Audiophile cables - brain science...or not?

[Grayson Dere]

Okay, first off, I totally realize this topic on high-end audiophile cables has been beaten to death over and over again but I wanted to start a thread in
a sort of different context. I've read many articles that explain the electrical differences between various cables, whether it be resistance or skin-effect,
but maybe some one could help chime in and perhaps attack this subject from a standpoint of brain science. What I mean by this is if we are hearing positive
and negative effects on the music we play through different cables is it possible that our brains are picking up subtleties in the signal that measurement
devices aren't capable of or picking up things we can't actually hear but become emotional responses due to brain/signal interaction?

Many engineers I've spoken with say an electrical connection is just that, an electrical connection. So, in their expert knowledge, a 6-foot speaker cable no matter what 'mods' has been applied to it won't sound any different than non-modded generic radio shack cable. I like to play devil's advocate so let's say the engineers are wrong
and there are definite differences in cables' sound when applied to an audio system.

I appreciate any and all thoughts on the subject : )

 

[Mark C Flick]

I side with the engineers, I don't believe different cables make a difference in sound unless something is wrong with them. No scientific evidence or anything, "I" just can't hear a difference. I don't have the best hearing, many years of trap shooting, USMC and hunting. Not saying that you or others can't discern a difference but I certainly cannot but I am open to objective facts that show they can make a difference.

 

[Grayson Dere]

It's a fascinating topic that never stops to amaze me in how others can perceive cable sound differences.

There is an audio showroom that I have high respect for and the owner did a A/B swap comparison between using a power strip and no power strip with an amp connected to it. Every time he plugged in the amp to the power strip he claimed the timing in the music drastically changed for the worse...pianos sounded 'off' and drums didn't sound realistic anymore. When the said amp was plugged directly into the wall A/C outlet he said the instruments came back to reality again. I couldn't hear the slightest darned difference either way...I must be deaf : P

This is the reason why I'm wondering if something else is going on here and not just electrical physics.

 

[Mark C Flick]

So, this is the kind of stuff I find interesting. The reality is that most homes and businesses use something like a 0.68 cent Eaton White 15-Amp Duplex Outlet, certainly nothing special there. And the wiring inside the walls? Usually contractor grade, cheapest stuff that they can use per code. My guess is the power strip had higher quality components than the showroom.

 

[Grayson Dere]

This makes sense, Mark. It also further shows why system synergy is a very important factor in sound quality. Not every expensive tweak will necessarily make the sound better.

 

[travis gidcumb]

Having bought quit a few “high-end” cables over the years and getting caught up in some crazy headphone cable upgrades, I have come to the conclusion that if a person pays 1000 dollars for a cable the buyer will hear a difference because he/she wants to and expects to hear a difference. I always “believed” I could hear a difference, but by scientific standards I probably didn’t.

I eventually come to grips with the fact that high-end cables just look better and are better made and that’s why I liked them. If you can afford 100,000 dollar speakers your not going to want big box store speaker wire running out the back.

So for me it just boiled down to cosmetics and bragging rights in the end. But now, due to budgetary constraints I’ve scaled back to just good quality and low cost cabeling.

 

[tesseract]

People often claim large differences in sound between cables. These large, purported audible differences completely disappear when sight is removed from the listening experience, suggesting that people are listening with their eyes (and wallet) rather than their ears.

At best, any audible differences that might exist are minuscule and totally swamped by room treatments and EQ contributions, contributions that are orders of magnitude greater, with objective measurements that can be correlated with subjective opinions. Money spent on room treatments and room correction software > exotic cables.

 

[tesseract]

It's a fascinating topic that never stops to amaze me in how others can perceive cable sound differences.

There is an audio showroom that I have high respect for and the owner did a A/B swap comparison between using a power strip and no power strip with an amp connected to it. Every time he plugged in the amp to the power strip he claimed the timing in the music drastically changed for the worse...pianos sounded 'off' and drums didn't sound realistic anymore. When the said amp was plugged directly into the wall A/C outlet he said the instruments came back to reality again. I couldn't hear the slightest darned difference either way...I must be deaf : P

This is the reason why I'm wondering if something else is going on here and not just electrical physics.

