Audiophile Cable

[ejman]

Great! Always wanted one of these. Now to find some plutonium...

 

[ERD50]

You can design and build a good audio amplifier using tubes. It just costs more money than using solid-state components for a given design target.

Unless you are trying to get a 'tube sound'! That is most easily done with... tubes!

And I do think some music in some systems can sound 'better' through a tube amp.

-ERD50

 

[dallas27]

I buy the cheapest "thick" gauges I can at monoprice.com.

For digital connection, cables all identical, they work or they dont [some anal forum member will quote this and refute technical reasons no one can actually hear or see]

For analog, if you are really worried, go with XLR balanced connections and be done with it.

Next 1st world problem, Please.


FWIW - I run an Onkyo Pro PR-SC885P on top of a Emotiva LMA-1 Amp
Speakers - 7.1 - Ascend Acoustics Sierra-1's with SVS PB-13 Ultra (both piano Black)
...and my new Sammy UN65HU9000 4k set.

 

[jimbee]

Unless you are trying to get a 'tube sound'! That is most easily done with... tubes!

And I do think some music in some systems can sound 'better' through a tube amp.

-ERD50

I see your smiley. A tube sound (distortion) can make sense for something like a guitar amplifier (sound production). It doesn't make as much sense for sound reproduction.

Sounding 'better' is subjective, and some people do prefer the distortion provided by tubes. I think proper sound system design means the amplifier is audibly transparent as possible, within design, operational, and cost limits. The sound is preferably modified via equalization, speaker positioning and room acoustics. Not everyone agrees...

 

[Music Lover]

I buy the cheapest "thick" gauges I can at monoprice.com.

For digital connection, cables all identical, they work or they dont [some anal forum member will quote this and refute technical reasons no one can actually hear or see]

For analog, if you are really worried, go with XLR balanced connections and be done with it.

Next 1st world problem, Please.


FWIW - I run an Onkyo Pro PR-SC885P on top of a Emotiva LMA-1 Amp
Speakers - 7.1 - Ascend Acoustics Sierra-1's with SVS PB-13 Ultra (both piano Black)
...and my new Sammy UN65HU9000 4k set.

Monprice for the win. The only thing that expensive cables do better than cheaper good quality cables is empy your wallet faster. It's all snake oil.

 

[ggbutcher]

I've got a particular burr up my nether regions regarding "audiophile" Ethernet cables. A bit is a bit, and the difference between 0 and 1 signals on a LAN is significant enough to punch through a lot of interference. Now, if your LAN cable is ratty enough to cause dropped Ethernet frames, what you'll hear in an audio stream are actual interruptions, not some subtle variation in tone. So, you do want decent, complete, and propery shielded copper (Cat 5, 6) between all connections, but you don't have to pay thousands of dollars to get it.

 

[gauss]

Aren't high end audio cables akin to designer product in other sectors? I am talking about the wire itself (I can see value in premium connectors).

The designer product functions the same as a nominal product but it is all about conveying prestige to either yourself or others? You are paying for an intangible.

-gauss

 

[ArkTinkerer]

Aren't high end audio cables akin to designer product in other sectors? I am talking about the wire itself (I can see value in premium connectors).

The designer product functions the same as a nominal product but it is all about conveying prestige to either yourself or others? You are paying for an intangible.

-gauss

There are some where you do get tangible benefits. There are flat cables so thin you can stick them to the walls, add a layer of joint compound or texture paint and the cable is invisible. Some of the heavy cables really do look cool. Others have heavier/better insulator jackets that will take some abuse. There are outdoor rated cables, mainly intended for pros, that take lots of abuse and stay flexible even at low temperatures--just the thing for that outdoor concert in winter!

 

[ampeep]

I used to be a skeptic, however you might not notice a difference if your system is not up to it. My first receiver was a Kenwood, which wasn't that great. Followed it up with a NAD receiver and then an Arcam integrated amp.

My first cassette deck that sounded any good was a Nakamichi 480, which had a great transport & heads. First CD player was a Yamaha, which wasn't bad. Ended up with an Arcam 7 CD player that had an upgraded D/A converter from an Arcam 8.

Used Monster speaker cables which made an improvement. Later, got some Monster 500 interconnects ($50/pr) which sounded better than the generics. Finally got some Kimber PBJ interconnects ($75/pr). My CD player has two sets of RCA outputs, so I could connect the Monster and Kimber interconnects simultaneously

The Monsters are darker, with a lot more bass (almost like someone turned up the bass control) - the Kimbers have a much more open and airy sound with much more detail.

