How Much Have You Invested In Cables

Yes, autocorrect took over. Apologies.

An apt one perhaps!

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Some cables do make a huge difference but in order to do so they need to be colour coordinated with your rack.

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:man_facepalming:t2:

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It’s your money and you can do what you like with it. Most people - me especially - have to spend wisely to make this hobby attainable and it angers me greatly that so much of the industry is devoted to peddling such blatant BS.

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Why does it anger you so much if you’re not interested just ignore it move on and enjoy your music.

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Here’s an actual account. At the excellent Signals show quite a few years back the Chord Company were conducting a demo. They had a full Naim system, can’t recall the speakers and they simply swapped out the Naca for Chord Sarum. My late wife who had zero interest in whether a wire made a difference or not, but loved music, went wow. I watched very carefully the volume was not adjusted!

You’ve made your point now retire gracefully.

Regards,

Lindsay

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NacA5 speaker cable.

A Russ Andrews Powerblock as I did not have enough socket points.

Everything else is stock.

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Your post gave me the idea to do A/B Test with super Lumina vs lavender on the CDS3. My son, who has a limited interest in music, said there was a difference but gave his vote to the lavender. He had no clue which was the more expensive cable. I will do the same test tomorrow on him but in reverse order.

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Better to do the swap more than once, and on one or two occasions pretend to swap but don’t. That’s what I do when blind testing, with one of my sons doing the changeover (and if a piece of kit that affects sound level he finds the two different volume control setting first, and resets at each change - and sometimes deliberately making one slightly louder, sometimes the other.)

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I had trouble putting the super lumina back into the amp, so I decided to leave it in and trust my ears. The super lumina is more relaxed, has a warmer sound, zero digital harshness, and has a bigger soundstage than the lavender.
Another reason to trust my ears over expectation bias is that I preferred the lavender over the H-line when I tried it several years ago. However, I had to get the Hi-Line repaired hence my reluctance to keep taking din cables in and out.
Hi-fi is all about trusting what sounds right to you; otherwise, we would all be content having a Sonos system in our living rooms.

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OK let me try this:

Have you ever wondered why manufacturers use measurements and values to market their products…apart from things like cables and racks etc? Like, if cables make a difference so large that human ears can detect it, don’t you think different companies would be demonstrating how their cable measurably out-performs the competition? You know, like they do with SINAD, dynamic range, jitter etc?

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Because it’s magic :wink:

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I’m not saying anything…

what you declare is a great difference for ks-1. I suppose you have kudos speakers. I would be curious to try them with my pmc twenty5 26, as I am already very happy with my WH phanto,

Hi Gruido71, I use my KS-1 with Spendor A7’s which are probably not a million miles away in terms of presentation to PMC so give 'em a shot!

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If taken to extremes, I suspect that all cable arguments get past good sense in one direction or the other.

I am not sure that many manufacturers really focus most of their sales pitches on exactly how a measured improvement contributes a specific amount of improvement in a specific aspect of what a listener will hear, and with good reason. We simply don’t have a complete explanation for how it all works from original data to what you hear in your head.

CD presented a good example of this limitation - some may be too young to remember the bold claim in the early 80s that CDs delivered 'perfect sound forever, but the ‘proof’ that all well-designed CD players will sound the same and offer a better and more credible listening experience than any LP ever can is still widespread, to put it mildly. Many who use their ears to assess what they hear disagree.

In cables, they are so simple that there is a lot less wriggle room than for (say) speakers for those trying to claim that some aspect of the listening experience will be transformed by a measured 0.001% improvement in some aspect, though even in cables you see plenty of pseudo-science that has bold claims with numbers and slides quickly past in what way this can be shown to improve the listening experience.

I reluctantly admitted that some cables were audibly better than (not simply tonally different from) other cables years ago, after subjecting friends to extended ‘blind as I could’ listening tests. I much preferred the smug feeling of superiority (and the certainly of avoiding wasting money) I had when ‘disbelieving in cables’. However, given what we heard, it wouldn’t be very sensible to stick to that view - “When I get new facts, I change my opinion” and all that.

On the other hand, we can all draw the ‘excess’ line where we want, given this level of uncertainty. Personally, I don’t regard (say) Naim A5 speaker cable as a ridiculously expensive product backed only be spurious technical claims, but I suspect I would say that without much evidence about any cable costing 20 times more than A5. Perhaps that shows a prejudice of mine.

Where do you draw the ‘excess’ line, or are you confident that even claims about A5’s sound quality are bogus because your ears say that (for example) the cable that used to operate a door bell really is as good as A5?

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What, so racks don’t make a difference?

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Of course they don’t Dave are you deaf? :joy:

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And all turntables are the same, only mine goes round at 33 and 1/3-er than yours. :grin:

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