This is a common tactic employed in demos. It is called expectation bias, instilling the expectation of change whether there is one or not. It is but one cognitive bias that humans are susceptible to. This is why so many audio enthusiasts point to blind testing as a way of discerning differences. With blinded testing controls are put into place and controlling for bias is not found in sighted testing.

 

[travis gidcumb]

Totally agree.

People often claim large differences in sound between cables. These large, purported audible differences completely disappear when sight is removed from the listening experience, suggesting that people are listening with their eyes (and wallet) rather than their ears.

At best, any audible differences that might exist are minuscule and totally swamped by room treatments and EQ contributions, contributions that are orders of magnitude greater, with objective measurements that can be correlated with subjective opinions. Money spent on room treatments and room correction software > exotic cables.

 

[Grayson Dere]

This is a common tactic employed in demos. It is called expectation bias, instilling the expectation of change whether there is one or not. It is but one cognitive bias that humans are susceptible to. This is why so many audio enthusiasts point to blind testing as a way of discerning differences. With blinded testing controls are put into place and controlling for bias is not found in sighted testing.

Blind testing is the best way, I agree. I'll have to dig up an article I once read a couple years ago that actually claimed you cannot successfully perform cable tests using the blind method because your brain will be biased one way or another...fascinating!

 

[tesseract]

Blind testing is the best way, I agree. I'll have to dig up an article I once read a couple years ago that actually claimed you cannot successfully perform cable tests using the blind method because your brain will be biased one way or another...fascinating!

Wow, whoever wrote that article completely misunderstands the fact that controls are meant to lessen bias. Sounds like a biased writer, trying to justify his bias.

 

[Sonnie]

I build most of my own power and speaker cables... they definitely changed depending on the techflex color I wrap them with... amazing stuff. They look completely different... and there is absolutely no doubt I know when they are swapped out... the color gives it away every time.

 

[Grayson Dere]

For the DIY inclined cable makers out there, you too, can own your very own silver strand system cables for a mere fraction of the cost of dealer bought silver cables:

http://www.laventure.net/tourist/cables.htm#materials

 

[AudiocRaver]

Bad cables can introduce noise, can be intermittent. Poor (super cheap) cables might increase hum pick up due to poor shielding. But it is not at all difficult, or expensive, to make a good-enough cable that avoids these obvious problems.

 

[Grayson Dere]

Bad cables can introduce noise, can be intermittent. Poor (super cheap) cables might increase hum pick up due to poor shielding. But it is not at all difficult, or expensive, to make a good-enough cable that avoids these obvious problems.

Absolutely true.

A funny thing occurred a while back that I can attest to. I used to play electric guitar and I had a cheap cable, around 5 bucks, that went from the guitar to the amp. My brother went out to buy some accessories for his own guitar setup and came back with a higher quality $50 cable. Being interested in why the cable would cost so much more I swapped out the $5 cable with the new $50 cable. I really wish I recorded the sound difference because both my brother and I were confused as to why the new cable sounded fuller, ie: the cheap cable made the guitar sound thin when the guitar was strummed across all 6-strings...I can't explain in terms of octaves but it sounded just 'thin.' We unplugged and replugged the cables 4 times over just to make sure we weren't crazy, then threw the cheaper cable in the trash.

Does this mean the cheaper cable might have been distorting due to poor shielding so it wasn't translating the full bandwidth of sound the guitar's pickups were capable of?

 

[ddude003]

Science informs us that metals, gauge, length and connectors/connections all contribute to voltage drop (think resistance)... How that plays out in the various parts of the signal chain may or may not be audible to any given listener with any given system in any given room... Things to consider are how a power cable plays with any given power supply of a source, preamp, amp and/or speaker... And how any amp design may play out to any given speaker design given the above issues with a speaker cable...

