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Opening a can of worms

Here is the can filled with opinions. It's been hashed and rehashed to infinity and beyond with no clear result. Since I am a seeker of truth I'll post my thoughts here for the yea and naysayers to debate over. Question is: Are expensive speaker or any other cable in a system worth the exorbitant cost over a reasonably priced cable loom? I thought I'd  experiment myself to find out. My comparison is between Transparent Ultra cable loom and Blue Jeans cable loom on a pure stereo system comprised of Proceed PAV,  Proceed PDSD,  Krell Kav 250, Musical Fidelity A3cd, Sony Ps4300 TT and B&W 803D2 speakers. All sources were used by this experiment using identical playback material. Cables had in excess of 200 hrs burn time and all were identical in lenght. The only variation were the connector manufacturers.
One change that occurred during this 4 week long endeavor was that I'm firmly seated on the sharpest picket on the fence.
My result is that I'm now a believer that there are audible differences in cables. I also believe that these differences are minute and one has to really listen carefully and for a long time to discern these differences.
Now to the crutch of the matter, $$$$$, As we all know Transparent Cables would reside in the upper tier of Audio Cable expense.  Blue Jeans Cable on the other hand falls into the lowest tier of expense (well maybe not lowest but low nontheless )
One would think then that the Transparent would be far superior to the BJs. Not really! Yes the highs were a little cleaner, mids a little tighter and lows a tad more pronounced but not by as much as one would expect. Soundstage was somewhat more open and airy and depth was somewhat more defined with the higher priced cable but again less than one would expect. 

Now for my personal opinion regarding the cable debate: expensive cable looms are slightly better than reasonable priced looms, if a dollar equals a penny to you then by all means opt for the higher priced loom, if a penny equals a penny don't be ashamed for opting for the best you can do. The differences are so minute that it's not worth going into debt over. BOTH looms sounded superb on my test system and I would be happy with either loom.

Now let the debate begin, just know I'm a fence sitter and not in one camp or the other
gillatgh
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,333 posts
 
So special wires and fuses are ONLY critical in audio sound quality? Nobody else has a need for special performance tuned $50 110 volt AC fuses. Nobody else has a need for better performance from $1000 wires to run 3 feet? 

Seriously, how could anybody buy into this kind of logic? It is predicated on audio equipment being somehow different from all other electronics. Why wouldn't your digital camera provide shaper images and better color from a better USB cable. Why woudn't all printers or PC perform that much better with a better fuse? Why do people upgrade RAM in PCs but nobody buys special digital performance PC fuses so that the digital bits have rounder zeros and sharper 1s? Why wouldn't your car run better and faster with a different fuse or specialist battery cables - after all modern cars all run on electronics?


nonoise's avatar
nonoise
4,382 posts
 
In case you glossed over, forgot, or simply didn't retain what you read from other threads, audio fuses are rebranded specialty fuses that are used in medical, military, aerospace, and important IT functions, among others. They're called high rupturing fuses. Google it. 

Now that they've been around awhile (what, two decades?) some audio makes have specified certain builds and styles (think real hard) like SR who have the factory do it or BeesWax, who go and do it themselves after buying audio fuse stock. Do you honestly believe that SR has their own fuse factory?

Please.

And as for your analogy regarding printers and cabling, to call that the same as audio reproduction is both a silly and lazy argument. Not well thought out at all. 

All the best,
Nonoise
kosst_amojan
2,095 posts
 
@shadorne 
You're arguing with audio Scientologists. They will only believe the dogma the quack gurus sell them at great price. Never mind that the people who actually make the music don't concern themselves with hocus pocus such as fuses and magic wires. They're not going to let that kind of rational thinking get in their way. 
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,333 posts
 
So audio is a special exception and all other electronic devices are different. Sure. 
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
14,147 posts
 
Ah, the Crusader Rabbits are hard at work today. Let us pause and reflect.

note to self: apparently the naysayers are just being superstitious. "Superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo..." That makes sense! 🙈 🙉 🙊

OK, it's that time again, boys and girls.

"Seeing with humility, curiosity and fresh eyes was once the main point of science. But today it is often a different story. As the scientific enterprise has been bent toward exploitation, institutionalization, hyperspecialization and new orthodoxy, it has increasingly preoccupied itself with disconnected facts in a psychological, social and ecological vacuum. So disconnected has official science become from the greater scheme of things, that it tends to deny or disregard entire domains of reality and to satisfy itself with reducing all of life and consciousness to a dead physics.

As the millennium turns, science seems in many ways to be treading the weary path of the religions it presumed to replace. Where free, dispassionate inquiry once reigned, emotions now run high in the defense of a fundamentalized "scientific truth." As anomalies mount up beneath a sea of denial, defenders of the Faith and the Kingdom cling with increasing self-righteousness to the hull of a sinking paradigm. Faced with provocative evidence of things undreamt of in their philosophy, many otherwise mature scientists revert to a kind of skeptical infantilism characterized by blind faith in the absoluteness of the familiar. Small wonder, then, that so many promising fields of inquiry remain shrouded in superstition, ignorance, denial, disinformation, taboo . . . and debunkery."



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