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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".


Or is it maybe just you dismissing tested evidence because it didn't follow your own sense of how a test should be completed?

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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.


How many interconnects have you tried? I'm sorry to say that $10-20 for an interconnect means the manufacture has to be able to build it out for $2-4 (need to build in profit for manufacture, distributors, dealers, plus marketing and misc overhead costs), that's what about a whole 2 minutes of man hours to insure a quality product? So tell me how good of a product you can make for that money? Could you even build your own for that money?

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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.


JITTER, your post here reads like you're taking a whole bunch of stuff you read off the net, and kind of assembling it together. Because if you were 100% up on your digital audio trivia, you would know that there is also regular non-digital information sent along with the bits. Have you ever measured a digital coax cable, specifically one of your $10-20 models? Did it measure out to full spec? Did you still get quality in that price range?

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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


The good ol' ABX test, where are the specs of the test? How was the ABX box hooked up? A test of 7 listeners is pretty much as far from conclusive as you can get. And if you read the results, 50% of the time somebody heard a difference...so while inconclusive data, it's still far from 0%.

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


I suppose that's why Dunlavy now sells $500 speaker cables and $200 interconnects.

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


Call the company in question and get their side of the story. Or do you just blindly follow one side of a story?

As you mentioned, the wire debate will never end. There will always be people who believe and those that don't. So I'm a believer in cables, and I think you do need to spend more than $10-20 to get a good quality cable, most of the time. There are of course exceptions, but they are going to be few and far between. On the other hand, I don't think you need to spend thousands of dollars on cables either. Go hit AudioAdvisor and do a search on interconnects, and then list them by price. There are lots of good quality interconnects in there for a very reasonable price.

Andrew