We won't touch on Maxwell, Tesla or Faraday ghosts here...

As for the brain... Even if you can not actually hear below 20Hz or above 20kHz your body may still feel the pleasant or unpleasant effects...

 

[AudiocRaver]

A typical guitar pickup is a high impedance device. With that high source impedance, the signal can be very sensitive to cable capacitance, and to other cable characteristics, which can be worse with an inexpensive cable. Plus guitar cables tend to be long - 20 feet? - even if you are right in front of the amp. These might be the cause of the thin sound you encountered.

 

[NBPK402]

I believe it is all capacitance, Inductance, and resistance that make the cables sound different. I also believe that unless your head is in a vice and you hear a difference, your head moved is very likely what happened. Until you have removed the variable of your head moving...you will not know if there is a difference or whether your head moving caused the differences.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

I think we have to be careful when it comes to how we discuss this topic in the sense that people often provide absolutes taken to obsurdity. To say that scientists have shown no differences exist is obsurd, for example. They’ve done nothing of the sort. Rather, we know how to make cables with provide adequate electrical properties to transmit sound without audible alteration and doing so is neither complex nor expensive.

I am a researcher by trade and I specialize in human subject design. While I don’t design cable comparisons, the principles remain the same. The methods we use to test this do not test if something is not true. Instead, we test if we have provided evidence in support of the hypothesis or not, and the hypothesis must be an affirmative hypothesis. We can’t actually test if cables make no difference. We can only fail to prove that cables make a difference. This necessarily leaves open the notion that future research could provide evidence that cables make a difference. A necessary quality of a falsifiable hypothesis.

As for the method we use to prove this, the standard is a double blind testing procedure such as MUSHRA or ABX. We use a statistical method to see if correct discernment or preference is guessing or stimulus informer. Often called due to random chance but that is actually a misnomer. As this is a frequentist statistical method, we are actually testing a null hypothesis that if we repeated this test over and over, we would get the same or a more extreme result for a reason other than that of the hypothesis. That is not random, it very well may have a cause, we just didn’t measure it. They are untested assumptions.

What that means is that scientists and engineers “should” be saying, our understanding of electrical signal transmission suggests an adequate understanding of the optimal means for said signal transmission and no further optimization over simple inexpensive approaches are necessary. Subjective testing using rigerous methods have found no evidence of a correlation between measured differences in cables and a preference nor has it provided evidence of an ability to reliably discern between well designed cables. Future research may find that new cable designs improve sound, but currently no evidence or hypothesis exist to explain why that would be.

As for the notion that we can hear things we aren’t measuring, absolutely. That is the trick with psychoacoustic research. It isn’t enough to measure objectively not enough to put people through double blind tests. These tests app have assumptions that must be addressed in the hypothesis or the results make little sense. The key is avoid accepting as true something which has no evidence or logical explanation. If we think it’s possible that current tests lack the necessary resolution to detect audible differences then we need to have a hypothesis as to why that would be true. We then need to conduct experiments that explicitly test the hypothesis in a rigorous way that has sufficient resolution.

As for why people think there are differences even though we have so far failed to explain why, well, there is always mass hysteria.

 

[Grayson Dere]

I believe it is all capacitance, Inductance, and resistance that make the cables sound different. I also believe that unless your head is in a vice and you hear a difference, your head moved is very likely what happened. Until you have removed the variable of your head moving...you will not know if there is a difference or whether your head moving caused the differences.

You are correct, Negatron. The audible effects of just moving ones head an inch up or down can have tremendous effects. My Vandersteen Model 2s are extremely sensitive to listener positioning, I've found, and it's sometimes annoying how still I need to be : P

 

[Grayson Dere]

I think we have to be careful when it comes to how we discuss this topic in the sense that people often provide absolutes taken to obsurdity. To say that scientists have shown no differences exist is obsurd, for example. They’ve done nothing of the sort. Rather, we know how to make cables with provide adequate electrical properties to transmit sound without audible alteration and doing so is neither complex nor expensive.

