Well you know in the hard core industrial world the quality is there in the first place---characteristic impedence, capacitance losses, resistance, dialectric quality, shielding, and in RF cases you throw in a 20 db pad to knock the VSWR (created by tiny impedence mismatches) down to nothing. Minute "z" mismatches between equipments can be eliminated with 20 db pads as long as you have enough signal strength designed into the system. (50.1 equip #1, 49.9 equip #2, cable 49.0) It would be interesting to see the results (if any) on how correcting the "Z" mismatches in audio (and computers) at 600 Ohms would affect performance. Bell Labs/Western Electric used to be fanatical about this on their mainframes and carrier equipment.
JJK

In some cases, quality cables can make a huge difference, and in other cases they are a complete ripoff.

The higher the frequency, the more important that you have good cables.

At audio frequencies, the "Monster Cable" is probably the biggest ripoff in the history of consumer products. It is almost fraud. #16 lamp wire is all you need (although I just bought some a few weeks ago to re-wire my office, and my gosh has the price of wire has skyrocketed: $35 for 100 feet!).

When you get to baseband video frequencies, you are up into the low MHz range, and cable quality starts to matter, as do connectors, but things still are not too critical.

By the time you get to the actual RF cables for TV, you close to (or over) the 100 MHz range, and good cabling is imperative.

Most computer cabling, like USB and Firewire/1394, have to pass really sharp, high speed pulses, and this involves the equivalent of very high frequencies. So once again, this is not a place to get cheap.

But for audio cables, for goodness sake save your money and use cheap lamp wire for the speakers, and don't get too stressed out if you have to use cheap cables for the audio interconnects (although at low levels for mics and turntables, you do need shielded cables).

For very high quality cables at very reasonable prices, no one beats Monoprice.

My entire Home Theater is cabled with their cables and much of my videography and audio cable menagerie came from there as well. For my Home Theater at first I bought their thicker HDMI/DVI cables thinking they were better, but I ended up replacing them with thinner ones because they were too thick. Wouldn't route properly or fit inside anything.

John

To echo what johnmeyer said above - at audio frequencies, save your money. An electron doesn't know whether it came through an oxygen-free piece of copper or a piece of barbed wire. Resistance of the cable run is all that really matters.

To run under carpets, I've even used 300 ohm TV flat lead-in wire. At 100 MHZ it's impedance is 300 ohms, but at audio frequencies, it's just another pair of copper wires with resistance as the only really significant charactistic.

I am astonished at some of the claims foisted on a non-technical public every day. My current favorite is the TV ad about the sticky footpads that you put on the soles of your feet every night. As you sleep, they soak up all the toxins in your body. In the morning, you peel them off, and you can SEE all the "toxins" as a darkened area. You keep applying new pads until all the "toxins" are gone... Oh, please.

I came across this item yesterday. Seems a audiophile is worried whether he should cut off the excess speaker wire going to a nearby speaker, or just coil the wire in the hopes of keeping the distance traveled the same for the pair of speakers. A respondent calculated that the time delay from an unequal cable imbalance of 10 feet would result in the mistiming of audio from that speaker equivalent to moving one's head the distance of 1/10th of a human hair towards that speaker! In other words, there might be more important things to worry about, like magic molecules. Man, there are days I could use some of those.

My current favorite is the TV ad about the sticky footpads that you put on the soles of your feet every night.

I don't watch enough TV: never heard of those! :D

Seems a audiophile is worried whether he should cut off the excess speaker wire going to a nearby speaker, or just coil the wire in the hopes of keeping the distance traveled the same for the pair of speakers.

I'd be more worried that to much cable would be a) a waste of $$ (could use that 20 feet somewhere else!) or (much less with speaker wire) b) making a cheap electromagnet. :D

At audio frequencies, the "Monster Cable" is probably the biggest ripoff in the history of consumer products.

It is easy to verify to anyone's satisfaction that cables equal to Monstercable in every measure of quality can be had at a fraction of their price

What about the second statement here, "Resistance of the cable run is all that really matters"?

