Have You Heard Exotic Audio Cables Improve Sound Quality? - Page 5

To believe is to wish it to be true.

Skeptics are just as susceptible to reverse expectation bias as the believers are to expectation bias. This is the purpose of the blind testing discussed above.

.....and to not believe often leads to never openening your mind enough at the possibility of it being true.
Edited by G-Rex - 3/3/13 at 11:55am

Blind A/B tests reliably make fools out of people who claim to hear the difference between speaker cables. The problem is that it is incredibly difficult to conduct a proper A/B test, if it is not done properly the results are meaningless. When people end up voting 50/50 on an A/B test it means they are guessing, it doesn't mean the expectation bias is somehow being cancelled by reverse expectation bias.

In this case, at least for me "to not believe" is to not open up my wallet and let some stranger take as much money out of it as they please and get no added value in return. I pity the fool who walks into a high-end audio store and openly admits they think exotic power cords or speaker cables make a difference. "A sucker is born every minute" comes to mind.
Edited by imagic - 3/3/13 at 12:32pm

The only exact science is Mathematics.

 

This is why schizophrenics don't know they are sick, perception for some people is reality, why do you think advertising and marketing campaigns are usually the largest part of the budget of any company, more than R&D by a margin of at least two or three.

Skeptics are just as susceptible to reverse expectation bias as the believers are to expectation bias. This is the purpose of the blind testing discussed above.

This is true, and actually all the more reason why tests need to be done under controlled double blind conditions with a good mix of listeners. The tests I have read about do exactly that, in that there is a good mix of "believers" and "skeptics" in the listening groups (the fact that many believers walk out as skeptics is interesting to me). My own personal tests were done with whole rooms full of believers and many times I was literally the only skeptic. Yet each test had the exact same result - none of the believers was able to reliably identify the higher end cable (or CD player, or amp for that matter). The fact is that I have never heard of any double blind test that has resulted in a verification that there are indeed audible differences between the types of cables we are discussing. If someone knows of one, please post some links here.

You mention that:

I have done lots of blind tests with results consistent enough to justify my cable purchases. I am not saying what I hear should be considered fact to all, but what I and others heard at my theater are real enough to go higher end.

One example: I listened to 4 different speaker wires from Purist Audio. Each speaker wire sounded different enough to pick each model out in blind testing with multiple listeners. Why the majority of others can't hear the difference between zip wire and Purist does not concern me. What concerns me is my testing was done well enough to conclude that my purchase was justified.

If this testing was indeed done with multiple listeners and under truly blind conditions (no one knew which cable they were hearing, etc) it would justify a conclusion that there were audible differences. I would love to know the conditions of the test, what the statistical results were, etc. You say that multiple listeners were able to pick out differences and that the tests were conducted blind, so I would think that such a test should be easily reproducible.

Of course, I would understand why you would be skeptical of my test claims as well. I would sincerely LOVE to see a mass group of AVS Forum types agree to meet for the biggest blind test of all time, so we can put both points of view to the ultimate test. I'm sure many AVS readers have all kinds of equipment and cables that could be rounded up...

Skeptics "show me the measurements"
"your blind testing is invalid"

A no win situation on these forums, so I will leave it at that.
Edited by G-Rex - 3/11/13 at 5:53am

How about sharing some information? What percentage of people heard the difference in your test, how many people were in your audience, how was the switching performed? What gear was used, what music was played, what measures were taken to make sure nobody cheated, even inadvertently? Information is good.
Edited by imagic - 3/3/13 at 12:53pm

Good for you it's your money after all we are free to buy what we want since we live in free countries!

Why only scientifically accepted test methods should be used for this type of analysis and everything else should be ignored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_effect#Mechanism_of_the_effect

If someone says "it sounds better because it costs 10x as much as the average product" then all I can say is a fool and their money can be easily separated.

Lets not even get started with digital connections between components like HDMI, TOSLINK, etc.

WSE, You are right on the money sir.

What is really laughable is that they not only have $14,000 speaker wiring but also $14,000 digital interconnects! And you'll see them still say stuff like the quantum excited flash frozen metals insure that no detail is lost in the treble and insure for a smoother transition to bass!!!! Yeah right a freaking piece of wire somehow magically knows how to decode and recode everything from DST-MA HD to TrueHD to LCPM and magically applies the same changes to every digital signal. :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

I'm not totally in all high-end stuff is crap point of view, Benchmark DAC1 PRE sure does drive headphones better than an iPod (although there are also pricey pieces of equipment that both test and sound worse than some cheap stuff!), but the wire stuff is ridiculous. Half the claims about the fancy wires don't even make any sense looking at it from a physics point of view and the rest are meaningless.

Maybe the cheap cables were some combination of too thin and long.

I also read that most of the companies make a 99% profit margin on their expensive cables on interconnects (even more sometimes).

Yeah the USB/digital interconnect stuff is particularly galling. Especially when they then start going on about how it lifts a veil off things and tightens bass! It's a shame that I transfer files over USB cables bit perfectly when I could have been getting my destination files evne better than bit perfect! Think of all the time that one could save in school! Take a half written book report, use a $500 USB cable, and then the better than bit perfect copy on the memory stick that you hand into your teacher might well turn out to now be a complete, A+ quality paper!

