Why on earth do speaker wires sound different?

[Nevalti]

..........I'm sure it's possible to construct speaker cables which affect the sound audibly .......

Then I think we are in agreement.

...... but .......... inexpensive cables are perfectly adequate for normal use.

Do you have an abnormal use in mind?

[Dave2002]

Try asking him if he can hear everything he can measure! If he can't, and he most certainly can't, how can he have confidence in his assertion?

Annoyingly, I can frequently see LEDs flashing or occulting (I can't tell which) at a high frequency but most people, apparently, can not. We are all subtly different - thankfully. The ability to see or to hear defects, that others can not, is often more of a curse than a blessing but maybe some of us afflicted folk get more enjoyment from sound.

A => B is False does not imply B=> A is false.

[Beef Oven]

There is , of course, the placebo effect
so (in a Bad Science style) I wonder whether blue speaker leads (wires ? ) sound different to white ones ?

(I once made a sound installation in collaboration with a visual artist who said that he didn't mind what it sounded like
as long as the speaker leads weren't white !)

I suspect he also owned a 'lifestyle' midi-system

Placebo effect!!!?? You trying to cause hi-fi world- war three!!!

4/5 of living in hi-fi world is a placebo effect!

[Nevalti]

... It would be interesting to know if our OP has heard a difference .....

As said above, I have auditioned several cables but have stuck with cheap old Linn K20 (full details above). Yes, I have certainly heard differences but the differences have always been negative. Without boring you with too long a tale, some cables mask fine detail, some take away high frequencies and some reduce dynamics. Another thing to bear in mind is that the cable may well influence the amplifier - I have no understanding of why. I had an AVC KT88 'High End' valve amplifier (a huge bargain by the way) which sounded significantly better with single cable runs rather than bi-wiring. Maybe someone here can explain why - but I can't. It strikes me therefore that any confident advice about speaker cable has to be tempered with consideration of the amplifiers and speakers involved. Naim once refused to guarantee their amps unless you used their cable. Apparently there was a significant, injurious effect on their amps if you used the wrong cable. Fortunately I was never keen on Naim.

..... I can assure anyone reading this that analogue interconnect cables definitely make a difference - sometimes remarkably so.

100% agreed but I have no idea why and I was annoyed to find that it is actually worth spending my hard earned cash on better interconnects.

[Nevalti]

...... 4/5 of living in hi-fi world is a placebo effect!

And 8/10 of statistics are made up on the spot

[Gordon]

"If you can't measure it, you can't hear it". Agree or disagree?

What are ears if not measuring devices? Conversely, if something is audible then surely it is measurable, reliably and consistently? If so it should also be explicable - how do you know what to measure - and that is the part I find intriguing. Much of the "mumbo-jumbo" aspect of subjective audio is that science and experience are not adequately connected, there is aesthetic judgement involved for one thing. That is where some HiFi journalists and pundits fail, in my opinion. Are they not curious to explain? Why should a CD sound "better" at 2AM?? Why do speaker cables sound different - do they, really? Do you mean "better" or just "different"? Is not the listener part of the experiment too? If one hears a difference does it matter?

This whole business of subjective vs objective response to sound quality etc has been going on for decades. The only "reliable" evidence at a personal level is one's own ears and for that there is no experimental control except one's own aural memory, hence my quotes around "reliable". Who knows what other people hear or think they do? If people tell me that they can hear these differences described eg by JLW above then I have to accept it because I have no way of knowing what she is actually hearing, even if I was in the same room. I know from experience of listening with people that claim these things that I can't hear what they tell me they can, in halting words of course because some of these phenomena are hard to describe.

Part of the problem is these halting words: What is a soundstage? What is a "fast" bass? Do you really think that the engineer didn't know what the acoustic sound was in the space and that he never left the control room? Was Kenneth Wilkinson just a cloth eared techie?

Like colour TV, HiFi is an illusion in which the brain constructs an image based on received stimuli. That brain is part of the process and injects its own component of that illusion. Of itself that illusion can be convincingly "real". If influenced by aural memory as well
- eg I have heard a concert in that place and "know" what it sounds like - the illusion gets more complex.

I spent many years in broadcasting and was involved in countless double blind subjective test sessions during research into international standards for audio and video. Such tests have to to be meticulously designed to avoid extraneous and misleading effects eg changing more than one thing at a time. In those tests, that often had Golden Ears in the assessment panels, I know that statistically NONE of them showed any extraordinary ability to disciminate subtle effects and often disagreed about what they had heard anyway. They were better than a random sample of non technical people - but then so they should be.

My "sceptical" approach is not to decry anyone else's experience of what they hear, it is simply born of years of my own experience and a need to explain phenomena rationally. I sometimes wonder if, in this subjective "can't you hear that" world, there is a kind of virility test going on? Some kind of "clique" of people who have convinced themselves that they do hear things - OTOH they maybe do.

[Gordon]

...Naim once refused to guarantee their amps unless you used their cable. Apparently there was a significant, injurious effect on their amps if you used the wrong cable. Fortunately I was never keen on Naim....

What kind of engineer says that!!!? By the same token they should insist on a specific speaker then? Oh! and to be sure we'd better specify the room too, you never know, it may be injurious to the speaker - and what if the mains is a bit dicky.....

[Nevalti]

What kind of engineer says that!!!? By the same token they should insist on a specific speaker then? Oh! and to be sure we'd better specify the room too, you never know, it may be injurious to the speaker - and what if the mains is a bit dicky.....

I made a very quick search and came up with this...

Because noone knows the load of the said cables and if the OP uses an older Naim amp, they can oscillate the amplifier or in the worst case scenario, can damage the amp. ( he should be aware of this )

My memory of the invalidated warranty is probably from around 1980 - at a guess. It is not me making the claim, I am merely reporting what I have read - and largely not understood - hence my original question.

