Hi all,

Apologies if this topic had been discussed before, but I'd like to know people's opinions about cables (most notably interconnects and speaker cables). How much of an effect does a cable have on the audio signal?

We've heard stories about how cables can "alter" (notice the quote) the sounds that we hear. Some have described how certain cables can improve the top end, the highs become shimmery, midrange frequencies are more defined, the lows are more detailed, etc. Some even say that certain cables can have effects that are opposite to the above description. Just look at many home audiophile cable reviews and you'll understand what I am saying. All say that with the right cable the component's abilities can be used to its maximum potential.

Is there a merit to this, or is it just snake oil? And what about people who are using home cables to connect their components? To be honest, I am thinking of using Cardas Crosslink interconnects and speakers to hook up my components, because when they were demo-ed sometime ago I heard a significant difference. The presentation became much more real, and the music was sonically more satisfying to hear. But to this day something in the back of my head keeps nagging me, "Did I hear those differences because they were there, or did I hear them because I wanted to, considering it was a set of Cardas cables?"

There are those who say that to get the best sonic presentation you should mix and match cables from different models and/or manufacturers. So cable A can be used for the highs, cable B for mids and cable C for the low frequencies. What is your take regarding this?

I would love to hear opinions about this, and I think it is good for those who are new to this hobby.

Cheers,

Bon

since ur running hx-d2, by all means, invest some decent money on the cables, just remember to use cables especially designed for in-car use, not home use.

i run 4ch + 2ch Monster Cable XLN401 extra low noise interconnects from deck to amps, very nice construction yet very flexible cables indeed.

Ahh these threads always end up turning ugly. I believe there is only so far you can go with build quality. Thats the most important thing to consider when purchasing cables and connectors. Well for me anyway.

I agree with bob - spend a little extra for cables you know won't fall apart but anything extra is like throwing money down the drain.

But then again I've got stupidly expensive cables ($800 for 2x seets of XLR cables) but only because they came free with the rest of my system.

My Take on the matter: in a car, you're going to lose any benefits of ultra high-end cabling (should there be any!) the moment you turn the key.........

Mobile audio has a much higher noise floor than what home audio has to contend with, therefore my assumption is as above: buy good quality that ensures the cables aren't going to be a *weak* point in your system.

Go for the most expensive $5,000 RCA cables you can get your hands on. They will make or break your whole system....

Dont worry about speaker type, mounting, location or amps, just spend up big on RCA's.

You'll definately notice the difference as your driving down the road at 100km.

you can check with a cro the effects of rca cables on an amp. Some cables roll the top end off at 20Khz.

sometimes this can be a desirable effect if you own mbq or focal tweeters :-)

when i swapped from stinger bullet to stinger expert, i noticed that my soundstage became considerably more open, and definatly wider/deeper.
imaging was more precise too.

i've got 100kg of sound deadening in my vehicle, which might help the differences to be noticable.

at the end of the day, for SQ on a budget money should be spent in this order:
speakers
HU
amps
cable

if your budget is unlimited, why not have the best of everything?

p.s. i also compared the 5m bullets to a set of 1m monster 400's (on a home audio system) and there was also a noticable difference there too!

LOL, very nicely put. :hehe:

IMO I would never spend more than $50 to $100 AUD on RCAs.

I believe there are other things that I could spend my money on that woul make more of a difference.

If you have money to burn, why not I spose. :hehe:

On a serious note, i made all of mine from a good grade micrphone type cable with gold connectors and it doesn't seem to have done me any harm. Work out about the same price as buying pre-built ones, but i made mine to exact lengths, in some cases 10cm or less to go from DSP to other devices.

correct me if im wrong but didnt someone win an SQ comp using $5RCAs?? Can't member who but someone might fill me in

it was Cyberpunky who won an SQ comp with cheapo RCA's :wink:

if you can be bothered, just DIY:

http://momentum.soundillusions.net/februar...abrication.html

might not look flash, but will do the job :thumb:

- Stooge007 out

Another thing that might be a puzzle to most: how much should one spend one's money for cables? Is there a guide for this? A number of people say to me that as a start you could spend between 10-15 percent of the total budget in cables, anything more is wasting money. Does that feel right?

If you don't have the budget to get all the cables and you have to choose between the two, which one should you replace first? The interconnecting RCAs or the speaker cables?

