I love seeing this story… it reminds me of 30 years ago when I worked in the telephone industry. Heard about telephone copmanies rolling out service in very very rural areas - running signals over barbed-wire fences because it was too expensive to run dedicated cables. That did degrade the signal, but it worked.
I know it’s a completely different thing entirely, but it just gave me nostalgia remembering hearing about that.
I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.
I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.
But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.
But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.
But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.
Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.
That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.
I’m jealous of people who can’t tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
To be fair, “audiophiles” are morons.
To be fair, the signal is only going through these suboptimal conductors for a very short distance.
Try wiring up your stereo with 50 feet of bananas, and you might start having problems.
The article isn’t clear on one thing : was it an analog or digital signal ?
The results are entirely unsurprising if the signal was digital. Also, I’d like to see a similar test in an environment with more electrical interference, I think the unshielded materials would fare less well there.
I worked at an online shop for high end audio equipment. It was always both amusing and painful when customers asked about the sound characteristics of various power cables in the price range between $100 and $10,000 that we carried, or the same with USB and optical digital cables. Some came with the firm belief that they needed better power cables to enhance the bass of their setup. They even bought gold plated “audiophile fuses”.
The advantage of good wire is isolating the signal from interference. However, if you aren’t in an electrically noisy environment, anything that can conduct electricity will do just as well.
Something in my computer monitor isn’t shielded and will alert me to a incoming cell phone call a second or two before the phone rings.
Your monitor is like the blinking stickers we used to put on our phones.
Yes my knees creak, why do you ask
Are you implying that gold isolates better from interference than copper?
He’s talking about the electromagnetic shielding in a cable, not the contact-points. Usually a copper mesh sheath housed underneath the outer-most rubbery layer and runs around and along the entire length of the signal-carrying wires inside the cable. Works like a Faraday cage, helps prevent electromagnetic interference from large power sources, other unshielded cables running parallel, or anything else that can generate an electromagnetic field near the cable.
Very important to protect signal integrity, widely used even outside the audiophile world (although there are of course plenty of audiophile gimmicks related to shielding).
Basically, if you have a bunch of live unshielded cables bundled and zip-tied together along with your speaker wire, you’ll definitely hear it. Run the signal through an oscilloscope, and you’ll even see it
Seems like you know what you’re talking about. If I may ask, how do ferrite beads figure into this? Do those actually help protect signal, or is it less effective?
Simply put, both protect against certain types of interference in different ways, and each is effective in ways that the other is not.
Mesh shielding is going to help prevent electrical interference from being introduced via the wire itself from an external source. Like other cables carrying signal and running very near/parallel, or electromagnetic fields generated from other devices, certain electrical components, household appliances, etc.
The ferrite beads protect against radio-frequency interference (RFI) via induction, acting like low-pass filters which attenuate specific bandwidths of very high frequency signals. Essentially, they intercept and absorb high-frequency electrical noise, and convert that energy into a small amount of heat instead of letting it pass through further down the signal path. This kind of interference can be from an external source, or generated internally from the various electronics/components in the signal path (which mesh shielding would do nothing to protect against). They also help dissipate any RFI that the mesh shielding itself may be carrying, so you often see both ferrite beads and mesh/foil shielding, like on laptop chargers or USB cables for example.
But the article is about what material is used as a conductor
Yeah, but the comment you replied to was making a point that the conductor doesn’t really matter if there isn’t any noise present. What makes a good cable has much more to do with proper shielding, because electromagnetic interference is what will muck up your signal, not a lack of gold plated connectors
The benefit of gold is that it doesn’t corrode
As I understand it gold is used as it doesn’t tarnish or corrode - it’s not there to benefit the sound in any way.
Exactly, silver is a better conductor I believe, but tarnishes like copper does
This just shows that bananas and mud are materials for excellent audio equipment. I am looking forward to my gold-plated banana.
I mean yeah, audiophile cables are 100% a rip-off every time. You can spend thousands on a cable without it having any real benefits.
It makes more sense to just buy decent speakers and a decent amp, along with a good audio source (any CD player).
I thought audio quality was more to do with the source and the destination. If you have a shit needle on a record or a speaker made of wood then its gonna sound like ass.
I never once thought it had anything to do with the cables. Unless they were frayed or damaged in some way.
But i am not an audiophile, i record my own music and mix etc, but never worried about cable quality before.
I was buying a receiver and speakers in 2020 and when it came time to pick out speaker wire, the salesperson walked over to where the wire was and began the pitch…
Salesperson: so when the frequencies are higher the electrons end up traveling only on the outer layer of the wire instead of in the middle…
Me: yeah, skin effect, I did electrical engineering
Salesperson: ah, so I guess you know you don’t need this then (pointing to gimmicky monster speaker cable that had a single strand of wire in a spiral around the main bundle with a clear jacket so you can see it)
Me: correct (grabs the cheapest 16awg)
Exactly this, the cables never mattered. They’re the least significant part of an audiophile system and I doubt anyone could tell the difference between a crappy cable and a good quality cable. People get good quality cable for durability rather than sound quality.
