More on Cables

I just love when I find an article like this.

And my personal funny cable story:
I just ordered some HDMI cables for work and didn't go though Monoprice (which I use for home) because, well, it's work: I need better cables. So I ordered more costly cables from another website. The cables arrived today all packaged up with the companies logo on the package. Sweet. I opened them up and out dropped the Monoprice packing sticker. The place bought Monoprice cables, marked them up, and sold them back to me. Dohp.

Good story. My company buys almost all of its cable from Monoprice or Blue Jeans cable and they but a lot of cable. Personelly I think Audioquest puts the slither in snake oil. I read a lot of reviews and as soon as I read that a reviewer thinks that they can discern a difference in sound based on a cable, my trust in what that reviewer says from then on is biased negatively. There is nothing worse than lying to yourself.

Happens a lot of times in the software industry, when you buy a "suite" of products from a vendor. The component pieces are often someone else's product. I recall one case where three different companies sold basically the same suite and it turned out each company had made only one of the three components and the other two components came from one of their "competitors". The only real difference was the packaging and the sales forces.

I have M****er HDMI cables only because the AVS division in my company carries them and as an employee I can get them at a heavily discounted price. To the customers, M****er Cable is never discounted. Everything else including interconnects from AVR to 7500 are not from that thug company.

I once met a Professor of Electrical Engineering (this was 20+ years ago...) when I attended a class on noise control (back when I was fresh out of college). He was teaching the class and as I looked at the syllabus, I noticed that his name seemed rather familiar to me, but I couldn't quite place it. Later in the week it dawned on me that I had once read an article that he had written (on cables / speaker wire) for a major mainstream audio publication. I remembered that article because at the time it was published, I was in my senior year of my BSEE, and I loved how he looked at 'the cable' as a transmission line, and applied all salient equations to 'the cable'.

His conclusions were rather well-founded, and in a nutshell what he said was that as long as the cable runs are reasonably short, were mechanically robust, had high % shielding, and not really subjected to strong RF or AC fields, that a garden-variety cable was the same as an esoteric one. That is, there were no sonic benefits to esoteric cables. As far as the induced noise issue, he also (and rightly so) stated that if hum was an issue, that one should consider switching to balanced lines / differential inputs to eliminate those problems. His treatment of the speaker wire issue was similar.

At one of the breaks (in this class) he and I got to talking and I mentioned how great it was to read a piece that addressed cables and de-bunked so many of the myths surrounding them. He asked if I had read the follow-up piece published a few months later in the same magazine. I told him that I had not, but he explained that after the initial piece was written, the Publishers of said magazine were beset with those companies whose esoteric cables lined the back pages of the magazine, demanding a retraction - or all advertising revenues would be pulled from the magazine. He refused to write a retraction but told me how he had to try and smooth things over as he was strongly pressed by the Editor (the Editor should have known what his first article was likely to do to their revenue base, but apparently didn't) to do so. He told them that he would write 'something' in reply.

In his rather short follow-on article, he basically said that he stood by the math behind his analyses but threw the publication and the advertisers a bone by saying that "if you think you hear a difference, then that's all that matters". That was about as far as he was willing to compromise on the matter.

I use that line all the time with people that I know who have spent (literally) hundreds to thousands of dollars on cables, and who tell me how switching to brand XYZ, with cables that have been steeped in yak spit, subjected to a strong magnetic field for 24 hours, and whose jackets are made of a special polymer that better contains the signal have allowed them to hear things they never heard before in their systems. Mind you, so much of this comes from the fact that if you have spent that kind of money...you are going to feel a need to justify such a purchase, so you tend to believe that you hear things that were absent before making the switch to the previously mentioned yak-spit-steeped cables.

I find that interconnects, along with politics and religion, are not topics to be brought up in 'polite conversation'. I learned this lesson the hard way, with friends and family alike...and so now, even when asked for my opinion, I first ask if they are merely contemplating such a purchase, or have alread made one. If the former, I give them my opinion, but if the latter, I simply say "if you think that you hear a difference, then that's all that matters".