 

[Koolau]

I love music but claim no "super powers" when it comes to sound. What I have noticed is that the right speaker (aka the one that sounds best to me) is the single most important part of any component system. Having said that, I'm sure there are those here who can indeed tell subtle differences in sound based on "quality" of such things as cables. I am not one of those folks so YMMV.

 

[gauss]

There are some where you do get tangible benefits. There are flat cables so thin you can stick them to the walls, add a layer of joint compound or texture paint and the cable is invisible. Some of the heavy cables really do look cool. Others have heavier/better insulator jackets that will take some abuse. There are outdoor rated cables, mainly intended for pros, that take lots of abuse and stay flexible even at low temperatures--just the thing for that outdoor concert in winter!

Good point - there may be many other product attributes of value beside the ability to pass the electrons faithfully.

 

[Music Lover]

People who buy expensive speaker cables are starting with a predetermined position that they are "better", so of course they will claim to hear an improvement. Yet, that claim has never been proven in a blind A/B test. Speaker cables move electrons from point A to point B...nothing more and nothing less. A decent quality cable of sufficient gauge with good connectors is all that is required.

 

[Al18]

Ethernet, TOSLINK and HDMI all transmit a digital signal. These cables are all rated to a specific spec - in the case of ethernet it's Category 5, 5e, 6, etc. Assuming the cables are all terminated properly during manufacture - there no difference about their performance, all should work perfectly. Save your money and buy inexpensive cables. I like monoprice.com and Amazon's house brand cables.

Speaker cables transfer an analog signal, so wire gauge, insulation and termination will have an affect on the signal. How much is debated, and is affected by how much power is going thru the cables. I use 18 gauge lamp cord for all of my currently connected systems.

 

[HFWR]

Seems to me that line-level signal cables would be more sensitive to whatever mysterious gremlins are lurking about, since a small "distortion" or interference will make up a larger portion of a 1v signal.

 

[Animorph]

Ethernet, TOSLINK and HDMI all transmit a digital signal. These cables are all rated to a specific spec - in the case of ethernet it's Category 5, 5e, 6, etc. Assuming the cables are all terminated properly during manufacture - there no difference about their performance, all should work perfectly. Save your money and buy inexpensive cables. I like monoprice.com and Amazon's house brand cables.

Speaker cables transfer an analog signal, so wire gauge, insulation and termination will have an affect on the signal. How much is debated, and is affected by how much power is going thru the cables. I use 18 gauge lamp cord for all of my currently connected systems.

Jitter was always a problem with digital audio signals. The clock at the receiving end was regenerated from the digital transitions. Crappy analog performance, with slow digital transitions, would create a big jitter problem with the regenerated clock. Measurable and audible. Eventually, at least most of the audiophile gear got pretty good at regenerating the clock without objectionable jitter. Audio over HDMI was still climbing this learning curve and was a step backward. Cable could have some effect on that, but i don't know of any specific testing. It's always way more complicated than it seems.

I was happy to listen for cable differences and pay if it made an improvement for me. I did have some favorite (reasonably priced) RCA line interconnects, but never heard a big difference in the speaker cables I tried. Now that I have tinnitus I can be really cheap!

 

[ArkTinkerer]

My CD player has two sets of RCA outputs, so I could connect the Monster and Kimber interconnects simultaneously

The Monsters are darker, with a lot more bass (almost like someone turned up the bass control) - the Kimbers have a much more open and airy sound with much more detail.

I wouldn't read too much into that. The components used in audio equipment have very large tolerances. 5% resistors and 20% capacitors. If you buy really good parts you still have 1% resistors and 10% capacitors and almost no one does that. So your audio inputs will have significant variation even on the same device. Actually huge compared to the variation in cabling.

 

[meierlde]

Jitter was always a problem with digital audio signals. The clock at the receiving end was regenerated from the digital transitions. Crappy analog performance, with slow digital transitions, would create a big jitter problem with the regenerated clock. Measurable and audible. Eventually, at least most of the audiophile gear got pretty good at regenerating the clock without objectionable jitter. Audio over HDMI was still climbing this learning curve and was a step backward. Cable could have some effect on that, but i don't know of any specific testing. It's always way more complicated than it seems.

I was happy to listen for cable differences and pay if it made an improvement for me. I did have some favorite (reasonably priced) RCA line interconnects, but never heard a big difference in the speaker cables I tried. Now that I have tinnitus I can be really cheap!

Of course this does suggest the quality of the sound card can make a difference.USB sound cards vary from $2 to $80 at least and possibly more. One would expect that those with good ears could hear the difference. A higher quality card would one expect also have more frequency stabilization thus less jitter.

 

[ERD50]

People who buy expensive speaker cables are starting with a predetermined position that they are "better", so of course they will claim to hear an improvement. ...