Fortunately it is easy to verify the facts in this case also.

You take a high end audio system with a separate preamp and power amp, put in different manufacturers' audio interconnects, and listen.

I did this many times with many different people, especially those who had learned Ohm's Law and were proud of their now complete knowledge of everything electrical.

I hooked up in turn a $5 Radio Shack audio cable, a $50 Monster cable, and a $500 Cello cable, and asked "the people who knew there was no difference, there just couldn't be," what they were hearing in each case.

Their eyes were bulging, because it was obvious that there must be some manipulation going on. Perhaps I was sneakily adjusting the volume between cables?

(In audio stores where they want to sell the more expensive gear, they make sure the levels are higher when they play those than the cheaper products, works everytime.)

So I offered them to exchange the cables themselves.

Well, it was priceless every time because the difference in sound quality was so great, and even when the naysayers knew that there couldn't POSSIBLY be ANY difference, they heard it loud and clear themselves.

I know of no scientific explanation for this great difference yet, and there probably isn't one yet. But I think we will get that explanation, just like in so many other cases.

In the beginning of audio, there was just "distortion" caused by non-linearity creating harmonics. So engineers worked around the clock to minimize the distortion, and created amplifiers with 0.001% distortion and beyond.

Then it was found that amplifiers could have 0.000001% distortion and still they didn't sound good. "Must be hysteria in the listeners, seeing that this was so close to perfection!"

Then one day IM (Inter Modulation) distortion was discovered, and it turned out that human ears are very sensitive to it. So the IM was reduced to unmeasurable levels, and the previous "distortion" was then referred to as Harmonic Distortion.

Soon enough it was found that the human ear was much more sensitive to odd harmonics than even ditto, but nobody had any energy to deal with that, so it was all referred to as THD (Total Harmonic Distortion)

And still some of those good amps with ultra-low THD, microscopic odd harmonics, and negligible IM didn't sound good.

Then it was found that an amplifier's distortion of a continuous sine wave in the lab was easy to measure, but unfortunately it didn't reflect how music was distorted, and it turned out that the massive feedback loops used to get ultra-low THD couldn't keep up with the reproduction of dynamic music, and the 0.000001% suddenly became vastly higher in real life situations.

Amongst other things, it was suggested that music transients were suffering from a different intermodulation distortion, TIM (Transient Inter Modulation), that didn't show up in the lab when measuring with continuous sine wave signals.

And TIM was of course denied for many years, because everyone knew that this was hooeey, because "the measured distortion was super ultra low all the way from 20 Hz to 20 kHz," and "people can't hear anything above 20k anyway."

Then it turned out that perfectly ordinary people could hear the difference between signals that had all frequencies above 20 kHz removed and original signals with overtones going into the ultrasonic range.

Impossible! Voodoo!

Until somebody thought that maybe they were hearing difference signals between the ultrasonics, that would fall within our normal passband of "20 Hz - 20 kHz" (or for most people a lot less), and science was back again.

So here we are with audio interconnects today. We can hear the difference, but we don't know why there is a difference. It is not science for the moment, but engineering. Trying different things to see what works, without waiting for peer-reviewed journals to publish "perfectly derived scientific conclusions" about the materials and mechanics of audio cables.

I have no doubt that we will come to understand scientifically how audio interconnects can be so different.

In the meantime I have no problem with listening my way through different cables to find the best value for a particular installation, because it does make a difference if the rest of the equipment is at a high quality level.

On the other hand if I was hooking up say an XM satellite radio to a boombox (or to anything else frankly), there would be no reason to look for anything over $5.

You didn't try coat hangers? Shame shame.
JJK

"You didn't try coat hangers? Shame shame.
JJK"

I did once, but no signal got through. Guess that wood isn't that good an electrical conductor after all...

If you just spent $1,000 per foot for interconnect cables, you're certainly going to think you're hearing a difference.