I am a researcher by trade and I specialize in human subject design. While I don’t design cable comparisons, the principles remain the same. The methods we use to test this do not test if something is not true. Instead, we test if we have provided evidence in support of the hypothesis or not, and the hypothesis must be an affirmative hypothesis. We can’t actually test if cables make no difference. We can only fail to prove that cables make a difference. This necessarily leaves open the notion that future research could provide evidence that cables make a difference. A necessary quality of a falsifiable hypothesis.

As for the method we use to prove this, the standard is a double blind testing procedure such as MUSHRA or ABX. We use a statistical method to see if correct discernment or preference is guessing or stimulus informer. Often called due to random chance but that is actually a misnomer. As this is a frequentist statistical method, we are actually testing a null hypothesis that if we repeated this test over and over, we would get the same or a more extreme result for a reason other than that of the hypothesis. That is not random, it very well may have a cause, we just didn’t measure it. They are untested assumptions.

What that means is that scientists and engineers “should” be saying, our understanding of electrical signal transmission suggests an adequate understanding of the optimal means for said signal transmission and no further optimization over simple inexpensive approaches are necessary. Subjective testing using rigerous methods have found no evidence of a correlation between measured differences in cables and a preference nor has it provided evidence of an ability to reliably discern between well designed cables. Future research may find that new cable designs improve sound, but currently no evidence or hypothesis exist to explain why that would be.

As for the notion that we can hear things we aren’t measuring, absolutely. That is the trick with psychoacoustic research. It isn’t enough to measure objectively not enough to put people through double blind tests. These tests app have assumptions that must be addressed in the hypothesis or the results make little sense. The key is avoid accepting as true something which has no evidence or logical explanation. If we think it’s possible that current tests lack the necessary resolution to detect audible differences then we need to have a hypothesis as to why that would be true. We then need to conduct experiments that explicitly test the hypothesis in a rigorous way that has sufficient resolution.

As for why people think there are differences even though we have so far failed to explain why, well, there is always mass hysteria.

This is an excellent write-up, Matthew. Mass hysteria is VERY prevalent in the audio hobby. Funny thing, too, why is it mostly end-users I find spending gobs of money on supposed audio-tweaks and not the actual recording studios/engineers that make the magic happen. I've never once read about Hans Zimmer touting about $$$$ cables : )

 

[Matthew J Poes]

This is an excellent write-up, Matthew. Mass hysteria is VERY prevalent in the audio hobby. Funny thing, too, why is it mostly end-users I find spending gobs of money on supposed audio-tweaks and not the actual recording studios/engineers that make the magic happen. I've never once read about Hans Zimmer touting about $$$$ cables : )

Eh...they can be just as silly. Even about cables.

Ask @DanDan, I believe he’s seen it too.

A number of studies looking at the mixing environment has shown that’s plenty of studios are operating under pretty horrific conditions. Sub-par speakers setup in a sub-par room and eqed until it sounded good to the half-deaf mix engineer. I certainly think things are better, especially today, but still problematic.

Toole refers to the uncertainty around this as the circle of confusion and it’s a real head trip when you give it some thought.

For every really good and knowledgeable mix engineer there are still 10 terrible ones who hold onto old myths and legends inaccurately and mix under these faulty assumptions.

I’m still amazed how many people I see over on some the studio forums talking about their favorite classic monitors, many of which are probably horrible and very likely ruining otherwise good mixes.

How many people have heard about the great and legendary Urei studio monitors. Often held as one of the greatest studio monitors ever made. More neutral and revealing than any before or since.

Accept...it’s not true. Once put under the scrutiny of Harman’s double blind testing and anechoic measurements it failed miserably. It was the lowest scoring speaker in the history of their testing for perceived sound quality and it measures terrible.

Look at it!