Hope you don't mind with these questions of mine, just trying to learn as much as I can.

Cheers,

Bon

PS: As a side note, the Cardas Crosslink that I'm considering can be used for automotive applications according to its website.

Well, I'll be spending well over $15,000 but I wont be spending $1500 or more on cables.

Get good RCA's first would be my recomendation, as cheap RCA's are more likely to fall apart, where as chap speaker wire is just that wire - no connectors etc.

However with that said it's normally easier to change a set of RCA's than it is to swap all your speaker wires - especially if you have soldered them to your speakers.

Ive always said that the best thing about good quality cables is the reliability. Nothing worse than running a bunch of 5 buck cables under your carpets, seats, trim etc then have to do it all again 2 years down the track when they pack up. No need to go overboard, just look for something with solid connectors, thick well insulated jackets and a quality look to the manufacturing.

I got a really good set of cables made for my car that have been there for nearly 10 years and have never, ever given me any grief. That alone was worth the money they cost me.

I did some in house testing on my home system. I bought a set of those "gee whiz aint those pretty" matched speaker cable interconnects from jaycar for about 90 bucks. I didnt hear any difference between them and my old cables which where not that bad really, But as an experiement, I made up a pair of the nastiest cables I could, el cheapo banana plugs and thin crappy figure 8 i had laying around and I heard quite a remarkable difference between them and the jaycar geee whiz ones and I dont have really good home system, just a denon amp and B & W 602's.

it's a long term investment! with amps and hu, you can change at anytime without having to pull up carpets or panels...but with cables, spend decent money on them, do it once and never will you need to change them again.

you mean on RCA's? or on your total cabling bill? cause i would have thought you'd eb using quite a bit of 0 gauge and all sorts of things.

anyway, my speakers and HU total $7000RRP, and my RCA's total about $1000RRP (i think)
total cabling is over $2000
i recon it was worth it.
you're pretty right about the percentage thing,
IMO the better your speakers are, the more benefit you'll get form having better cabling. dearer isn't always better, but dearer often means better quality connections and easier to bend cable as a result.

I had some DNA cheap leads, and I'd get engine noise but it wasn't there all the time. It frustrated me a great deal, and I went to a lot of effort to try get rid of this noise. In the end, what it turned out was the headunit would get a bit warm, heating up the connectors on the rca leads. For some reason they'd induce noise then. If you put your hand behind the headunit, and kind of played with the connector, the noise would go away.
From now on it's decent build quality stuff for me.

I have to say here that alot of people say that cable quality makes no difference because they listen to the guy next door who tried some in his low quality install where of course they wouldn't make a difference.
Still most people still don't understand terms like transparency, delicacy, imaging, slam, dynamics, three dimensional staging, etc, etc and most people really don't even have a reference for what good sound really is like, even in a car. Most people don't care either and are happy to settle with what they have.

Once the system has the basics done well, and you are realistic, there are qualities that better cables can help to promote.
I believe this to the point where I have purchased Monster Cable's XLN speaker and XLN Pro interconnects. Retail value cNZ$2000. But look at the system in my signature and it's relative.

Still, some people do get the rest right and still don't hear a difference...that's fine of course too.

Each to their own.

check out this link, i found it to be an interestin link
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm

IMO its not worth spendings too much on cables, yes don't buy the cheap stuff cuz the connectos will fall apart, cable corrodes etc. But it really depends on whether or not u can hear the difference!

Roger Russel is god.

Well not quiet - but he is one of the people I extend a lot of credit to.

His mini articles about speaker materia,l metal vs silk dome tweeters, and paper vs plastic speaker cones make great reading.

Ok lets get a list of cable manufacturers going

Brands that come to mind are:

Stinger
Street Wires
Monster Cable
Jaycar
Dick Smith
Rockford Fosgate

And how would you guys rate these?
Also another question, what is the difference between platinum connects and gold connects? Any difference in sound quality there?
Platinum more expensive, Gold looks classy

Well jaycar and dicksmith aren't realy brands, they're just retailers of unbranded cable.

To add to the list.

Audio technica
Cannare
ALT (Dynalink)
Tara Labs

Read the article by Roger Russel posted above.

But to save you time I have quoted it below:



From that you can conclude that as long as the connector + cable resistance is less than 5% of the speakers impedance you wan't hear a difference.

