Good, Neutral, Reasonably Priced Cables?

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...

Mprime,

Agreed- there's an agenda at Audioholics. I tried to be politic about 'objective' perspectives and finesse the issue by referring to their data as being objective... As long as the experiment is done right, data is always objective. It's the interpretation that gets complicated ;-)

FWIW, Audioholics takes pains to at least give the appearance of doing proper controls- not being an EE, I can't meaningfully judge how good their methodologies are.

Looking at it from another perspective, I think they deserve some praise for actually doing, and talking about, cable measurements. I've certainly never seen Stereophile, Absolute Sound, or any other high-end rag carry out rudimentary, much less standard and routine, measurements of cable properties. Instead, they provide hearing evaluations and sometimes comparisons, which, as we all know by now, are highly specific to system interactions, etc. etc. and may have little if any broad applicability. If I'm going to toss around the 'agenda' word when discussing Audioholics, I should probably be fair and recognize that this approach is similarly 'agenda-driven'. I should probably run for cover at this point before the impending flame-war engulfs us...

Getting superior sound for listening enjoyment is probably the overarching goal of all this (but who can say- some folks seem to like the process of getting there more than the goal...) In getting to that goal, it seems to me that both subjective and objective approaches should be useful, and could be complementary, if folks could be motivated to work together.

Oops. Ending soapbox session now...