Audio cables

One of those highly  controversial topics.
At one hand you have people claiming great improvements in sound quality using an other cable, others claim that tons of blind testing has been done yielding invariably the same results; no audible differences.
In general the discussion end is a flare.

 

Here you find a very courageous and strikingly honest guy, Mike Lavigne.
He owns a Opus speaker cable (starting at $ 33.000) and did a blind listening test comparing his ultra high end cable with a run of the mill Monster speaker cable.
Read this.

 

One can debate cables endlessly, but one can also measure.
Measuring won’t tell you everything.
If you measure differences between cables it won’t by magic map into audible differences but at least you have a clue about what this passive components do.

If you can’t measure any difference but they do sound different, you might be in for some unsighted listening tests.


Jim Lesurf  measures the resistance of a couple of speaker cables against the frequency.

Looks impressive, wild variations in resistance over the frequency range.

Sure this passive components behave like wild.

Now 1 MHz = 10E6 = 1.000.000 Hz
The upper limit of our audible range is 20.000 Hz= 0.02 MHz.
So what do this measurements learn us?

 

John Siau of Benchmark Media tested frequency response of various cables.

As an objective audiophile, I have occasionally been surprised by the unexpected:

I decided to test speaker cables to show that the differences are insignificant. I expected to demonstrate that 18-GA zip cord was indistinguishable from high-quality audiophile speaker cable or even the heavy-gauge cables used by the sound reinforcement industry. I was shocked to discover that there were differences, and more shocked to discover that the zip cord performed better than most of the other cables!

Source

 

This test uses 100 ft cable with a 8-ohm JBL 4410 3-way studio monitor as load.

The DC resistance of the cables and impedance variations in the speakers cause the dips in the frequency response..
The inductance of the cable causes the high-frequency roll-off.

 

 

The same test with a 8-ohm resistive load,( also showing phase response) is less dramatic now that the impedance variations by the speakers are eliminated.

However both phase and frequency response are affected inside the audible range.


Yes speaker cable do matters but you have literally go at great length (100 ft) to show the impact.
With short runs as common in the home (<12 ft) you won’t have this problem.

 

The best performer is the magenta one, 24 strands of 24-GA twisted pair cable.
Sound familiar as indeed most CAT5 cable is made of 24-GA twisted pair!
In other words:

©Vincent Kars