The thing that bothers me most about interconnect discussions, and what drives me crazy about people and companies who champion expensive speaker and interconnect cable - is the total lack of any testable evidence supporting opinions or products. The most compelling proof given is "I heard it".

Although I dont have a problem with the opinion that a well constructed $10 - $20 cable might be a bit better than a $2.50 radioshack special, anything beyond that I'm losing respect for you.

The biggest laugh (next to "burn-in" - not even going to touch that one) is people who claim wonderful increases in audio quality .. in areas such as "sound stage" "warmth" etc. when upgrading their digital audio interconnects. The only thing travelling through there is a digital datastream. the ONLY possible improvement I could see would be if you were experiencing skips in your audio due to a cable SO poor that you were dropping data along the way. I once read about a guy who sent his ac-3 signal through a coathanger to a hugely expensive dolby digital decoder that had an error counter on it .. that counted a whopping 0 errors over several hours.


When turning to the internet for answers, it seems the only sites or studies that offer any actual scientific or otherwise verifiable comparisons all come to the same conclusion .. interconnects are the biggest hoax / scam going.

Here's a link to a double blind study comparing stuff like $1000 speaker cable vs 16guage zipcord and expensive interconnects vs $2.50 rca cables.
http://www.oakland.edu/~djcarlst/abx_wire.htm

heres a post from John Dunlavy (Dunlavy Audio Labs) on the subject:
http://www.verber.com/mark/cables.html

nice story about interconnect company refusing to take part in any actual scientific testing:
http://www.vxm.com/21R.64.html

finally, if you want to read a bunch more, check out http://2eyespy.tripod.com/myaudioandhometheaterhomepage/id3.html

It has the link to the coathanger test i mentioned above, but it seems to be down.

I'm not looking for an argument, as it is obvious those who believe in this subject will not have their stance swayed - I just wanted to get it off my chest. Also I'm not much for checking over my typing/spelling, so I apologize in advance.

Happy listening.

- pink