Sorry Bill L, I don't mean to pick on personally but your words here are representative of most people who believe they are getting better sound from better cables.

Quote Originally Posted by Bill L
I'll go with your second reason. They don't have to. The cables stand or fall on their own. As do other products whose evaluation relies on sensory perception like colognes, food, art, and fabric softener. To some there is no appreciation for the subtle differences. To others it's a world of difference. Audio is no different. This talk of rampant placebo and obligatory proof is obsessive and, frankly, pompous. Why should the cable companies listen to you?
For some reason, cables are compared to other subjective products like food, wine and art. The reason for this really does escape me other than the obvious possibility in that it makes cables a matter of taste and not engineering design.

Personally, I feel that the type of music, the singer, the tempo, the instrument, and all of the compenents that go into making beautiful sounds are what we should really be discussing. Now there is an area where there are everything from subtle to dramatic differences. Some music is inherently pleasing while other music needs to be appreciated over time to be developed as a taste.

Audio cables are the forks and knives, the china, the wine goblet. We taste food and wine not cutlery and glass.

So perhaps all this bickering about audio cabling is akin to fighting over whether 80/20 silver nickel cutlery makes souffle taste better than 79/21 silver nicklel. I mean really, couldn't we then argue that you wouldn't taste the difference if you were eating beans but surely would if you were eating caviar (caviar has a higher taste resolution)? Yikes, maybe some of us have a tin ear, plugged nose and cotton tongue, not to mention color blind.

...OK, switching gears....

As an engineer, the main impressions I take away from these cable debates are as follows:

1. People tend to think there are a number of significant parameters and factors regarding audio cabling and audio cable engineering that either are not properly measured nor even discovered or understood yet. The type of cabling used and required for home audio is a fraction of a percentage of the variety of cabling used over the entire frequency spectrum. There are many more problems and cable design considerations when transmitting higher frequency and much more complex signals. While I cannot argue that there may be something we are overlooking, this type of logic could be used in any situation to support any claim, regardless of its absurdity.

2. There is a general lack of acknowledgement that there are numerous reasons for a person's audio system to sound different at any given moment in time. This could range from background noise, time of day, mood, exact listening position, rearrangement of furniture (even very minor), volume levels, temperature and humidity and the list just goes on. I realize people don't have the capability nor the desire to properly control all of the factors but engineers have a problem with confirming any type of conclusion without these factors being systematically eliminated as possible causes of a particular change in system sound.

Maybe the solution is to simply buy whatever you can afford, whatever sounds good to and just listen to and discuss the music. Don't try to justify your purchases by citing technobabble or pretending you are certain of the engineering reason why your system sounds so good.

Is that possible?