Stereophile magazine used to be based in Santa Fe, about 60 miles north of here. I had one of the only PCM digital audio recorders in the state and I used to go up to their offices every once in a while so they coud "play" with it. I used to get into some debates (particularly with J. Gordon Holt) about what they really could or could not hear. I was infinitely amused with all the flowery adjectives thay could come up with to describe "perceived" audio experiences. I loved to point out to them that sound travels through air very differently depending on altitude, temperature and humidity. They were basing their equipment reviews on listening to this stuff at 7,200 feet in very dry air. Their "reports" were only valid for Santa Fe and very few other places. I also liked to point out that women and children can hear better than men. Starting at about age 25, males ability to hear high frequencies dimishes with age. (J. Gordon Holt was as old as dirt and probably couldn't hear much above 4khz at that point.) Audio is, for the most part, all smoke and mirrors. Acoustic perfection can never be achieved, but that doesn't seem to have stopped anyone from trying. Green Sharpie on the edge of CDs to make them sound better... anyone?

John

I have noticed on my system that the volume and bass change proportionately with atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature.
And it is substantial. Ballpark figure of about 2 db SPL.
JJK

If you just spent $1,000 per foot for interconnect cables, you're certainly going to think you're hearing a difference.

That is true, and for that reason I let "cable atheists" :O) test the difference with cables they didn't own.

J. Gordon Holt dropping off at 4 kHz? Oh nooo. His dual-triode hearing aid goes much higher than that :O).

I am absolutely no fan of "tweaky" audio gear. I never owned any speaker cable floor standoffs, or the fantasy cables made of dilithium crystals.

But I did find reasonably priced parts that made a very substantial difference in the sound.

And you are certainly right that the air temperature changes sound dispersion dramatically. I can hear how the same street sounds carry differently during the different seasons.

All product reviews (or movie reviews) have flaws, but the better ones give you enough subjective information to decide whether they should be put on your own evaluation short list.

"I hooked up in turn a $5 Radio Shack audio cable, a $50 Monster cable, and a $500 Cello cable, and asked "the people who knew there was no difference, there just couldn't be," what they were hearing in each case.

Their eyes were bulging, because it was obvious that there must be some manipulation going on. Perhaps I was sneakily adjusting the volume between cables? "

What was the resistance measurement of the three types of cables?
Without knowing those numbers, your argument is no comparing like qualities.

Very simply put, if your five dollar cable was a number 28 wire and your Monster cable was number 14 and you're pushing high amps to a low efficiency speaker, you will probably hear a difference because the resistance of the #28 wire becomes a considerable fraction of the impedance of the speakers on a long run.

Tha does not mean the Monster cable is any better than a number 14 piece of house wiring.

Coursedesign: You take a high end audio system with a separate preamp and power amp, put in different manufacturers' audio interconnects, and listen.

RalphM: What was the resistance measurement of the three types of cables? ...if your five dollar cable was a number 28 wire and your Monster cable was number 14 and you're pushing high amps to a low efficiency speaker, you will probably hear a difference because the resistance of the #28 wire becomes a considerable fraction of the impedance of the speakers on a long run.

An "audio interconnect" is the cable between the preamp and the fairly high impedance input of the power amp, so the fractional-ohm resistance of the interconnects will not make any difference. There will be small capacitance differences, but not likely enough to affect the sound quality substantially.

I never bothered to test different speaker cables, as I had a 2 x 0.8kW power amp and tri-wiring (separate cables from the power amp output to the woofer, midrange elements, and the tweeters).

It would just take too long to switch cables, so I have no data on different speaker cabling other than finding that tri-wiring (with one particular cable type) does sound better than single wiring (with the same cable type).

well, audio cabling is crazy. But the audio in the amp is a Fourier wave form ( composite of many signals), this cause some problems with power transistors being able to ramp up/down fast enough. After time, better and cheap power transistors could follow ramp up/down with 0.01% or better power signal distortion (in 80's). One must remember that an unshielded wire acts as an antenna, transmitting and receiving ( mostly 60hz line noise)& ( depends on power and length of wire), so where you live can have an impact. There are simple issues like looping wire can act as a low performance coil, etc... But good wire(cheap or whatever) and layout planning solves most issues. Plus today's speakers require so much less power, heavy cabling is not needed in most cases I would think. '-) And like John Cline pointed out, air density is a critical factor, probably more important that cabling, so check that moisture content '-)