As long as its not too crappy. Otherwise you’ll wonder why you’re picking up radio.
I’ve literally used lamp wire in a pinch before…sounded great 😆
Cable quality only matters in long distances, when the dumping of the signal is noticeable.
If the distance is so short that there is not any voltage drop and still out powering the external noise. There is in effect no influence
Oh yeah, for sure. I didn’t include that part because an audiophile setup rarely has a need for long distances.
I think the term audiophile has changed in the last decade or two, because now i keep seeing being used to mean “someone who likes music more than the average person”. Before it was more “had an entire room dedicated to music listening and if you move their chair a millimetre they will literally murder you”
That’s the kind of person who swears that can tell s huge difference based on cable (but, of course, never in a blind test).
There are websites dedicated to selling them things they don’t need. A 1m audio cable can cost several tens of thousands of pounds/dollars. And they’ll buy them and swear that they make a significant difference to the timbre of the hi hats on track 3 of The Joshua Tree
Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a cable, for home use. 8ft. Yours for the low, low price of £98,770
That’s not a pair, btw…
I do mean “person with a huge setup dedicated to music listening”. An audiophile who actually knows what they’re talking about will tell you to get any cable from a reputable brand.
But of course you also have “audiophiles” who have no idea whatsoever.
Even more than the actual contact with the media, the entire system breaks down at the ears. If your ears aren’t well-trained, then you don’t even know what to listen for. You might think loud bass is good, or booming drums, and never notice that you can’t hear any mids.
So in a blind test like this, some people just might prefer a sound that this experiment has little impact on, so they wouldn’t be able to notice any differences.
A well-trained ear might be able to detect differences between them, but still not have a real preference. Besides being able to hear all the different frequencies, you have to know what the instruments sound like in real life to know if those frequencies are reproducing accurately. Again, if you don’t what it’s supposed to sound like, you really don’t know if ANY change in components makes a positive or negative difference in the natural sound, you only know the difference relative to your personal preference.
TL;DR: This “experiment” doesn’t prove anything. It’s just funny.
Interesting, do you know where I can buy a set of trained ears? - Audiophiles, probably.
Some of it is genetic, but a lot of it is years of training in hearing and teasing out all the frequencies.
I spent years in the audiophile record business back in the transition days from analogue LPs to digital CDs, and spent a LOT of time with beyond top-of-the-line audio gear, including high end stuff that wasn’t even on the consumer market.
My ears got trained from many years in bands and orchestras, then recording sessions, then hearing the final recordings on CD, as well as thousands of other recordings, and many live performances by some of the greatest orchestras in the world. I know what it is supposed to sound like at every stage of the process.
Bottom line, cables aren’t going to be a major issue. Guarantee you’ve got at least 10 other variables making a bigger difference, and most of them can’t even be fixed.
Yes, so my well-trained ears prefer noisy sound, something like 48kb mp3s I downloaded from the web in my childhood (born 1996). Because that’s less likely to cause migraine through them than a good record with some annoying sounds in it, preserved by a more precise lossy encoding. And things you want to hear are kept well enough even by 48kbit mp3s.
And this surprisingly keeps with analog things, like headphones and speakers. I prefer something cheap and noisy that makes sounds softer to something quality and with crisp sound, but somehow too crisp.
And I do have good ears, I can hear a lot of things, a cat walking on a neighboring plot in countryside during wind, things like that. Hence the migraines.
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Once in a while I come across shorts of this audiophile showing of his gear. The cables he uses look like under sea cables, like he’s pulling 40kV out of his wall socket. It’s so ridiculous
EDIT: This fucking shit. I guess that they’re using XLR cables at the very least but cmon man what the fuck are those cables (especially the second setup)
It’s not about sound quality, it’s about wasting money and showing off. Maybe some placebo effect, too.
Speakers are made of wood, the good ones are at least.
Unless your referring to the actual drivers, then yeah wood wouldn’t really work in that case.
Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.
Yes you’re 100% right. Solid wood will warp and split, I did mean MDF and should have said as such
Well, paper is a very popular material in speaker cones, including high-end
Yeah, i meant the cone, not the case
Yep cables only matter in terms of preference. Unless we are going so cheap it’s barely holding on
Cables give resistance… thats all…
I heard one guy talk about the importance of cable shielding and connector material and shit once, but the ones I actually know just talk about the other hardware (speakers, mixing pults, lots of terms I couldn’t recite).
This is why I like to get mid level stuff. Once you get past the cheap rubbish it’s all the same imo.
This is about a digital signal right? Cause I’m pretty sure if I add a banana midway into my bass’ pedalboard that I’d be getting a significantly different sound. I’m tempted to try and proof myself wrong tho lmao
will be converting to bananas tonight, thanks op
If you can’t hear the difference, don’t pay the difference