Myself personally have used the brands I listed above as well as a Monster cable speaker cables and have never felt that the speaker cables let me down. I currently own a 50 metre roll of 12 guage ATL (Dynalink) speaker cable, which was cheap to buy (sometimng like $1.50 per metre) and compared to the Tara Labs ($8.00 per metre) I cannot hear any difference. And to be honest I will be using the cheaper cable in my SQ install.

Gold and platinum are both only used because they're inert (ie don't oxidise) - both offer conductivity lower than copper. (platinum is actually worse than gold IIRC)

As for cables - i'm yet to be convinced of any differences in non bodgy ones - or to experience a piece of copper with a less than 20KHz bandwidth and some concepts are just plain laughable (ie silver for high frequency components/directional cables/etc yada)

IMO pay for build quality and noise rejection (ie a decent quality twisted pair type) and that should be pretty much it...

my old copper 1c worth

if you listen to your car stereo or watch in-car dvds more than listening to your home stereo, yes by all means get the best cables you can afford.

no matter how much deadening you have on the car, you will still hear some road noise anyway. the benefits of a pair of $1000 RCA will be negligible once you start your engine.

before you decide to lay down some thousand dollar RCAs under the carpet, put on a set of 13" rims along with 75 profile tyres first, take out the pod filter, replace your loud muffler with oem type, then add a resonator whereever there is space for it...oh, also avoid revving your engine over 3000rpm, because that's when the car starts getting loud.

Amps is a grey area, its impossible to prove either way whether amps sound different... cables, however are another matter, it can be easily proven that one cable thats adequately constructed wont sound any different to another adequately constructed cable, and that the only difference you can hear between cables is if one is physically not up to the task asked of it...

In short, you may notice a difference betwenn $5 RCA's and $50 RCA's, but you wont between $50 RCA's and $5000 RCA's in a blind test...

The really, REALLY funny one is when someone tries to convince you to buy a 'high end' digital cable... digital cables only have 2 signal levels... On, or Off... do you know how monumentally incompetant you would have to be to design a cable that COULDNT transmit an On or Off signal properly? :hehe:

Amps and CD Players i'll admit to there being some disagreement on, but high-end multi-hundred-dollar cable is just hilarious really... buy some good $50-$100 RCA's for the construction quality, and spend the extra on better speakers

Have a read of this if you want proof and/or data : http://sound.westhost.com/cables-p3.htm#interconnects

hah, good point!!

it's like choosing between a clear bottled coke and a tinted bottled coke.

x2

This is exactly as I would have explained it, if I could have been arsed typing it out. :hehe:

Me too:

Cardas
Kimber Kable
Transparent Cable
Analysis Plus
Nordost (check out the Valhalla)
Furutech (they've got interesting stuff, check it out: www.furutech.com)
Audioquest
Belden
Vampire Wire (previously used their bi-amp version)
XLO Electric

Plus many more...these are the ones I'm familiar with, if only in name.

Bon

Bah i feel so mass market in my cable knowledge. How come its always harder to find the good quality stuff, why dont these companies advertise more.
Ok I will answer my own question, its probably because they offer the premium stuff that a normal consumer wouldn;t want to spend the money on. Any more suggestions?

Generally because they are a very esoteric type of company that does not require mass marketing as the people who intend on buying it are "in the know" as they are Audiophiles who research their pet subject frantically till they find what thye want.

Also mass marketing of products lessens the products "exclusivity".

I agree...to a certain extent. I've seen ads from some of these cable "boutiques" featured in audio magazines. Bear in mind that these companies made cables for the home audio market, so you will find their ads in home audio magazines more than car audio magazines.

FYI the authorised distributor for Cardas Cable is Audio Definition in NSW. Might wanna ring them up...

Bon

1 more for the list.. the one i'm using in my system.

