if you choose to not believe in differences, that's fine. The listening was based on playing the same music - I'm not into test tones.
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.
Actually, I do believe that there is more to this than our engineer friends say. ...
I do hear a difference between my multistranded and solid core copper wires. Is it real? I dunno but I do like the more 3D soundstage I get with the solid core wire. The vocalist is further out in the room and there is just more distance between the front and the back of the image which creates a pleasant to my ears effect. There is more "there" there. Is it real, is it imagined, don't know ....
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It is definitely more than a change in equalization - some of the changes include imaging. For example, a singer's vocal would seem to be suspended several feet out into the room as compared to coming from between the speakers.
Don't know if such things can be measured....
... I do like the effect of the solid core wires so that's what I use. ...
Is it real, is it imagined, don't know
Well, for many years I believed the result from a test conducted by a learned panel from Stereo Review magazine long ago that concluded that without the shadow of a doubt all amplifiers that have comparable distortion characteristics within a certain power output sound the same. Much latter I discovered it ain't necessarily so. ...
I think that's reasonable. You found what you like, you are satisfied, and that's the whole point. Enjoy!I don't have the means or the knowledge to test my solid core wire vs my stranded wire. I do know which one I prefer so that's the one I use. If the explanation lies in measurable differences in R,C, or L I certainly would not argue the point. ...
On the other hand, If some one were to conduct the test and and the cables tested identically and then the tester tried to convince me that I was not hearing a difference then I would think the tester was full of BS and was not measuring for the correct factors. Same as with the amps.
An old speaker cable article by Nelson Pass explaining the RLC's of cables and interactions with speakers and amps. I remember a lot of articles like this. If you have difficult speakers or amps there could be audible differences among cables. If the speaker and amp are closer to ideal, or the distance is very short, the cable won't make as much difference as long as the resistance is low enough.
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https://passlabs.com/articles/speaker-cables-science-or-snake-oil
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My experience as an audiophile on cables:
- Cheap cable can really effect the sound (quality, volume) negatively...
- Audiophile level cables have subtle differences. ...
Some good info there. Thanks, I recall reading a number of the Nelson Pass articles.
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Now this has me wondering - is there an 'audiophile box' that lets you plug in RLC in different configurations? It would be like a hardwired, simple equalizer. It would provide some frequency shaping, but w/o all the downside of a multi-band EQ.
-ERD50
Can alway try a capacitor, resistor and coil substitution box. Or Make one. Happy experimenting.
Anyone still interested in the original post, there's an update by ARS Tecnica including some double blind testing. The audiophile’s dilemma: strangers can’t identify $340 cables, either [Updated] | Ars Technica
Of course once you go to an external sound card and an usb cable, then the issue of the quality of that cable could emerge.While I'm quite certain that a fancy, $$$ Ethernet cable will provide no audible difference over a basic spec-compliant cable, this test is pretty deeply flawed (and tests like this are not easy).
It appears they just used the laptop's DAC and audio output to drive some headphones? I did not see any mention of a separate high-end audio DAC and headphone amp. Laptops have decent audio quality outputs (as in 'not bad'), but I'd bet discerning listeners would detect a difference in quality between a laptop audio output, and a quality external DAC and headphone amp. And you would not need to spend mega-bucks for quality external components, maybe $200? But the laptop components are probably less than $5 total, and a laptop is a very electrically noisy environment with many challenges to great sound (multiple noise sources, clocks, etc, proximity of the noise, difficulty in grounding everything ideally).
It would be easy to make the claim that the noise levels in the internal circuits of a laptop would 'mask' any differences between the cables. I still doubt there is any difference, but this is not a good set up to discern differences. I doubt any true audiophile drives their amp/speakers from the headphone jack of a laptop (I have for convenience and causal listening, but I use a ~ $120 external DAC for my serious listening).
The cable seller claims that this Ethernet cable reduces the noise that can get into the audio circuitry, and that noise can interfere with the audio circuits. Now that claim has some theoretical basis, so I think it would be better to test for that specifically. As a poster in one of those articles mentioned, noise getting into the DAC is not a surprise to the designers. A high quality external DAC will be designed with noise in mind, and they will take steps to mitigate any audible effects. It's a stretch to think that an Ethernet cable with any sort of 'special' attention to noise reduction would make an audible difference in a good design that accounts for this kind of noise, but we could test for that:
My approach would be two separate ABX tests - first with the 'special cable' a constant, but with increasing levels of noise injected into the system. Record the point at which listeners detect an audible difference (and I'd suspect the point where a difference is detected is when they get errors, and the sound mutes - 'golden ears' not required!). Then repeat those tests with noise and a basic cable.
Would you find a difference in noise level rejection between the cables, and are those noise levels likely to be encountered in real life? That would be my test. As I said, this stuff gets involved and is time consuming, and ideally is repeated by different testers and different groups with similar results. That's why I tend to go with logical thinking and track down the stuff I know is an issue (like my room effects), rather than chase questionable issues.
-ERD50
Of course once you go to an external sound card and an usb cable, then the issue of the quality of that cable could emerge. ...
As to the ethernet (and/or wireless connection). it might be possible to compare direct streaming with using network shares to handle the music. If you use network shares then the music comes over in blocks as the player reads the next block of data and then the receiving computer gets that block and presents it to the player. In this mode as far as the player can tell the file looks like a local file. (Indeed a third possible test, a local file vs a networked file, vs streaming). (Although if you watch the net traffic in streaming you see the file buffered into local memory and the net traffic stopping for a while before resuming again).
In any case, if the cable seller is claiming their cable cuts noise that could get into the DAC and affect the audio, isn't that what we should test for? I'm not sure it is relevant whether the data is sent in blocks, gets stored in a buffer in RAM or anything else.
-ERD50
Since the data is buffered into the computer, the sound card gets the data as a dma transfer (memory to memory). If there were jitter on the ethernet cable, or wireless link, it would be absorbed by the buffering process. (Unless you think any ethernet jitter gets preserved in memory).
So the audio data is sent to a buffer and that buffer is loaded to the sound card a bit later. So given how things are done its not clear how ethernet jitter could get to the sound card in the first place given the buffered nature of how things actually work.