I designed a lot of electronic equipment while an undergrad, through grad school, and some until the 90s, including a lot of tube gear. In the days of vacuum tubes, it was important to design the final push-pull audio amplifier section so that it would have a high "damping factor." A high damping factor would act like a short circuit to damp the speaker-generated voltages that would be inadvertently activated at various resonance frequencies by the incoming signal. If high-resistance cables were used to connect the speakers - usually large, bass-reflex speakers in those days - then the carefully designed, high-damping-factor amplifier was for naught; the spurious electrical currents generated by the speakers never could be properly loaded by the amplifier and the resonances would be free to shine.

However, when Acoutic Research marketed the AR-1 in 1954, the damping factor of the amplifier was much less important, for the design of the small boxes allowed for the generation of few of the bass-frequency resonances - the ones that caused most havoc with the sound - to develop in the first place. Then the cable resistance became much less important - the speaker boxes provided the damping (mainly with all the fiberglass packed inside, which changed both the desired signal and the resonances to heat, with the desired signal the only portion that was constantly fed from the amplifier), not the amplifier. Lamp cord is entirely adequate for connecting the final audio output to such speakers. Impedence mismatch between amplifier and speaker, or cable-to-speaker, also is a moot point, for the distance between length of the cable is too short relative to the wavelength of the audio frequencies for visual standing wave ratios to become a significant player (at least, for the typical home installation).

However, for connecting, say, a VGA computer port to a high-resolution monitor, a good cable makes ALL the difference, mainly because of the high frequencies involved. For example, I worked for years standing up. But sometime after my 70th birth day, I decided I wanted to sit down after a few hours on my feet. So I bought a Zonet signal splitter, and hooked up another 24" 1920x1200 Dell display so that I could work from my couch. With about 15' of ordinary cable, the image was a messy blur. However, with a good cable, I cannot tell the difference between HDMI and the VGA feed.

Moral of the story: Good cables are a rip-off or invaluable, depending upon the need.

JC says hearing starts to go bad at 25 for males? i think this is overly generous. I can remember as a teenager i could no longer hear my mother. Seems to aflict my sons too.

Hey, I remember the AR speakers! I went to college surrounded by AR-3a's (at least the dorm guys with money.). I think a guy named Henry Kloss was one of the founders of Acoustic Research; I think he got pissed off at something and left to found KLH. I met him one day when KLH had just introduced an "audiophile quality" cassette deck with something magical called Dolby Noise Reduction. Man, that was a long time ago.

Regarding cables, I think the expensive cables sound better for the same reason that your freshly-washed car just drives better. It's all in the head, the same reason why placebos have an astonishing success rate in medical tests. If you think I'm full of specialized oxygen-free molecules, then show me a double-blind test involving a $10 wire connection and a $1,000 wire connection that definitively shows an improvement. I think there are companies on the web that have challenged Monster Cable to put up or shut up with their claims, and as I understand it Monster never takes the bait.

Amen, Brother Riredale! Placebos are much more effective when subjects believe they are expensive than when told the pills are a dime each (see
http://media.www.dailyvidette.com/media/storage/paper420/news/2008/03/18/News/Placebos.Cost.Reflects.Its.Effectiveness-3272469.shtml

Other studies have shown that placebos' power is zero when subjects are told they're getting placebos. Recent research indicates that many procedures - including such things as knee operations - depend mainly upon the placebo effect for efficacy.

Moreover, while some acupuncture studies have shown an effect apart from placebo effect (especially for headache & back ache), sham acupuncture has been as effective as the real thing when other complaints are involved.

Given all the info, I'd predict that a double-blind study would show little difference in audio cables. Most people have no idea how powerful the mind is . . .

LReavis said "...Most people have no idea how powerful the mind is . . ."

I put it another way that is far less flattering to the ego.
...Most people have no idea how easily they can delude themselves....