Sharkwire

website: http://www.sharkwire.nl/en/overview.php

what people generally recommend is to spend the most amount of money on interconnects rather than speaker cables as the signals from interconnects still have stages of amplification to go through and hence any noise picked up here will be amplified. similarly the interconnect between cdp to preamp is more important than preamp to poweramp as it has two stages of amplification to run through. however generally in car audio there is no interconnect between cdp and preamp as the h/u acts as both.

in terms of whether cables make a difference.... just because you hear, or perceive a difference does not mean there IS a difference. it could all be psychological and i dont realli see in any time in the near future a way of quantifying such things as depth of soundstage, dynamics, or "snap". its realli all subjective, so in this sense i say each to their own - i doubt there will be conclusive proof either way to say no there isnt a difference or yes there is.

in terms of car audio as stated above, if there is any difference it wont be heard due to road noise etc etc.

from personal experience, and frm an objective and honest point of view, i beleive cables dont realli play a role at all, and ive heard some realli expensive cables on realli realli expensive systems. with all this talk of cables changing the sound dramatically like a "night and day difference" - this is all hyperbole. id challenge these ppl to a blind ab test and if they couldnt pick the difference straight away then how could they claim such staggering changes?

whats the point of having such a good system if you have to concentrate so hard and strain just to hear minute differences. IMO stop listening to the components.... listen to the music and enjoy.

just my point of view anyways guys

thanks blackrazor for the link

i found it extremely interesting and informative.

the 20khz roll off that i measured was with a few tube pre-amps and power amps, which as stated can be sensitive to cable capacitance if poorly designed. Just like a lot of esoteric hi-end valve gear.

have a look at this section

http://sound.westhost.com/amp-sound.htm

this might explain that my reference home amp and still favorite is a 2400watt rms x2 @ 4ohms power amp that actually is test bench champ in a well known hi-end audio magazine (and for me not very respeceted apart from the good technical measurements)

my car reference is 2x300watts rms and i have yet to try a more powerful amp. Everything i have purchaced has been smaller and has not sounded anywhere as good or as clean as this amp so far in my system.

aaaaah no. here we go again.

i aint gonna get all irate on here (again). its been debated too many times before and everyone has their own thoughts on the matter.

i hear cables. i will spend money on cabling. but i won't spend lots on the stuff. you'll never catch me spending $1000/stereo rca pair. i feel the gains you'll get don't match spending that grand on a better amp or speakers or whatever other component.

i also believe that cables won't make as much a difference to a system's sound as temperature! (e.g a properly warmed-up amp vs a freshly turned-on example).

my home cabling is a match of $80/m van den hul speaker cable and DIY interconnects and the improvements i heard floored me.

having said all that i still cant understand why people have so much trouble believing silver sounds different to copper to gold to mercury to brass....

anyway thats all from me.

d

there is a very good read on www.audioquest.com then go to 'Cable theory'

it diffines what they have found to contribute to better SQ in the grafde of copper, strand diameter ect.

Did anyone pro-wire-SQ actually read that link i posted? The guy used a length of FENCING WIRE, and still measured no electrical differences that were large enough to manifest themselves in the form of diminished SQ.

I'll repeat : Any well built cable will sound the same. Or more accurately, will not audibly colour the signal. If you hear differences between cables, and you're not using $5 cheapies, then what you are hearing is your own psycho-acoustics, because it can be easily proven that the audio waveform has not changed enough to make an audible difference.

I swear if i got some $40 cables, put some nice pretty woven fabric sleeving on them and replaced the heads with some fancy dancy plated ceramic ones, and sold them for $3000 a set, plenty of people would suddenly find that these were magic SQ cables that enhanced the richness, clarity and depth of their music :?

Making it short and sweet:

I spent $600 on custom Audioart cable with Nakamichi heads.
This was then all replaced with $250 worth of Neotech / similar stuff using the same Nakamichi heads. (Take note of gear / system setup as it requires more cabling than normal)

Which sounded better? The cheap stuff.

thats all very well and great! ... but its just another opinion. :roll:

i've witnessed cable tests being performed and the cables measured differently across the 20-20000 range. it wasn't a huge alteration, but present nonetheless, and it wasn't achieved with smoke and mirrors. it was a plain, unbias test between 2 different dielectrics/insulators/shields.

i'm sure this guy with the "fencing wire" is an intelligent man and obviously believes strongly in what he states. i disagree with him entirely. if i saw some credentials of his i might take his writings more seriously. otherwise i think he's just sampled a bit of data and drawn conclusions based on his own bias opinion. :|

blackrazor you are well entitled to your opinion and i respect your beliefs. this debate will rage as long as time keeps moving. many people have performed tests and "therorised" about the impacts it will have on sound.

this fencing wire man's little essay means nothing to me.. but thanks for sharing nonetheless.

d

No-ones saying that cables wont measure differently, they most certainly will, but the differences are so minor as to be inaudible... cable makers come out with scientific snippets about their cables and then claim it will have some effect on some part of the sound, with no understanding or backup to prove the link...

