The Science of Cables

I'm not getting into the technical melee here, but if anyone is interested in measurements - including one that can ID differences ***when we don't know precisely what to measure***, look up a youtube video of an AES talk by Evan Winer on his Null Tester.  OK he;s a techie, but if more mastering engineers has his commitment, we'd probably like more recordings and even like digital masters.

Note the subtlety here - I disagree that we cannot measure audible artifacts.  The problem is that a) we dont know what to measure and b) we don't know how to weight consonant vs dissonant distortions.  There is a difference between "sounds nice" and "is accurate". IN fact, distortions make great pianos and violins - but ah what distortions they are... (rich resonances that are primarily low-order, even harmonics).
Measuring cables is complex. I tried one with nearly $1m worth of lab gear (not mine) and failed miserably.  but it was fun.

cleeds,

How does it prove nothing when subjects reported substantial differences, which, according to the test, could not have been there?
One cannot prove a negative, we we cannot prove there are not differences, (except maybe the null test), but that  suggests that the mind is having a major influence on reported results.  I KNOW this is true of me which is why i am very careful to listen multiple times under multiple circumstances before i come to a concision....
headache? I hate it. Good wine? I love it. Just sayin'  better to invest in wine maybe

G

While I largely agree with the direction of Dunlavy's post, I will give slight shelter to two claims:

For example, claiming that copper wire is directional, that slow-moving electrons create distortion as they haphazardly carry the signal along a wire, that cables store and release energy as signals propagate along them, that a final energy component (improperly labeled as Joules) is the measure of the tonality of cables, ad nauseum, are but a few of the non-entities used in advertisements to describe cable performance.

Any properly shielded wire can be directional. A Faraday shield should typically be grounded ONLY at the source.
And dialectic do absorb and release charge non-linearly. It is called dialectic absorption (closely related to dissipation factor) and can be read in any good data sheet.
The larger the physical form factor the less this is a meaningful concern, since the capacitance goes way down.
Not really defending the position of many cable claims, but there is a hint of truth in there if you look closely....
G

I realize not all will like this, but it IS informative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ
AES panel discussion

I know you didn't ask me, but i took a quick look at:

Could you please do us all a big favour and take a peak at the following thread....

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/doug-schroeder-method-double-ic

....and give us your ideas about what all the hub-bub is about.

I cant even figure out what the OP is saying.  he doesn't provide  schematics (step 1 IMO), nor define which "IC", nor define the characteristics of those ICs.. or does he mean "interconnect", at which point its just less resistance and more capacitance and I'll stay out of relative subjective judgement-land.
But if we don't know the characteristics of the source, media and termination we don;t know much.
Sounds like a very expensive tone control to me.
G

What I find interesting is that the second highest rated cable in the test had the worst fidelity, and the worst rated cable was right there in the middle when frequency and amplitude were measured.

As i noted above, we have to distinguish between accuracy and musicality. They are different and valid. The problem is one is harder to measure.

Most of our queues come from music theory. Concepts of consonance and dissonance, chords construction all follow the "some distortions" (e.g.: harmonically related additions) are welcome. Chords are examples, as is the resonance of a sounding board or violin case.  Heck, tubes probably get their great rep from consonant harmonic distortions and that is known to be musical from folks who make music. No issue there, as logn as we understand what is happening.

in cables we also have the possibility that what they are is long, expensive, fixed tone controls. We KNOW that rooms are far from flat. We also know that many electro-mechanical components are far from flat (cartridges, speakers...). Finally we know that there are HF distortions from the digital recording mastering process which, when it is done badly, are objectionable. all these problems can be made better or worse through simple frequency manipulation. So a cable that distorts - rolls of the HF - may sound very good to many in a particular system. Sadly it may sound dead in another.

Decades (?) ago Mark Levinson launched a $20k equalizer on the world from Cello and got great reviews from Stereophile among others. I’m convinced we miss a trick by not having a loudness contour - in fact i think its one reason why many audiophiles listen more loudly than they might otherwise. Of course we need to avoid a cure that’s worse than the disease.

So i’m not surprised.