Here's another way of understanding why super-expensive cables exist, but normal people should not buy them. A cable is like a pipe, plain and simple. It's a conduit. In my career as a photographer I've shot some nice homes and some amazing yachts. Once, I was photographing a mega-yacht (pictures below) that was a true exercise in sky's the limit excess. The ultimate? The plumbing was all custom work, done by Rolex. When I used the bathroom on that yacht, that was Rolex pipe doing the flushing. The budget for the photo shoot itself was six figures, and the final product was only 100 brochures, because really there were only a few people in the world who could afford that yacht. The markup on every aspect of that boat must have been 99% versus the raw material costs.

Purely functional items like pipe and cable are available to the ultra-rich at prices only the ultra-rich can afford. The materials are as high-end as possible and the number of units sold is extremely small. The only way companies that provide such products can exist is if their products are ludicrously expensive. That's fine, they are serving a purpose and a market. The problem is when someone who is genuinely enthusiastic about audio starts to think there is a magic fix, a cable that will make everything sound better. The money being spent on exotic cables should be spent on something else that makes a real difference like better speakers, more amplification, and acoustic room treatments. The only exception is if you are super rich and it truly does not matter what you spend, you just like having the most super-special stuff on Earth and never have to ask what it costs. If that is the case, then you should buy the most expensive and awesome-sounding cables you can find, because re-distribution of wealth is the right thing to do.

If this is what your living room looks like...


and this is where your living room is located...


then by all means, buy esoteric cables for your system.
Edited by imagic - 3/3/13 at 3:22pm

I could imagine the faces on the engineers at Rolex when they were asked to design a plumbing system assuming that is what you meant. "Nothing exceeds like excess.."

I can tell ya one thing, I'd rather drink Johnny Walker Blue out of a Gold Chalice than buy stupid high end speaker wires.

I imagine this has been posted before in one of these "exotic cable" threads but here is an excellent video on why we often perceive differences in sound quality, even when nothing has changed. What I like about Ethan's approach is that he actually produces examples to illustrate the concepts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ

You need look no further than this forum to see examples of 'bogus claims made for exotic cables'...Here's a thread about multi-hundred dollar HDMI cables: http://www.avsforum.com/t/1339688/poll-your-favorite-hdmi-cable/0_40

The only time I heard a difference with cables was testing interconnects. Copper vs. Silver. The Silve wire was noticeably brighter and the 8 people in room picked them in a blind test everytime. The test subjects were B&W 800D with McIntosh 501 Monoblocks, MX 136 processor. Comparing Wireworld Silver XLR VS. Transparent MM2 XLR. Then just for giggles I swapped the Transparent MM2 for Monster RCA... Hmmm to my amazment they heard NO difference. WTH, the Monster RCA were 10 years old and to think Transparent wanted 3K for their cables Ummmm NO. If I cant hear a difference I'll keep my Monster RCA. But YES, we def. heard a difference with SILVER wires. IMO I didnt care for them, no one did. Just my .02 cents.

The conductors in each model Purist were different in composition and awg: copper, copper silver and copper silver gold. All with very different conductor and shield geometries. The resistance/ppf ranged greatly. It is not outlandish that they all sounded a bit different. Only on this forum... if you don't go with $10.00 cables then you are insane.
Edited by G-Rex - 3/16/13 at 8:29pm

Just to be clear, the resistance of speaker cables ranged greatly? That sounds incredibly suspicious. The composition of the conductor has nearly nothing to do with a speaker cable's resistance; the gauge of the wire, just about everything. Relative to the speakers themselves, even the gauge of the wire is almost irrelevant except at high listening levels or over very long runs, so long as the cable is 14 gauge or thicker. Still, subtle differences in volume caused by variations in resistance are a top cause of bad results from blind A/B tests. To have a valid test under those circumstances, you need to level match output to within .1db for each of the setups being compared, otherwise the results will be skewed towards the slightly louder setup, even if it's only a .2db difference.

I don't think anyone here said you should not pay for decent cable. $10/foot is not outlandish for good speaker cable and even $20/foot is justifiable for quality interconnects. Once prices top $100/foot, we're talking exotic and that's where I think there's nothing to be gained over quality commercial products.
Edited by imagic - 3/3/13 at 4:31pm

I am aware that the general rule is that awg is the relevant factor to influence the reisistance/ppf, as is the case with Purist. There are some exceptions. Some Cardas speaker cables have a very high ppf even though they are large awg.

Yes copper is not that expensive, gross profit margin is 90% + for exotic cables

 

Mogami W3104 are as far as I go about $5 a foot!

 

http://www.mogamicable.com/category/bulk/speaker_cable/conventional_configuration/

I'm with you.

All I know is that when I put up $1k for anyone to come on over and stone cold 9 out of 10 coin flips pick if they are listening to some MIT EXP2's or Canare you can't get them to do it.
Edited by Jinjuku - 3/3/13 at 7:45pm

.

It's not only on this forum, you need to broaden your horizons!

It's pretty simple isn't it... if someone will buy them, someone will sell them.