I agree that this is a major factor. But an expensive cable still might be better than a basic good quality cable. But I am skeptical.

I wouldn't read too much into that. The components used in audio equipment have very large tolerances. 5% resistors and 20% capacitors. If you buy really good parts you still have 1% resistors and 10% capacitors and almost no one does that. So your audio inputs will have significant variation even on the same device. Actually huge compared to the variation in cabling.

Agreed. Other variations are likely to be much larger than good versus 'super' cables.

Jitter was always a problem with digital audio signals. The clock at the receiving end was regenerated from the digital transitions. Crappy analog performance, with slow digital transitions, would create a big jitter problem with the regenerated clock. Measurable and audible. Eventually, at least most of the audiophile gear got pretty good at regenerating the clock without objectionable jitter. ...

OK, and it has been a long time since I researched this or did the math, but...

in the real world, how much difference in jitter can we attribute to a good quality basic cable, versus a big $$$ 'premium' cable? The math can be done to predict the distortion components of that jitter delta. Is it in the range of even being possibly audible?

And if the answer is yes, then I really don't think it is that hard to design a stable regenerated clock that would sync to the source. If you do that, any jitter within the error band would be regenerated accurately, so it just wouldn't matter. So if jitter is a problem, it seems any decent quality DAC should resolve it with a solid regenerated clock.

Is there more to it than that?

-ERD50

 

[meierlde]

On jitter assume a 100 mbits/sec cable That runs at a 4 bit by 25 mhz signal rate. Giving a pulse length of about .00000004 sec. or about 40 nano seconds. Assuming a jitter at that rate the frequency of the jitter would be well above the audio range and get lost in the sound card D/A converter. For wireless G you have a 20 mhz bandwith giving bit durations of about the same duration (actually .00000005 sec) Again way above human hearing. There are problems with motion control with jitter at the microsecond level, but since digitial audio is typically sampled at 44k that should not be audible on audio.

 

[ampeep]

i wondered about the big difference between how the two sets of cables sounded, so I switched the connections. With different audio outputs, the difference remained between Monster vs. Kimber.

Also had my wife & friends listen to the cables and they also noticed the difference.

 

[M Paquette]

in the real world, how much difference in jitter can we attribute to a good quality basic cable, versus a big $$$ 'premium' cable? The math can be done to predict the distortion components of that jitter delta. Is it in the range of even being possibly audible?

And if the answer is yes, then I really don't think it is that hard to design a stable regenerated clock that would sync to the source. If you do that, any jitter within the error band would be regenerated accurately, so it just wouldn't matter. So if jitter is a problem, it seems any decent quality DAC should resolve it with a solid regenerated clock.

Is there more to it than that?

-ERD50

Heh, heh. Yeah. The clock that's regenerated from the data is the DATA CLOCK, used to recover encoded bits from the link level stream. It's not the clock that goes to the DAC. See, what goes over that HDMI audio line, TOSLINK, or other digital audio interconnect is not just bits of digitized sound. The audio data bits are framed, formed into packets or blocks which also include metadata.

For example, those TOSLINK optical fiber interconnects follow IEC-60958, which in turn carries audio using AES3 protocol. (identical in protocol, but not signal levels to S/PDIF). The protocol treats audio in blocks. Each block of digital audio is presented as 192 consecutive frames. Each frame includes metadata that the receiver will collate to get the description for that block. The frames are broken into subframes, each with 32 time slots, each slot with two symbols. These represent one bit of one channel, or a synchronization preamble. The different time slots are used for different purposes, including things like synchronization, auxiliary samples, the audio samples of course, validity markers, user data, the channel status, and a parity flag for error detection.

The receiving hardware has to receive all the time slots for a frame, and all the little frames for one block to get all the metadata for that block. It needs all the metadata to know just what to do with that block. This means that there is a one block (or more) sized buffer on the receive side that has to be filled before the receive hardware starts sending the data to a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC).

There may be many nanoseconds of jitter on the interconnect, but that's not normally enough to interfere with the receiver decoding process and filling the receiving buffer. If there is too much jitter or other interference, the AES decode logic detects that, will flag the condition, and won't fill the buffer with anything.

Jitter on a digital audio interconnect either has no effect, or will result in silence from a decent design, or repeated playing of the last buffer of data in a really bad design. (Yeah, there's a $10,000 sooperdooper amplifier that did this...)

Of course, people are entitled to their own opinions. They just aren't entitled to their own facts.

