Speaker cables have shown to made a difference... does it matter?

[VinylRob]

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Lamp cord or zip cord is usually about 18 gauge, isn't it? That seems to be the standard that many people use around these parts, it seems.

I'd say.

Something like Monster from the 70's was just OFC thick lamp cord, right? It made a difference in the lower registers, but was otherwise somewhat unsophisticated in comparison to even many of the budget $$ Hifi wires of today.

Happy Listening!

 

[SkyLounger]

FWIW, the first officer I was flying with yesterday spent most of his career as an avionic (flying came later to him).

We were having this discussion with a fellow flight attendant who happens to be an audio buff and is the kind of guy who's willing to and appreciates spending hundreds on interconnects, power cables/conditioner and speaker cables.

The F/O-avionic explained to us that any intact wire of the proper gauge will do the job and unless you get to see the wire being used before listening, you won't objectively be able to hear the difference between clothes hanger wire and $1000/ft cable...

Conclusion of that discussion: To each his own, I guess... I'm sitting on the fence on this one, as I was playing devil's advocate between those two guys, trying to challenge each other's position.

 

[Bigerik]

FWIW, the first officer I was flying with yesterday spent most of his career as an avionic (flying came later to him).

We were having this discussion with a fellow flight attendant who happens to be an audio buff and is the type to spend hundreds on interconnects, power cables/conditioner and speaker cables.

The F/O-avionic explained to us that any intact wire of the proper gauge will do the job and unless you get to see the wire being used before listening, you won't objectively hear the difference between clothes hanger wire and $1000/ft cable...

Sigh.

And what "type" would that be?

 

[Jeffery]

I know with some of the high efficiency percussion driver horn guys:

Percussion drivers?

 

[JohnVF]

FWIW, the first officer I was flying with yesterday spent most of his career as an avionic (flying came later to him).

We were having this discussion with a fellow flight attendant who happens to be an audio buff and is the type to spend hundreds on interconnects, power cables/conditioner and speaker cables.

The F/O-avionic explained to us that any intact wire of the proper gauge will do the job and unless you get to see the wire being used before listening, you won't objectively hear the difference between clothes hanger wire and $1000/ft cable...

That's great. But what did you hear, when you made the comparison?

I'm an expert in very few things, but one thing I'm the best at is at making decisions for myself and coming to a conclusion. I've yet to find a person that was better than me and deciding what is right for myself. I concluded that about 80% or more of the advice I've been given in this hobby was not right for me, in the end. And a good deal of that wasn't just wrong for me, it was just wrong.

 

[terra1]

FWIW, the first officer I was flying with yesterday spent most of his career as an avionic (flying came later to him).

We were having this discussion with a fellow flight attendant who happens to be an audio buff and is the type to spend hundreds on interconnects, power cables/conditioner and speaker cables.

The F/O-avionic explained to us that any intact wire of the proper gauge will do the job and unless you get to see the wire being used before listening, you won't objectively hear the difference between clothes hanger wire and $1000/ft cable...

But what was the experience shared?

Did the F/O solder some coat hangers together and compared them to $1000/ft cable?

I love homespun homilies. And they are good food for thought, but I don't always believe something just because someones tells me so.

I would agree for a lot of systems, goals, and budgets it may not make any sense.

You kind of have to weigh evidence and keep an open mind sometimes. Like on a forum, the "discussion" is sometimes about posturing and showmanship rather than a facility for determining truth.

Nothing like experience to really learn and sort what life is about.

I never tried a coat hanger. But I have tried various speaker wire from Monster to Audioquest and I was able to hear a difference sometimes and to varying degrees. And nowhere near $1000 a foot. I got 80 feet of Audioquest Type 4 Blue solid core $2.50/ft. for $216.40 including tax, new at Magnolia HiFi back in 1995.
Certainly not $1000 a foot.

Now most of my media sounded great before I got the Audioquest, but I was on an anal quest to tweak out more detail from my Manhattan Transfer tonin' CD track 1 Let's Hang On, listening to the ratcheting sound, and tame the harshness or brightness from my High Society soundtrack track 4 Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with Celeste Holm and Frank Sinatra. Wire was the cheapest upgrade at the time.

This was before I got into vintage in 2008. Today, I wouldn't bother with expensive cable and wire other than what I have accumulated. Priorities change. And a lot of vintage speakers and components won't accomodate the solid core wire let alone a coat hanger. Today, it's easier to swap out components with vintage because they are now so much cheaper than when new. If I were to buy new components back then it wouldn't have made any sense - they would have been more than the $200 I invested in wire. I wasn't out to prove anything to anybody but myself even then.

