14 Aug
2014
14 Aug
'14
9:38 p.m.
On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 9:10 PM, drlegendre . <drlegendre at gmail.com> wrote:
But here's the thing with audio cables: The
problem is that cables of
various composition, length and construction have a tendency to sound
+different+, each from the other. This inevitably leads to the (actually
reasonable, at this point) belief that one must be "better" than another.
Ignoring whether one cable sounds "better" than another, I'm not
convinced that they even sound different. I'd be very interested to
see results of a proper double-blind study on whether there is
actually any audible difference between cables as you state. Aside
from ultra-crappy unshielded cables, or ultra-long
cables, I very much
doubt that any human can reliably distinguish any two audio
cables.
Years ago a friend gave me a Monster Cable brand HDMI cable, the
package unopened and bearing a Fry's Electronics price sticker for an
ungodly amount of money. I'm not sure why he had purchased such a
thing. The marketing copy on the back of the package showed sample
images allegedly from the Monster Cable and a competing low quality
cable, where the Monster image was clear and beautiful, and the
competing image looked like extremely bad OTA television reception,
with ghosting, white noise, color phase shift, etc. That is entirely
fraudulent. A bad HDMI cable could certainly cause problems, but
there is no possible way it could cause the sorts of distortions they
were claiming.
While it is less obvious that the claims for expensive audio cables
are fraudulent, the burden of proof that any particular cables are
better than ordinary cables is on the vendor (extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence), and as far as I know none have
actually publisher results of any independent double-blind testing.
They rely on having purchasers that buy into subjective reviews.
Another fraud in the consumer electronics world is some of the
capacitors sold for super-high-power car audio. They claim that they
will sell you a 500F capacitor with only milliohms of ESR. What
they've done is put a high-ESR high-capacitance supercap in parallel
with a low-ESR low-capacitance ceramic capacitor. You get high
capacitance, *or* low ESR, but you don't actually get BOTH at the same
time for a large transient, which is what they want you to believe.
If that actually worked, supercap manufacturers would just put a tiny
ceramic capacitor inside their product at the time of manufacture.