hermanv - regarding: "Speaker cable blind listening tests"

[E-Stat]

Still I agree, $7,000 is straining credulity.

Absolutely, yet I have an audio reviewer friend who is currently listening to the Nordost Odin cables which fall into that ridiculous price range. He claims there is a difference, but it is hard to imagine how they are better than the already excellent Valhallas. The perfect match for your $400k system!

rw

[Feanor]

I'm as guilty as most for being suckered in to expensive cables. Cables can and do sound different. The question is, how much of a difference? The answer is; not much. Audiophiles, or middle-aged men with nothing better to do, are a perfect target as the sucker brigade. I have spent probably $6k on cables for my system, and quite frankly, I now have realized or admitted to myself that it was an utterly stupid waste of money. This level of crackpottery puts us, as a consumer group, way out on the lunatic fringe. As always, the sensible and right approach is to pick the middle ground. You can by a pair of interconnects for $150-$250 that will sound as good as any $7,500 interconnect. If there are any differences they will be small and you will have to listen hard for them. The sucker will spend the $7,500. The smart one will buy the $150-$250 interconnects. If you want to spend lots on audio, then at least spend it on components and speakers where there is a modecum of cost to value ratio.

I have a pair of speakers that I have yet to hear bested (in fact they've bested most everything I've heard, and I've heard many of the best). They are wired throughout with professional studio-grade ultra pure oxygen free copper - not silver (although siver is reputed to be the best conductor) or some other weird hyper-expensive alloy. In any concert you've attended, ever, they use sensible tour-grade UPOFC for their cabling. Have you ever heard JBL Hartsfields or 4350 studio monitors?. These are detail machines. As compared to the ultra pure copper cables of today, they use what could be considered lamp cord. In other words, all this hyper-expensive esoteric stuff (and nonsense) is un-neccessary to acheive high performance and if you think otherwise, then you must know something the best sound engineers in the world don't. Unless you want to burn money, don't throw it away on hyper-expensive cables.

I definitely agree that cable and (especially) interconnect differences are small. Granted, for a poor person like me, $150-$250 interconnects are on the high end my scale. (My mid-range is Blue Jeans and my low-end are Parts Express house brand.)

On the other hand $7500 is mid-range for some people. One can spend upwards of $35,000 for, say, Transparent Opus speaker cables. You've got to be crazy-rich to justify that.