Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

Sometimes what we ask for is not what we want. Dodgealum has asked for neutral cable recommendations, and he's received quite a few suggestions. I own both Audience Au24 and VH Audio Pulsars. In my system, a combination of Au24 and Pulsar sounds best.

Sounds best. That's an important distinction. I may have wanted neutral to begin with, but what sounds best is another thing. I don't believe one has to pay big bucks for "neutral" cabling. And, I'm one who considers Au24 to be big bucks cabling, but you can see where my price/performance skew rests. The Pulsars are not the ultimate definition of neutral, but they sound damn good. Combined with the Au24 interconnects, the combination is very, very nice. I'll add that I've owned the Ridge Street Midnight Silver Edition II interconnects, and while these are also not the ultimate definition of "neutral", they too sound really, really nice and are certainly worth investigating.

That's why I continue to recommend (as others do, too) that wire has to be heard in one's own system with an open mind.

....makes Salma Hayek look quite a few notches lower.

sounds high maintaince to me :))))

i actually prefer when they ask for my number.

you know what i mean...

mike

Psychicanimal, you're right -- I'm branching out into both a left and right brainer! ;-) Perhaps I'm being a bit too objective. There is more that I don't know than that I do.

Looking at things from a different perspective, many audiophiles have heard differences in cable performance from one system to the next. While that, plus the scientific differences I referenced, points to many cables being systems dependent, that does not prove that all cables are so systems dependent that they will be neutral in one but not another. Thanks for the continued challenge to my reasoning Psychicanimal.

Allow me to rephrase: MANY cables may sound neutral in one system but not another; ALL cables will influence their systems to some degree; SOME cables may sound neutral in most systems. That's what I love about this forum -- it's a great learning opportunity for me so long as I listen.

Cheers

Threads like this really amaze me, regardless of who contributes to them and how much or little they've spent on their systems and cables.

Having said that, there's obviously a LOT of different concerns regarding cable selection being voiced in this specific thread with sound quality and design integrity only being a small part of them. Brand recognition, resale value, status amongst audiophile peers, etc... are also raising their heads. While nobody wants to "lose their shirt" when buying / selling gear, selecting products that are properly designed in the first place typically negates many of the problems associated with having to worry about resale value.

Smart people realize that interconnects can change "flavours" when you change their positions within the same system. As such, the cable itself doesn't have a "flavour" or measure of "neutrality", it becomes part of the component to component interphase. What you hear is the result of that specific synergy / summation of complex impedances and how the specific components react / load up / transfer power into those specific impedances.

If a cable maintains the same sound in every system in every component to component interphase, it is doing something so wrong that nothing else will overcome that colouration / design flaw. I'm not saying that a cable can't display similar characteristics when mating various component configurations, but that those characteristics may vary in intensity somewhat due to the specific combo's used.

Hopefully, some of you folks will learn this sooner rather than later i.e. before you go broke and are very unhappy with your systems. I know that some get the basic idea as i can see it in their posts. Having said that, speaker cables are another story. There are specific electro-mechanical design characteristics that allow some cables to work more universally than others in well designed systems. Systems that are less than well designed / put together may require lesser cables to act as an "electrical band-aid". Sean
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PS... How does a cable achieve "greatness"? Is it by the manufacturer providing a bunch of freebies to reviewers and getting them to list them in their "reference system" in glossy mag reviews? Or is it achieved by building up a bunch of hype on the net via on-line reviews and end user commentaries? I've tried a bit from all three camps and quite honestly, some of them are horrid sounding AND so electrically backwards that its' not funny.

My experience is that "great" cables come with "great" price tags. That's because someone has to pay for all the freebies / discounted cables that the manufacturer went through just to gain the public notoriety that they've achieved. Just remember that the grass is always greener on the other side and there's always a "better" / "most amazing" cable that will be available next month or the month after that.

Compare profit margins between cables and components and you'll see why there's SOOOO much hype surrounding this part of the market. This isn't to say that there isn't a difference in cables, only that much of the differences are in the component to component interphase, not the cables themselves.

Sean,

It would be nice is to understand the objective characteristics which lead to these subjective differences we hear with interconnects, as opposed to speaker cables. It seams to me (this is offered as a straw-man) that interconnects are suppose to offere a voltage signal to the various components where speaker cables are suppose to deliver current to their load; the hypothesis is that the amp upstream equipment (connected by interconnects) is more susceptible to the voltage/current differences than the amp is. The analog is a circuit designed to measure/deliver voltage is quite different than that to measure current.

Perhaps this is what you've been saying all along?

Best,