geoffkait,
Wow! Thanks for the huge Strawman argument, professor!
Your consistency in misidentifying arguments and fallacies is remarkable. You are batting 1000! An achievement of sorts, I guess ;-)
Nobody said you can do better than the sound of the original recording.
I of course didn’t claim anyone was saying that. So...what a surprise!...you are yet again indulging in your hobby of attacking strawmen. What I instead argued was to consider the implications, the conundrum, contained within the understanding one can not improve on the sound of the original.** . That’s why I concluded with: "And then ask yourself if boutique audiophile cables are necessary for passing along extremely high fidelity signals." (Note, that does not contain the strawman you re-phrased this to become).
Presuming first that audiophile cables alter the sound....(and acknowledging that even the most hardened "objectivist" about cables would say you want to choose the right cable for the right job, lest it degrade the signal)
IF one has the view that cables are essentially just forms of tone controls, then, just as when you play with an EQ, it’s possible one cable can sound "more revealing" of what is on the recording - e.g. if the frequency contour favours the upper frequencies, more "detail" will be heard.
That concept of how cables can alter a sound system doesn’t produce the conundrum I referred to.
However, most high end cables are not marketed as simply being tone controls. They tend to be directed to claims that tickle the audiophile’s desire for Higher Fidelity.
So...
IF one has the view that audiophile cables result in "higher fidelity" of the signal - that is they *reveal* via lower distortion/higher fidelity information that goes missing on *regular* cables...THEN the problem I pointed to arises. Because, as I said, the high end cable could only ever be revealing information that was already conveyed by the non-audiophile cables used to capture the recording. In fact, you are hearing the capabilities of the *very worst* cables the signal ever passed through.
Hence it seems to be a conundrum of sorts to say the expensive high end cables have properties that make them "more revealing" for music in a hi fi system than the basic cables used for most recordings. Or, in other words, it seems rather odd for many audiophiles to think they require spending big bucks on high end cables because lower priced cables aren’t up to the job of conveying a high fidelity signal. They are using their high end cables to exalt in the signals conveyed by non-audiophile cables! So non-audiophile-grade cables *must* be capable of extremely high fidelity, which suggests the emphasis many audiophiles place on high end audio cables to achieve high fidelity *may* be based on some dubious assumptions.
** (BTW, that is on the presumption of fidelity to the original signal -we can of course alter the original signal through EQ, re-mastering etc to make it into what many would think to be "better" sound. But again, that’s not what we are talking about for the moment)
