so limiting, and that was a true revelation.
The cost of my speaker cables combined together doesn’t buy a new set of Audioquest Type 9!

All my cables are well stored in a small wooden box, that serves as my side table, so no space wasted.

 

[Beobloke]

I suppose one old chestnut is the pursuit of clarity and imaging at the expense of musicality.

But how would one go about pursuing a vague, meaningless concept like “musicality”?

 

[Beobloke]

The most common mistake in audio is believing anything you read on audio forums.

Yes, I believe that.

Hang on a minute……

 

[Sue Pertwee-Tyr]

Try to borrow some first and then preferably buy used ones. Have fun
<snip>
I totally agree with you, as I would not have neither the time or the patience to do it.
Therefore, good dealers must:
- be experimental with speaker cables
- be willing to let you try them at home - at least a pair of different types, well burned-in.

Can I just check: are you advocating borrowing cables from a dealer, then buying used (presumably elsewhere)?

 

[Mike Reed]

I suppose one old chestnut is the pursuit of clarity and imaging at the expense of musicality.

Not the 'expense of musicality' but the furtherance of musicality, whatever that is.

I fire up the kit, listen and hopefully say to myself " Jeez but that sounds good!", Next thing is to lift the needle at end of side or reject the CD, Ergo, the sound quality/dynamics/holography or whatever is the determinant of whether I'm going to have a great session. If sound is off, the music is off.

 

[chiily]

"Mistakes, I've made a few...."

My biggest....

2022-02-28_02-43-52 by Garf Arf, on Flickr

 

[naka]

Can I just check: are you advocating borrowing cables from a dealer, then buying used (presumably elsewhere)?

Nop!
1 - Buy from a dealer if any of the ones their recommended/lend fits your system. If the dealer knows you and your system I am sure he/she will suggest a good cable…It is all about trust both ways.
2 - If you don’t have access to any dealer or the try-at-home isn’t not supported by them, them buying without testing is the only possibility. In this case buy used. The possibility of selling without losing money is attracting, isn’t?

I have done both: 4 bought at the dealer, 4 online stores - new, 6 online used.
Sadly few and few dealers sell by the like they used to.

 

[naka]

"Mistakes, I've made a few...."

My biggest....

2022-02-28_02-43-52 by Garf Arf, on Flickr

Was it the VanDamme speaker cables?!
Or was it the speaker cables “in bed” with the powercords?

 

[James]

Loudspeaker cable polarity ....

 

[chiily]

Loudspeaker cable polarity ....

Correct James, good spot. Took me about a day to figure out what the hell was going on.

And it is easily done, quite common.

Anyway, on with the cable thread.

 

[James]

The most common mistake is not necessarily a mistake, but circumstance. It's room acoustics. People sometimes forget that the room is part of the audio equation. They invest heavily in upstream changes that make, at best, marginal improvements. I've heard some horrendously expensive systems sound dreadful and some modest systems sound fabulous because of the room.

If you have a good sounding room, count yourself lucky.

EDIT: Wot steve said earlier ...

It is, if you value a dwelling space over music reproduction, and most sensible people do. Just don't expect your beautiful room to sound nice. Mine didn't. I just got used to it, and it sounded good enough. But very few rooms sound at their best as you happen to have them laid out. Anyone who spends large sums on hifi jewellery that makes minor differences at best while assuming that the room is performing optimally is deluding themselves.

 

[ampedup]

"Mistakes, I've made a few...."

My biggest....

Nice chassis grounding solution. What fastener did you use to tighten the cable to the chassis?

 

[chiily]

For me, the most important lesson I've learnt in hifi, music reproduction, is the room and treatment of.

My hifi is in an L shaped room, with the speakers placed across the bottom of the L. Which leaves one speaker firing down the long vertical length of the L and the other just the across the much smaller width of the horizontal bit of the L. Honestly, it sounded worse than dire. I moved speakers all over the place, but nothing worked. Then on a whim, and encouraged by other people on this forum I bought two large, ex studio absorbers (for behind the 57s I had, to make them think there was a vast space behind them) and four oblong GIK panels, which now cover the wall opposite the speaker firing across the horizontal of the L. The results are marvelous, an amazing improvement. No length, or fancy cable construction, or otherwise, could have made such a difference.

Honestly, first step, sort the room out, second build or buy good speakers.

 

[tpetsch]

The most common mistake in audio is: people not finding the very best speaker they can, that works really well in their listening room, even if it means spending 80% of their budget buying them, then building their system around those speakers. The cable bit comes into the equation when building the system around the speakers...

And here I am my whole life thinking Source First all along because no piece of gear down the line can fix whatever may be lacking from a source component signal. Personally, if I'm not happy with the performance of a source component no speaker will fix that issue, they can't, speakers can not change the signals their fed and actually improve upon them. The best a speaker can do is not mess up or distort the signals their fed to badly.

The most common mistake that I continually see is when folks make more than one change to their system at a time. It's a slow process, only one change at a time should be performed, then evaluate, let the change burn/settle in for a week or two, then decide if that change was better or worse, if better move onto the next change, if worse then it's easy to know what the offending change was as you only made one.

Another common issue is not having musical priorities straight, or even worse, not having any at all. Having a strict goal in mind of what is truly a musical improvement. Hearing that cymbal in the background more clearly than before, or having a more expansive soundstage for me personally is not necessarily an improvement if I then in the process also loose some track of the musicality / band interplay of the performance as a tradeoff. For me personally, if I loose track of the performance the change was worse, but if I gain more insight into the performance, if I understand more clearly the artists intentions, then the change was better. For me these are improvements, all that other stuff is just Hi-Fi sound effects.

 

[chiily]

Nice chassis grounding solution. What fastener did you use to tighten the cable to the chassis?

Ah, yes I have spade connectors on there now, slipped under one of the screws that hold the two pin mains connector as unearthed metal chassis and HT are not great bed fellows.