 

[aidynphoenix]

i have not ever heard a difference between cables. there are bigger audio issues i need to worry about before i would even try to hear a difference in cables.
i do believe that if somebody has the determination to spend money on expensive cables. they should be sure to make sure that the cables are the last thing to be concerned about.. first the room needs to be perfect.. the cables inside the amplifier and throughout the speakers need to be addressed also.

 

[terra1]

i have not ever heard a difference between cables. there are bigger audio issues i need to worry about before i would even try to hear a difference in cables.
i do believe that if somebody has the determination to spend money on expensive cables. they should be sure to make sure that the cables are the last thing to be concerned about.. first the room needs to be perfect.. the cables inside the amplifier and throughout the speakers need to be addressed also.

That was how I approached it. Not the cables inside the amplifier though. I doubt many would do that even now. I certainly wouldn't have thought to screw around inside my $2300 receiver or knew how to. But cable and wire were certainly the cheapest upgrades and they worked. So saved me from fixing what wasn't broke and making it worse like so many other DIY recommendations and disasters that occur occasionally.

 

[VinylRob]

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We tried it, it SUCKED.

We actually tried Romex and coat hanger wire on my relatively high fidelity kit for a lark. I'm running Atma-Sphere OTL amps and Coincident CPRE-T's, so I'd like to think we could come to some rather reliable conclusions. Now I don't want to make any sweeping revelations or tell JohnVF what he should be using in his system (just kidding) but, compared to modest ($200-$400) speaker cables... the former clearly fell short of what I would call audio excellence! But again, in the spirit of TOL, if coat hangers hooked up to your speakers sounds good to you, I can't dispute that, nor would I care to convince you to purchase real audio cables.

I can't wait for someone to cross examine me now on the methods under which we conducted this "acoustic test" and the validity of the outcome given that our whole world revolves around having, cooler than yours, stupidly expensive gear. Bring it on.

Happy Listening!

 

[bowtie427ss]

We tried it, it SUCKED.

We actually tried Romex and coat hanger wire on my relatively high fidelity kit for a lark. I'm running Atma-Sphere OTL amps and Coincident CPRE-T's, so I'd like to think we could come to some rather reliable conclusions. Now I don't want to make any sweeping revelations or tell JohnVF what he should be using in his system (just kidding) but, compared to modest ($200-$400) speaker cables... the former clearly fell short of what I would call audio excellence! But again, in the spirit of TOL, if coat hangers hooked up to your speakers sounds good to you, I can't dispute that, nor would I care to convince you to purchase real audio cables.

I can't wait for someone to cross examine me now on the methods under which we conducted this "acoustic test" and the validity of the outcome given that our whole world revolves around having, cooler than yours, stupidly expensive gear. Bring it on.

Happy Listening!

My findings were the opposite, plastic coat hangers brought resistance, capacitance, inductance, resonance, voltage drop, and the entire audio signal to both immeasurable and inaudible levels.

They were the first audio component i've experienced that imparted absolutely no coloration or "sound of their own" to the system. The "blackest" black i've never heard.

 

[House de Kris]

16 Ga. zipcord. What serious listener would use 16 Ga.?

But, but, but, Roger Russell says that at these lengths and speaker impedance, 18ga is no problem-o! In fact, cable D is 18ga, while the zip cord was 16ga. And, cable D had more wins than cable A. Go figure.

Actually, I just wanted to bring up ol' Rog's name. Yeah, I know, pot stirrer.

To make this more appropriate for TOL, when I read that article and it did the cable description at the first, I was pretty sure I'd prefer cable C, even before reading the test results. That topology matches what I've personally found to be most to my liking. Odd, how it seems to have been the most favorable cable of the shoot-out.

It is too bad that they only measured capacitance. My personal findings are that in speaker cables, inductance is the greater key to a preferred cable. My personal fave "complex twisted pair" cable measured only 80nH (yes, NANO henries) of total inductance for a 12ft length.

 

[Bigerik]

Roger Russell has a website. He can't be wrong!

 

[SkyLounger]

Sigh.

And what "type" would that be?

That's great. But what did you hear, when you made the comparison?

I'm an expert in very few things, but one thing I'm the best at is at making decisions for myself and coming to a conclusion. I've yet to find a person that was better than me and deciding what is right for myself. I concluded that about 80% or more of the advice I've been given in this hobby was not right for me, in the end. And a good deal of that wasn't just wrong for me, it was just wrong.

But what was the experience shared?

Did the F/O solder some coat hangers together and compared them to $1000/ft cable?

I love homespun homilies. And they are good food for thought, but I don't always believe something just because someones tells me so.

I would agree for a lot of systems, goals, and budgets it may not make any sense.

You kind of have to weigh evidence and keep an open mind sometimes. Like on a forum, the "discussion" is sometimes about posturing and showmanship rather than a facility for determining truth.