 

[Nodak]

There has been only one time that different cables made a noticeable difference on my McIntosh system. When I bought the equipment in 1972 I used extension cord for my speaker wires. several years later I found a set of Monster speaker wires at a moving sale for $10. When I hooked them up there was an immediate improvement in bass response of the speakers. The Monster cable is very heavy compared to the 18 guage zip cord I had been using.

 

[ERD50]

There has been only one time that different cables made a noticeable difference on my McIntosh system. When I bought the equipment in 1972 I used extension cord for my speaker wires. several years later I found a set of Monster speaker wires at a moving sale for $10. When I hooked them up there was an immediate improvement in bass response of the speakers. The Monster cable is very heavy compared to the 18 gauge zip cord I had been using.

Yes, 18 gauge wire is really small. If you had a 15' foot run from amp to speakers, that would be 30' of wire, and that would be about 0.2 ohms, not insignificant at all with 8 ohm speakers, and speaker impedance can drop much farther at certain frequencies. A dip to 2 ohms for example (extreme, but not unheard of), means you are losing 9.09 % of the signal to the wire!

I'll assume that the Monster cable is far thicker gauge (they actually don't list the gauge as part of their marketing smoke/mirrors about using bundles of multiple gauge wire together). It turns out I actually have Monster Cable on my speakers (I forgot!) - I didn't buy it for the name, in fact, I would have avoided it because I hate hype. But I think I got it cheap, it is thick, and very flexible, and came with nice connectors, so I went for it. As close as I can measure through the clear insulation, it looks to be ~ 4 mm dia, so ~ 6 gauge, and that would be 0.125 ohms for 30'. About 1/16th of what 18 ga provides. I think it would be reasonable to detect an audible difference between them.

I used to be a skeptic, ..... with an Arcam 7 CD player that had an upgraded D/A converter from an Arcam 8.

Used Monster speaker cables which made an improvement. Later, got some Monster 500 interconnects ($50/pr) which sounded better than the generics. Finally got some Kimber PBJ interconnects ($75/pr). My CD player has two sets of RCA outputs, so I could connect the Monster and Kimber interconnects simultaneously

The Monsters are darker, with a lot more bass (almost like someone turned up the bass control) - the Kimbers have a much more open and airy sound with much more detail.

i wondered about the big difference between how the two sets of cables sounded, so I switched the connections. With different audio outputs, the difference remained between Monster vs. Kimber.

Also had my wife & friends listen to the cables and they also noticed the difference.

Are these differences reliably detected in blind tests, and can they identify which is which? Often, friends will tell you what you want to hear.

And if there is a real difference so great that it actually sounds like turning up the bass control, it should be easy to measure the difference with a cheap voltmeter and a test tone (easy to generate from a computer if you don't have another source or test CD - or DL them from the internet). And if that's the case, it is just R, L, C, easy to reproduce with a cheap discrete component (or combination). Then it comes down to what do you want it to sound like - take your pick!

And if the answer is yes, then I really don't think it is that hard to design a stable regenerated clock that would sync to the source. If you do that, any jitter within the error band would be regenerated accurately, so it just wouldn't matter. So if jitter is a problem, it seems any decent quality DAC should resolve it with a solid regenerated clock.

Is there more to it than that?

-ERD50

Heh, heh. Yeah. ... The audio data bits are framed, formed into packets or blocks which also include metadata.
....

There may be many nanoseconds of jitter on the interconnect, but that's not normally enough to interfere with the receiver decoding process and filling the receiving buffer. If there is too much jitter or other interference, the AES decode logic detects that, will flag the condition, and won't fill the buffer with anything.

Jitter on a digital audio interconnect either has no effect, or will result in silence from a decent design ....

Of course, people are entitled to their own opinions. They just aren't entitled to their own facts.

Thanks for that detailed response. Just to make sure I decoded all that correctly, let me paraphrase it: I oversimplified it by just talking about clocks and data. The data is put together in blocks with some supporting data, and this gets decoded at the receiving end.

Bottom line, extreme jitter at the interconnect may result in failure (silence in a good design). Lesser levels of jitter just have no effect whatsoever, the data is reconstructed, there is no physical difference to 'hear'.

-ERD50

 

[Animorph]

So HDMI audio is asynchronous? If the DAC clock isn't synchronous with the data clock, then there has to be some way to make sure the buffer doesn't become empty or overflow due to clock speed differences. A high-quality DAC clock would have been great back in the CD days, but the bits just streamed out of the CD player at their own rate. You had to use the data clock or get really fancy.

Reviewers hated HDMI audio originally, and jitter via basic receivers was one culprit still mentioned, but that's about when my tinnitus started so I don't have an opinion on HDMI versus digital coax and have to take their word for it.

 

[ERD50]

OK, this should clear things up:

-ERD50