Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Speaker cable?

Rat, do you realize that on forums and emails that typing in CAPS, means that you are yelling? I wish you guys would agree to disagree on this issue, I like to keep an open mind and invite everyone's opinions, even yours

Peace Out

sir: I sure do. That's why I put caps where I did!

Hey, I really am going to give up on this one. At least I think I am. What's that old saying that goes something like "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."

I suppose that there are still people that think that the earth is flat?

Go Figure??

Have a great day.

It's not?

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I suppose that there are still people that think that the earth is flat?

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Now you're trying to tell me it's not

Ya beat me to it

Rick, don't feel bad, some of my audiophile friends have reported to me that they've gone out and looked for themselves rather than believing some silly scientific theory. They say that they've found that the earth is indeed flat and urge me to try it and "Just trust your eyes".

Couldn't resist but post this: Probably the best improvement I had in my system is when I replaced my generic monster original speaker cable with a 10 g Signal Cable shotgun, biwire cable!! I am not sure if it was through biwiring (I don't think as much) or from a thicker cable. But I am 100% positive that I felt like something was lifted from in fron of the speakers. Now, I don't think that a $2600 speaker cable makes too much sense for somebody who buys a $900 pair of Axioms (including me), but I think it does for somebody who buys some 10k speakers, those who care, and probably can distinguish that 1% increase in quality. I do think that for our range of speaker quality, as well as other audio gear quality (in my case Rotel) we should definitely look beyond the range of $20 speaker cable. There are many cable companies out there, most of them overpriced, but I was able to find some that could offer same quality cable for less money. I can mention three: Signal cable, Cobalt Cable and Blue Jeans Cable. By the way, mine costed $165. Reasonable, I think!!

Actually there is about a 1.8% variance between Chimp DNA and human and certainly the morphological and mental differences between chimps and homo sapiens sapiens is enormous. I was being facetious, and thought about using the chimp/human DNA conformance as an example, but I thought that would really offend the knuckle walkers.

BTW, nice to hear from you Chess. I'm still laughing at your demonstration of graceless bad manners.

BTW, I still have one case remaining of 1990 and one of 1993 Chateau Margaux. On the other hand, two buck chuck is fine for dressing roasts.

The problem here is that those who know it all base their rigid opinions on the assumption that a cable's performance is reduceable to 3 electrical parameters: resistance, inductance, and capacitance. This is an idealization - a great over simplification.

Now Kcarlisle has already pointed out that cables do make a difference in sound quality. When you connect a speaker wire to a speaker, the speaker's impedance is in series with that of the speaker wire, therefore, speaker wire can actually modify the speaker's frequency response. So, setting aside his snotty concession, we see that even a reductionist agrees that speaker wire makes a difference in sound quality. But, it does not stop there.

Dick Olsher has done some thinking (and listening) on the subject:

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"Put a gun to their head, and they will maintain till their dying breath that the RLC paradigm is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the past ten years, a handful of investigators have shown that the RLC paradigm just doesn't go far enough, and that there are other factors that do indeed affect signal transmission. This is also true for other passive parts such as caps and resistors where a simplistic test-bench measurement oriented paradigm has failed to fully account for sonic differences. Turn a Meter Head loose with an Audio Precision System and have him try to differentiate between a mass-market receiver and a Mark Levinson, or for that matter, between a run of #16 awg zip cord and an equal length of high-end cable. It's like trying to judge fine wines on the basis of a chemical analysis. Such measurements are in general not predictive of human perceptions.

To paraphrase Rene Descartes, I hear, therefore I am. Meaning, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. While it is possible to dissect a sound field with a variety of frequency and time domain measurements, these meter readings or waterfall plots in no way add up to reflect the emotional reaction I might experience. No wonder science has had such a hard time defining perceptual attributes. Take timbre, for example. The American National Standards Institute defines timbre as "that attribute of a tone by which a listener can judge that two sounds of the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar." Pretty vague if you ask me. The following layman's definition is no better: the perceivable difference between a clarinet middle C and a violin middle C is timbre. To quote Handel (Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events: MIT Press), "timbre is not reducible to an acoustical property that automatically yields a clarinet note or a violin note."
Timber has to be judged subjectively."

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Anyway, among other things, what I find interesting is the reaction of folks who KNOW that cables make no difference to sound quality to the suggestion that folks simply listen! Would you not agree that the responses to the suggestion range from displaced behavior (let's talk about wine) to outright hostility?

Isn't it interesting that we have here a subject about which reasonable people cannot even begin a discussion much less concede to those who say they can hear a difference that the objectors will at least give it a listen?

I think it's interesting, and in the case of aggressive dull normals like Chess, funny.

Just a minor detail (haven't finished reading your post) but my name has no s in it.

Thought I could stay away. . .as do many of us but I just can't.

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Now, I don't think that a $2600 speaker cable makes too much sense for somebody who buys a $900 pair of Axioms (including me), but I think it does for somebody who buys some 10k speakers

$10K speakers. . .$2600 cables. Come on. Open the speakers up and look inside at the cables. . . they didn't use $2600 cables inside. So if the cables really were worth that much, which in my humble opinion they are not, you are still running into the problem of the internal wiring. And what about the connects on the receiver and the speaker coils themselves, what about the wires in the receiver/amplifier. They are not $2600 wires. And why would somebody spend one quarter of the amount on speaker wires than they did on speakers. ANYBODY would agree that you could make far better sound quality improvements with $2600 investing the money on things that significantly improve the sound like speakers and amplifiers.

There are differences in the quality of speaker wires and interconnects. I remember how pissed I was when I finally broke down and spent some extra dough on some fancy interconnects. Only to find that one of them would only work intermittently. I had to jiggle the wire to get sound to come out. Not the receiver .. the expensive cable. Absolutely ridiculous. If you can't connect two wires to a plug and have a solid connection you have NO business making cables.

All this to say that a clean connection that works is the most important feature of a cable.

In the end, dollar for dollar, it is always going to be wiser to invest the money in better speakers and amplification than on interconnects. I believe this point to be unarguable. Cables do not make sound they just deliver the message. Thus they cannot improve sound only degrade it. Whether they degrade it a tiny bit or a teansy tiny bit just doesn't matter to me.