HI FI INTERCONNECT CABLE DIFFERENCES

[legrandefromage]

blah blah blah...

I've had a beer or two so can be as belligerent as I like.

'burn in'??? are you serious???

Have you ever actually taken you equipment apart and seen how piss poor some of the internal cabling is?

Speaker cabling is all about capacitance, inductance and resistance. Any snake oil cable sold that interferes with those three will change the load on an amplifier circuit and therefore change the overall sound the unit has. Proper cable shouldn't have any effect unless it gets over a certain distance. As its been some 6 years since my paypacket relied on me remembering this stuff, exact details are hazy:

From memory, interconnects are not affected unless going over 10 metre lengths. Thats where balanced interconnects came in from studio use. Speaker cable, I cant remember but unequal lengths dont affect the load on an amplifier unless over something like 10 metres again. In home cinema systems, its actually better to put the amplification for the rear speakers on long interconnects and short speaker lengths.

As for 'digital' (again from memory!), audio is affected by RF interference, jitter and some other stuff. Decent RF suppression makes one hell of a difference. Something that can actually be achieved by using a decent cable (50 Ohm!). A few manufacturers used reclocking - this helped with jitter.

Regarding PC's - audio isnt an issue so very little is done. If you actually wire your standard Curry's PC into a decent audio system, it will sound rough no matter what resolution the music was sampled at. Thats why £400+ sound cards are available.

Then there's the recordings themselves, something which so few people actually bother to think about. A poorly mastered CD or MP3 will sound as rough as hairy bollocks no matter what system you put it through. Heck, some stuff is even designed to sound good on a ******* mobile phone FFS!

Put you favourite CD's through an oscilloscope and you'll see what I mean. Remembering the 20kHZ brick wall filtering CD uses, audio should have a nice rounded wave. Sadly, many dont showing squared off peakes where no thought has been given.

So there.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Put you favourite CD's through an oscilloscope and you'll see what I mean.

I can't find the slot.

One thing I find daft is people spending thousands or even hundreds on gear and then playing MP3s through it.

 

[greenstiles]

LGF You should have a couple of beers more often although i'm still 100% sure my cable sounded different after it had cooled down 35mins at gas mark 4

 

[highlandsflyer]

I use QED Qudos purple because it is purple.

 

[Neil]

I use QED Qudos purple because it is purple.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "Purple is a fruit..."

 

[legrandefromage]

LGF You should have a couple of beers more often although i'm still 100% sure my cable sounded different after it had cooled down 35mins at gas mark 4

At the company I worked for, we did blind tests with customers' cables and our own Belkin sourced interconnects plus a few very pricey ones (£4k digital interconnect anyone?) and nobody could tell the difference. The only person who claimed he could got them wrong.

 

[JohnH]

Cat5 can be used for very long runs because of its balanced pairs which have a very tight and controlled twist....

Thanks for the post, djoptix. That was a very interesting read!

My point about networking cable was about general cabling like Cat 5 hardly being expensive (compared with audophile-costing digital cables), and in fairness (accepting the twisted pairs and their significance) is unshielded (that's what the U in UTP stands for).

And coax and other types of cable were used for networking long before Cat 5 / UTP became ubiquituous.

Thinnet and thicknet were used - and yes, they needed shielding, and terminating correctly.

When I was first networking computers (big ones) it was all thicknet, vampire taps, and AUI cables. They were heavy and cumbersome, and awkward to connect.

Thinnet / 10 Base 2 cables were less unwieldly, but more delicate and more prone to not being terminated correctly.

Sorry if I've caused confusion -- I only quoted the first line of djoptix's post because it seemed a bit neater than reproducing the whole lot.

 

[highlandsflyer]

At the company I worked for, we did blind tests with customers' cables and our own Belkin sourced interconnects plus a few very pricey ones (£4k digital interconnect anyone?) and nobody could tell the difference. The only person who claimed he could got them wrong.

That reminds me of the time I swapped wives with Sigourney Weaver's husband. Purely in the pursuit of identifying a difference I had to repeat the exercise numerous times.

I tend to agree although I have never heard such high end interconnects.

I feel decent shielding and good quality wire and plugs would put most differences into the minor category.

One thing I have been surprised at in the past has been the amount of coiled up cable people have had lying behind their £3000 audiophile setup.