Nothing like experience to really learn and sort what life is about.

I never tried a coat hanger. But I have tried various speaker wire from Monster to Audioquest and I was able to hear a difference sometimes and to varying degrees. And nowhere near $1000 a foot. I got 80 feet of Audioquest Type 4 Blue solid core $2.50/ft. for $216.40 including tax, new at Magnolia HiFi back in 1995.
Certainly not $1000 a foot.

We tried it, it SUCKED.

Happy Listening!

I did start my post by FWIW, didn't I?

That was a discussion I had with said individual, never said I agreed with it, simply posted the conclusion of discussion and no, I haven't tried it myself and probably never will. I'm actually happy with my no-frills interconnects and speaker wire.

 

[bowtie427ss]

Roger Russell has a website. He can't be wrong!

I read that on the internet.:yes:

 

[Bigerik]

I did start my post by FWIW, didn't I?

That was a discussion I had with said individual, never said I agreed with it, simply posted the conclusion of discussion and no, I haven't tried it myself and probably never will. I'm perfectly happy with my ten bucks interconnects and no-frills speaker wire, thank you.

So your mind is closed and you just wanted to share the thoughts of someone who thought like you did? While labeling someone who had a different view as a "type"?

 

[JohnVF]

Roger Russell has a website. He can't be wrong!

And he designed those legendary McIntosh speakers like the...um....the....err...I'm sure I'll think of them.

 

[Hyfi]

I'm still more skeptical when it comes to Speaker wire than I am with ICs. I know some folks have some rules of thumb like Small Gauge twisted strands for mids-highs and heavier Solid Core for bass.

I have one setup that uses 4 different types and gauges of thin cheap and some not even designated as speaker wire running 70 feet down a crawl space, up walls, through ceilings and to the speakers. Although I recently just tamed this system with a single pair of ICs, there are many who would doubt that the sound coming from the speakers id delivered in such an F'ed up way.

 

[VinylRob]

><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯`·.¸.·´¯`·...¸><((((º>`·.¸¸.·´¯ `· .¸.·´¯`·...¸><((((º>

My findings were the opposite, plastic coat hangers brought resistance, capacitance, inductance, resonance, voltage drop, and the entire audio signal to both immeasurable and inaudible levels.

They were the first audio component i've experienced that imparted absolutely no coloration or "sound of their own" to the system. The "blackest" black i've never heard.

See, I knew I had something wrong after Gizmoto said coat hangers sounded as good as "audio wire"! I tried metal painted ones (with the paint scrapped off at contact points, off course), I deliberately avoided plastic coated ones because the Chinese manufacturer for Target probably did not use audio grade high purity class 1.003 extruded Flourinated Ethylene Propylene (FEP), and I was deeply concerned about skin effect on the high frequencies. Now had I tried ALL plastic, which is so counter intuitive, I'm sure I would not be able to dispute your results!!!!

Happy Listening!

 

[cwall99]

First, my congratulations to our friends in MN for undertaking this project. Nicely done. While it's not necessarily a perfect experimental design, it's a start, and I salute the effort.

Regarding the results of the different pairings, it appears to me that while some cables appear to have been selected more often than others, the differences are not that great, and, as suggested earlier, don't appear to be statistically significant. Failing to show a statistically significant difference would mean that the hypothesis, that better cables result in better sound, is rejected. In other words, spending thousands of dollars on speaker cables may be invested elsewhere in your system if you want to improve the sound.

At the end of the article, they mentioned some observations that support the conclusion that I'm drawing from the results. Those observations include:

• As a group, those who use bulk wire as cabling liked the bulk wire (A) the least.
• As a group, those who owned expensive (not bulk) cabling favored the cheap bulk wire (A) over the most expensive cable (B).

Seems pretty simple to me.

Many thanks to our friends in Minnesota.

Now, if we were living in the world of peer-reviewed journals, we'd want someone else to try and replicate the results and publish their findings as well.

Sounds like a great idea for a SMAC event.

 

[VinylRob]

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Now, if we were living in the world of peer-reviewed journals, we'd want someone else to try and replicate the results and publish their findings as well.

Sounds like a great idea for a SMAC event.

I would be happy to help support an effort like you suggest and with SMAC I feel we might have the resources and the people to advance this study. Let's offer it up.

I don't know, given the article in question, if I would be so inclined to dismiss high quality cables as making a non significant change/improvement. The knife cuts both ways on faulty information and testing.

I would agree that there is a high level of variability in perception, though if it were not for my own extensive listening over the years and with SMAC, to so many different set-ups, my personal conclusions still find high quality cables can play a very significant role in a well done kit.

Happy Listening!