 

[Grayson Dere]

Eh...they can be just as silly. Even about cables.

Ask @DanDan, I believe he’s seen it too.

A number of studies looking at the mixing environment has shown that’s plenty of studios are operating under pretty horrific conditions. Sub-par speakers setup in a sub-par room and eqed until it sounded good to the half-deaf mix engineer. I certainly think things are better, especially today, but still problematic.

Toole refers to the uncertainty around this as the circle of confusion and it’s a real head trip when you give it some thought.

For every really good and knowledgeable mix engineer there are still 10 terrible ones who hold onto old myths and legends inaccurately and mix under these faulty assumptions.

I’m still amazed how many people I see over on some the studio forums talking about their favorite classic monitors, many of which are probably horrible and very likely ruining otherwise good mixes.

How many people have heard about the great and legendary Urei studio monitors. Often held as one of the greatest studio monitors ever made. More neutral and revealing than any before or since.

Accept...it’s not true. Once put under the scrutiny of Harman’s double blind testing and anechoic measurements it failed miserably. It was the lowest scoring speaker in the history of their testing for perceived sound quality and it measures terrible.

Look at it!
View attachment 11438

YIKES! that frequency response! I will definitely read up on those Urei monitors...I'm curious as to how those even became 'legendary.'

I stand corrected regarding mixing studio/engineers not being finicky or absurd when it comes to equipment..I always had the assumption that 'Pros' would undoubtedly be only concerned with
using nothing but the state of the art in recording practices/gear and studio space setup.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

YIKES! that frequency response! I will definitely read up on those Urei monitors...I'm curious as to how those even became 'legendary.'

I stand corrected regarding mixing studio/engineers not being finicky or absurd when it comes to equipment..I always had the assumption that 'Pros' would undoubtedly be only concerned with
using nothing but the state of the art in recording practices/gear and studio space setup.

I don’t really know a lot about their history. I wanted a pair as a kid because of the stories i had heard. I had a friend who had a person studio and he talked about finding a pair for his far field monitors. I can also say as an outside observer, Harman bought Urei, the speaker was tested, Urei was quietly put to sleep. I can only assume they were unimpressed with their investment.

 

[DanDan]

Worth remembering that Popular Music is mostly a Fashion thing....... This results in the Producers following every current fad, constantly insecure.
Word got out that Bob Clearmountain used the Yamaha NS10 for Mixing his hugely successful global hits. Apparently he also blocked the tweeters with Loo Paper. Many wanted to know what brand!
Yamaha Toilet Roll became widely used....... LOL. But the little speakers blew up in the deadened power hungry studio CR. So Yamaha increased the power handling from 15W (afaik) to 50. The original NS10 was the entry level model in a great range, ending up with the legendary NS1000. It was low powered, very affordable, designed to be used 'Bookshelf'.
I tested a pair recently, the sealed woofer still does very clean 30Hz, albeit quietly. A Bookshelf or Floor, Corner, location will take advantage of this extended tight LF. The tweeter is above the woofer, normal vertical two way orientation. Conversely the higher powered 'Studio' Version was usually used horizontally, ruining the Stereo picture. Fashion eh? The sound had a pronounced mid, with pretty horrible HF. Yamaha sold gazillions of them. Myths were invented.....'A Standard Reference, same in every CR' 'Make something sound OK to good on these and it will sound amazing everywhere else.' Fashion eh? The Urie were indeed horrible. Compounding this to the extreme, many CR's were voiced flat on axis. i.e. 6-10dB Tilted opposite to the rest of the listening world. Indeed the world's currently most Fashionable Studio Designer, vehemently, aggressively even, promotes such a response to this day in his basically Anechoic copies of Newell and Hidley. There are many many more examples of appalling sound becoming hugely successful. Vinyl for instance.....;-) The SE Reflexion Filter seen in hundreds of thousands of Studios. The Stone Age sounding Beats Headphones. Fashion eh?

My Reference Trax.
Enjoy DD