Some people will always buy esoteric cables, good on em, if they have the money to waste then thats their prerogative... if people want to plonk down dollars for some snake oil they are welcome to do so... i personally prefer to know for a fact that my extra 10x as much money on cables is going to make a fundamental difference to sound, and if its not, then i wont bother...

The logic of spending 10 times as much on a product to get a fraction of a hundredth of a percent of a difference just baffles me, it really does... :roll:

My, good responses from everyone here and thank you for your inputs. It's just that many people would engange in discussions (sometimes heated discussions) about head units, speakers, amplifiers and so on but put little thoughts in cables, whether it's an RCA or a speaker cable.

Is it because cables are harder to measure scientifically? Or is it because most cable reviews out there do not succintly explain whether it is worth the advertised price when correlated to the build quality, materials used and performance (scientific and/or sonic)?

Maybe at the end of the day people would like to see solid, unquestionable, almost beyond refute, distinctly measureable even, reason or reasons behind why a certain cable is worth x dollars. If they buy a cable (or a piece of anything) 10x the price of what they already have then it has to perform 10x better. Sounds like utopia, doesn't it? Problem is, utopia is an impossibility...

Cheers,

Bon

PS: Again, many thanks in participating. One thing's for sure, the responses here are generally more civilised than ones one would normally find in US forums.

people will start flaming at you if you start an RCA thread over in the usa...

No, they're probably one of the easiest components to measure scientifically. The problem that is faced is that so much marketing money has been spent on making 'magic' cables people believe a differance exists without any scientific results to back it up.

how do you measure cables scientifically?
And when you measure, are you measuring what you expected to measure?
who can prove that scientific parameters can improve sound quality?

true, you can measure cables scientifically, but you can never measure SQ scientifically? even if cables are of scientifically top quality, they dont definitely give you the best results SQ wise.

yes i agree, the difference in price truly makes you believe that the more expensive is always better. just as if you were a tutor, if you charge 30 bucks an hour, people tend to think that you are crap, but if you charge 50 bucks an hour, people might think you are a good tutor.

also, let's talk about stock turnover, given two brand names aerpro and stinger expert within the same australian car audio market, which brand of RCA cables do you think have higher unit turnover per year? i believe it's aerpro, and for stinger to maintain enough revenue for them to survive, they must increase their sales price and profit margin, so they can earn more money for less units sold. And when you get into mass production, obviously, the more units you make the cheaper it will cost to make each unit, that is another reason why Aerpro sells cables cheaper than Stinger Expert cables.

You are measuring resistance.

0 resistance = no colouration of the sound.

High resistance (5% and greater than speakers Ohm rating) = alterating overall ohm rating of the system which cause a change in the frequiency response of the woffer.

fortresshill32 read the link on Roger Russels findings for a complete explaination.

What else is their in cable that could possible effect sound quality? To quote BlackRazor "pixie dust"???

No there's noting else, all cables do is provide a path for electricity and the only thing they can introduce is resistance, which is why if you use the correct guage cable you will not hear or see any difference between a $1000 12 guage cable and a $5 12 guage speaker cable.

Psychoacoustics is a powerfully thing. You may feel there isn't much hard proof to show expensive cables don't make better SQ but theres even less that shows it does.

i think the main 'scientfic' measurment of cables would be its resistence. the less the better. If u read the boxes of the expensive cables it describes all sorts of fancy things!!! IMO once u get upto a certain quailty the difference would be minimal. also theres the 'human' factor, if u had a $10000 system connected with $2 cables and interconnectors, u'd always be thinking maybe i am not getting the most out of my system, where u'd be feeling alot better if u had $1000 cables connecting it all together. there might not even be a difference between the $2 and $1000 cables, but u might convinvce urself its better!! As we all know, a system is only as good as its weakest link
just thought of this hyperthetical:
u have a $10000 SQ sound system.
2 identical RCA cables,but one marketed, packaged and sold as a budget $20 cable. the other marketed, and sold as a class leading $150 cable. u don't know the 2 were the same cable. which would u buy?
I'd probably buy the $150 one!

yes, if i drive a merc, i will buy a set of $7000 20" brabus chrome rims, not a set of $3000 20" taiwan made chrome rims.

oh, with cables, there is one more you measure: capacitance