Cable Fables

[myou]

A family members works in the digital TV production business and as such, know's a think or two about home theatre equipment. Having recently purchased some components, he readily dismissed the importance of having top end cables in most cases. Excluding better quality speaker cables and the use of an S-video or component video cable, other high end cables are are waste of money and have little to no effect in home, non broadcast uses. Comments?

[Brandon B]

Take it outside.

BB

[JonMarsh]

high end cables are are waste of money and have little to no effect in home, non broadcast uses. Comments?

Well, you know what they say, it all depends.

There's an awful lot of variation in what a "home", non broadcast system is...

In fact, I quite taking broadcast anything seriously a long, long time ago- haven't even had my Denon tuner hooked up in a couple of years...

OTOH, for example, the balanced interconnects I use right now between my preamp and power amp are clearly the best I've ever had in this position- and the company that developed them went through several iterations (using an outside company (Cardas) as the prime manufacturing vendor) before, in there opinion, they were "right". Now, I'm sure there lots of home systems for which these would be overkill or the benefit not fully realized. But even for my "budget" speakers, the M8 MkIV, (an 8" two way system with HiVi 8" mag/aluminum cone woofer, and Vifa XT25 tweeter) the benefits are clearly audible. And the signatures of a variety of interconnect cables are quite audible on this system; I'm not talking "strainging to descern a difference, either. This isn't to say that one can't find the right connectors and cables to make something pretty good for less bucks, but sometimes pretty good isn't enough.

Then too, it comes down to cost/benefit analysis. Many folks will inherently rebell at spending as much on a good set of interconnects as on a reasonable midrange DAC. I didn't do that lightly, but after evaluation, I felt they were worthwhile.

This is one of those topics that seems to inspire a lot of "spirited discussion", sometimes/often degenerating into heated acrimony, due to the divergence of opinions on this topic.

I think it's just best for everyone to do what suits them, and to not turn this into a matter of "audio religion", to where you feel you have to convert others to your point of view.

Beyond that, I'd probably just better close out on this- and just say, do what makes you happy, and fits in with what YOU hear on your system. Most places will let you borrow and evaluate cables over the weekend, so you shouldn't have to buy without knowing what you're getting into.

~Jon

[David Meek]

Yes, they CAN have a difference, IMO - other people will argue differently. I think improvements can be had up to a certain level, but above that very ambiguous point, a lot of the ultra-expensive whiz-bang cables are "snake oil".

Getting back to the point though, to me, it depends on several things including:

the acuity of the person listening to/watching the system
the sensitivity of the system
the cable's design and quality of build - to a point

IOW, a home-theater-in-a-box most likely won't realize much if any increase in performance going from OEM cables to high end (high dollar) ones. Now if the system is a very discerning one, it very well can display differences when its cabling is modified. Notice I didn't say it would sound better, just different. "Better" would be up to the user to determine.

System synergy and user interaction are very subjective things and can generate some of the most heated conversations you'll ever want to encounter.

[David Meek]

Oh, Jon got in ahead of me. . . :

[glangston@socal]

Cable

Do people replace or upgrade the cable from the street to their house? I'm not sure if there are any options but I've never seen any mention of this.

[Andrew Pratt]

glangston@socal I have for my phone lines to get better download speeds via my DSL connection

I think one thing people need to get past is cost. If we can get past the cost factor here and just look at the cables themselves it would remove a lot of issues that typically cloud these discussions. So do I beleive cables can influence the sound? Absolutely! Do I think you need to spend $$$$? No! There's a host of ways to get different sounding (notice I didn't say better) interconnects with many only costing a couple of dollars worth of cable and parts if you know how to crimp or solder. Of course that isn't to say that you can't spend a lot more money on higher priced items that may or may not sound better to you but to argue that higher priced cables don't sound different is to me making the issue more confusing then it needs to be. The real question is do different cables sound/look different? And in my experince I'd say yes on both audio and video cables.

[aud19]

Totally agree, It depends on the listener and the system. A high end system that is already transparent due to the quality of components is more likely to show differences to a person with critical ears. A guys who works on a contruction site with no ear protection and has a HTIB likely won't notice much if any difference with different cabling. Also like the rest of AV, there's the case of diminishing returns. Will a $5000 set of cables sound better than a $500 set of cables on a high end, transparent system. Likely yes. Is it $4500 better sounding...? Well that's pretty damn subjective and takes a lot of things in to consideration like the persons budget and how critical their ears are etc.

Jason

[theMaximus]

I would say you should at least avoid getting lowest quality cables. You don't have to spend a fortune unless you have very high end system and you can definitely tell the difference in sound. If you at least buy mid-end cables made by respected manufacturers, you shouldn't have any problem. I guess the rule of thumb is to spend about 10~15% of price you paid for your components on cables. To say cables make no difference at all seems like extreme generalization and isn't true in most cases.

[ht_addict]

A family members works in the digital TV production business and as such, know's a think or two about home theatre equipment. Having recently purchased some components, he readily dismissed the importance of having top end cables in most cases. Excluding better quality speaker cables and the use of an S-video or component video cable, other high end cables are are waste of money and have little to no effect in home, non broadcast uses. Comments?

I notice you mentioned the word "TV". From personal experience going from composite are cable tv coax to S-video on my Digital cable box did nothing for the picture. Now DVD is a whole different ball game. With a decent DVD player and TV you will notice a huge difference between composite/s-video/component and progressive. Even within the different connections using different cables from more than one manufacturer will exhibit a different picture. More so when using S-video and component. Richer colors, more detail, blacker blacks, etc are what you'll see. Same thing on the audio side, with different cables giving you a different take on bass, soundstage, detail, clarity, etc.

ht_addict