Cable auditions - Hard Work?


Does anyone find it to be "hard work" to audition cables? I find that I have to be 'fresh' before I can begin to listen to cables. After I begin, I can only listen, with the intensity needed, for a period of about an hour.

As I do A/B comparisons, it sometimes seems, my impressions change as I listen. Sometimes the differences are so small or subtle, that I question if I'm hearing a difference at all. Have I lost it?

How do you folks do your cable auditions? I'd really like to know.

Thanks
paul
oldpet
Have your buddy, Jack Daniels, come over and help. After a bit, even the $8,500 cables will sound o.k. :)

See www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm
Lots of good ideas, and great advice. Thank you one and all.

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who finds this cable auditioning thing to be.....a pain. I actually find it to be stressful at times, like i have a final exam coming for which I haven't studied quite enough.

I would just buy some cables and stick with them, but I have found that different IC's - even in my self imposed price range - do bring various qualities to the table. I love 'air' and detail etc. but, i don't want to give up good deep bass with slam to get it. uuugggghhh!

I just have some self imposed rules on budget...I won't spend more than $250 on a pair of IC. Speaker cables are different for me because of the length of the run - 17+ feet. :-( That sort of limits my choices. I've done the DIY Canare 4S11 speaker cables - they're actually excellent for the $$.

I've never tried the Cable Co. I suppose I don't have anything to lose. Just some more sleep.

thanks again to all. Any more thoughts are still welcome.

paul
Hi Paul,

I have spent way too many hours agonizing over this same thing. I finally figured it out, spend a few nights listening to your system with one cable, then with the other. If you found one was less enjoyable than the other, get rid of the one you didn't enjoy. In your price range it should not require such intense listening and stress. It should be apparent without a lot of thought after a couple nights, as to which was more musical and enjoyable.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're listening to your system and not your music, than you're missing the whole point of this hobby. ENJOY THE MUSIC! That is the goal.

JD
If you are spending hours comparing cables, something is not right w/the rest of your system. Folks, the cables biz is a scam, and the sooner audiophiles learn this, the more money we'll have for what we value most: music.
Yes, it's hard, tedious work. The good news is once you're done, find what you like, you don't have to go through it again for years as suggested above. As I built my system I used perfectly acceptable $200-$300 ICs for my 'major' components. Now that the system is 'done', I just wanted to dial-in the last bit of resolution and (yes) freq balance to my liking. But going through about 20 $300-$1000 ICs takes a LOT of time, esp as I was generally intentionally auditioning cables that had similar characteristics.

The Cable Company is both a blessing and a curse. My 'salesman' was incredibly knowledgeable and patient, helping me narrow things down considerably. They have every cable made, a reasonable (?) lease cost, all cables fully burned-in, painfree return shipping labels, but before you know it you've spent $400 just to audition. At least the price can be fully credited to buying a new or used cable from them at a fair, if not audiogon, price.

I can do up to 90min at a time, at the expense of getting on with my life. I have about a dozen CDs and a dozen LPs I use and know what to listen for. I tend to cover as much ground as I can in an intense listening session, rather than just listening to a particular cable for days more casually. Some of this may be the 2wk time limit of The Cable Co, a lot of it is I just want to get it over with. So it's usually one track I'll listen to once or twice before switching to a different cable. I can only compare one cable to another at a time, so I have to carefully choose the order in which I stage the cables, and can quickly narrow down to the favorites A/Bing against each other. I take copious notes (what a surprise) so I don't have to repeat a comparison unnecessarily.

The good news is I have found the 'perfect' ICs I was looking for to fit my system/ears/preferences (if not budget!) which takes the whole system an appreciable step beyond what the previous (decent) cables did. And learned a lot about many of the popular current cables available today. The bad news is I could have accomplished a lot more useful stuff (and saved a lot of money) in the hours and months it took to get to where I am now -- but we can all make that claim in this hobby. I don't know that I could have short-cutted the process and have the same level of confidence that I didn't hear cable XYZ that has such great press against my final choices.

The only thing 'worse' I can think of is auditioning power cords, which I did only enough of to replace all my generic IEC cords with $50-$200 cords -- relatively cheap -- with an absolute minimum of critical auditioning. YMMV of course.