Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

try Goertz MI1 or MI2 speaker cables: http://www.alphacore.com/mispeaker.html
or Kimber 4TC 0r 8TC (not as good as Goertz} and more expensive.

Re. objective characteristics of cable behavior, I've found the audioholics site to be worthwile food for thought:

audioholics site

They seem to be pretty far toward the 'objectivist' end of the spectrum of thought re. cable performance, which some will find more appealing than others. The hard data they provide is valuable regardless of its interpretation and eventual shoehorning into electronics theory (which gets very esoteric very fast, at least for me.)

If one can make use of it, perhaps the data can aid in choosing cable evaluation candidates, and perhaps in understanding cable placement differences as well. (impedance matching, capacitance, etc...)

There have also been a couple of articles in Stereophile re. cable theory, at least one of them was by Herve Delatraz, who makes the DarTzeel amp, if I recall correctly. I couldn't find them on the website- perhaps they are only available in print, or I wasn't looking in the right places online.

Fun thread!

Interesting, Tommy.

I must say this site (have never run across it before) appears to have an axe to grind. For example, they slam the Goertz speaker cables for introducing a large phase shift; the problem is it's out of the audio band and therefore irrelevant. In fact, when you assess their data on the cable, it's quite flat in the audio range.

Seems hard to get an "objective" opinion.

Sean, assuming that a cable meets a reasonable level of design integrity, is it your opinion that the process of evaluating the different designs (sonic evaluation) becomes random and unpredictable?

Would you agree that design integrity could be of a high standard in a $500 I/C, just as high as say a $2500 I/C?
If so, it should then be possible that the less expensive cable could sound better than the more expensive cable, given a sympathetic set of electrical (impedance) properties in system components?
I'm going through cable changes in my system right now, and I'm experiencing a wide range of sonic differences between cable, that seem totally unrelated to price. I won't get into specifics at this point, but it seems to me that spending big bucks on cables does not guarantee any kind of performance advantage over lower cost cables, and that basically it's all about system synergy and finding a cable with the right electrical properties that 'just happens' to compliment the properties of the components to which it connects.
Various things strike me from all of this, foremost is that any written review of audio cables is to be treated almost as a source of entertainment, rather than any kind of resource or reference. Unless you have the exact same setup as the reviewer (impossible, since at the very least, his/her AC will be different) the results of the review are totally system dependant and therefore of little or no relevance outside of that specific system.
A bit too 'black and white' but you get my drift.

Rooze

Here's the root of the problem: entertainment. To me, an audio review in a magazine is not entertainment. It is a published account of a listening experience. Now, 'gentleman's entertainment' IS entertainment...