Cables for speakers only need to be of adequate thickness copper for the current. Double the thickness if you wish, just don't be an idiot to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for those magic "audiophile" cables.

If you want to see how deceptive it can get, read about James Randi's attempts to get one manufacturer of these so called "audiophile" cables to submit to a double blind testing.

http://www.randi.org/joom/content/view/102/2/

Randi offered them one million dollars if they could prove their cable were superior to even those over priced Monster speaker cables.

Oh yeah, I certainly know that when a high frequency analog signal in the megahertz to gigahertz range is run through wire, the AC impedance of the cable can have a drastic effect on said signal. The AC impedance of a copper wire is almost negligible at audio frequencies, only the DC resistance is of concern.

I did double-blind tastings of filtered tap water (with a good quality filter) compared with bottled Arrowhead Mountain Spring water (the most common delivered 5 gallon bottles in L.A.) at my previous company and invited all employees to see if they could taste the difference.

Only two people in the company were right 100% of the time over many tests, the rest had completely random results.

So I wish to congratulate you who are saving so much money by always buying the cheapest signal cables that can carry the current.

I can't do that, because my placebo sense is 100% annoyed and 100% correct also when I don't know if I'm listening to a cheap cable or not. Ditto for other former skeptics who cannot explain how they can be right 100% of the time, in double-blind tests, but they trust themselves enough to put the results ahead of the lack of science.

You guys who save on cable, I bet you are always lucky with prescription medicine generics too. After all, the FDA-approved generics are absolutely guaranteed to be bio-equivalent, i.e. they release exactly the same dose of the active ingredient.

Still, a lot of people have reported getting sick after switching from a brand to a generic. The FDA says this is obviously imagination, since they are bio-equivalent.

Recently, scientists elsewhere started looking into the deaths of people who had died or gone crazy after switching to generics of certain time-release medicines (full story in today's L.A. Times). They were kookoo, right?

It turned out that the brand name drug released the active ingredient at a fixed rate across the 16 hours that it was time-releasing, while the generic had different "inactive ingredients" that caused the release to be a double dose per hour for the first 4 hours, and half the regular dose for the last 4 hours, which was enough to screw up patients very seriously.

Back to audio: it seems that resistors and capacitors can't have any influence on the sound. I just learned from a self-appointed scientific authority that the sound quality of an amplifier is only dependent on the number of transistors. That's easy to measure, so it must be the key to it all. Sort of like looking for your lost car keys under the street lamp, because it is so much brighter there.

So for those who missed the point I made several times very clearly: I have not tested speaker cables and have no opinion on them, because I have no actual comparison data, and opinion without data is just hot air.

I also said that signal cables make no difference when you are hooking up cheap stuff.

When you have good preamps and power amps, the signal cable makes a huge difference, and I have thousands of hours of experience with hearing this difference.

I am not alone in being able to listen to an audio system and diagnosing something like, "It sounds terrible, and the problem is the interconnect between the preamp and the PA" or "there is no air in the sound, and it sounds like the problem is in the output stage," etc.

How to get to this obviously deluded stage? Spend many many years working on sound around the clock.

Hey, it could work for you too. But then you'd have to spend more on cables... :O)

On the other hand, it has been my experience that most people are pretty numb, and they don't want to put in the work required to become more open to what's going on around them, whether it's about enjoying food more fully, or audio, or nature, or the opposite sex, or just about anything else.

Coursedesign, please stick to audio. Your straw man arguments about drugs do not make your ideas about cables more credible, they do just the opposite! Also, please don't fall into the parallel discussion about amplifiers, keep on the subject please.

Now tell us please, which audio interconnect cables have you tested? Please tell us the manufacturer and model number. What is "cheap" vs. "expensive" cables.

I would really like some cold, hard data. Do you really think there would be any audible difference between Monster Cable's "Standard Interlink 100" at $10 per meter vs. their "Sigma Retro Gold" at $1000????

I'd imagine that being skeptical about a 100 to 1 price ratio would be normal, even for the most deluded person on the planet.

C'mon, tell us all, inquiring minds want to know.