[Gordon]

I made a very quick search and came up with this...


My memory of the invalidated warranty is probably from around 1980 - at a guess. It is not me making the claim, I am merely reporting what I have read - and largely not understood - hence my original question.

I say again, what kind of engineer designs an amp that can oscillate with a feasible load such as that presented by cables and speakers whose impedance has to be controlled to make it sound anywhere near good? It implies a dreadfull phase margin and feedback conditions. Methinks NAIM doth protest too much.

My HiFi friend round the corner here has a NAIM system which he is very pleased with. Despite my telling him of the pitfalls he insists on using very thin speaker cables that must be at least 40 feet long [he lives in a bungalow and his amp is at one end of a long room and the speakers the other - the cable go up into the loft, across and down again]. To my ears the system is harsh sounding with a hard glassy edge to it so string tone is not pleasant. The speakers are some strange Amercian things I've never heard of - normal dynamic moving coil, reflex enclosure on stands. But then he listens to rock music most of the time and hates the sound of the violin!!

Sic transit audio mundi.

[LeMartinPecheur]

what if the mains is a bit dicky.....

When I bought audio mags some 30 years ago there was quite a bit about filtering power supplies to avoid spikes and other nasties. I bought a cheapish device marketed by, I think, Hi-Fi News & Record Review which, always assuming it's doing anything at all, is still doing its stuff on my rural-Cornish mains supply.

Is it still hi-fi orthodoxy that such devices are a good idea? I know it's considerd advisable to protect pooters from mains spikes, which I do, albeit with what appears to be simpler - at least less bulky - technology.

[Gordon]

When I bought audio mags some 30 years ago there was quite a bit about filtering power supplies to avoid spikes and other nasties. I bought a cheapish device marketed by, I think, Hi-Fi News & Record Review which, always assuming it's doing anything at all, is still doing its stuff on my rural-Cornish mains supply.

Is it still hi-fi orthodoxy that such devices are a good idea? I know it's considerd advisable to protect pooters from mains spikes, which I do, albeit with what appears to be simpler - at least less bulky - technology.

Mains filters are a good thing if your supply is subject to disturbances from say local industry etc. Generally though any decent amp should have a properly designed power supply to deal with variations including spikes.

What you can't deal with however is the quality of the earth which is used throughout the audio system as a reference and is common with all the other household stuff like fridges. If that is mucky then its crud gets through. Filtering depends on having a clean earth to dump the crud into. If you have these sorts of earth problems there isn't much to be done except run your system off a battery with an inverter - a silent one of course, such as solar panels your roof [or wind in Cornwall?] - wired independently of the mains. Beware of listening in the dark.

[MrGongGong]

When I made a workspace in the loft it needed a separate power supply anyway
at the time I was doing lots of analogue edits and was constantly interrupted by the fridge etc
so put in a radial as opposed to a ring circuit
no interference and no clicks but not sure if you are allowed to do that these days ?

Most houses are now earthed through a PME down the cable into the house and not with a rod
(or at least that's what I remember when I did a rewire about 10 years ago ...... which would probably be illegal now BUT did give me the opportunity to install contact microphones into the wooden floor where the piano is I guess that's a Clique thing ? )

[Nevalti]

You talk a lot of sense Gordon and I agree with most of what you say. Because of your obvious expertise I am not clear, on some issues, if you are asking a question or raising a subject. I will nevertheless comment on a few points.....

..... if something is audible then surely it is measurable, reliably and consistently?

IF sounds interact in some way within the various parts of the ear structure, and undoubtedly they do, it seems reasonable that what we hear is not necessarily measurable from outside our ears. When CDs first appeared we were told how 'perfect' it was and that we could not possibly hear the discrete 'steps' in the digital wave form. Most of us knew instantly that it was quite awful compared to LPs and very far from perfect. Fortunately it has moved on far enough for most of us now to enjoy it. That initial misinformation was perhaps based on a misunderstanding of what we could hear. If there was a misunderstanding then, should we be more confident now that we know what people can hear.

Why should a CD sound "better" at 2AM??

As someone who has experienced that, I always assumed it was due to mains interference. When I moved to the countryside rather than living next to a Mr Kipling factory everything sounded better. At my old house I always knew when the factory was working.

Why do speaker cables sound different - do they, really? Do you mean "better" or just "different"?

I certainly agree that 'better' may sometimes be simply a preference, maybe it is masking a deficiency somewhere else in the system, but if you are losing information, frequencies or dynamics with some cables, most of us would agree, I think, that the audible and measurable signal degradation makes it a 'worse' cable.

This next bit, I may have misunderstood your intent, if so I apologise in advance....

What is a soundstage?

It is the aural image that a good system will spread out in front of your armchair. A good system will portray a fairly precise 3 dimensional aural image way outside the speakers. Only a poor system will make the sound 'appear' to come from the speakers. Obviously it does come from the speakers, we know that, but your brain tells you something else. That is part of the magic 'realism' and it may be part of the problem of understanding too.

What is a "fast" bass?

I have no idea how it is done but some amplifiers are deliberately engineered to provide sharper, faster sounds. The leading edge of each sound is artificially enhanced which gives an impression of great detail and speed. It can sound extremely impressive for a short period but rapidly becomes infuriatingly artificial. That is what SOME people regard as 'fast'. To me however 'fast' bass should be bass portrayed as naturally as possible. A plucked bass string should sound just like a plucked bass string and not a softened one. My valve amp, mentioned earlier, made some wonderful music but was incapable of providing the 'fast' impact of a plucked bass string. It couldn't make you 'jump' the way a real, live note can. It was OK with new valves but the bass performance quickly dropped off as the valves aged. It still made a lovely comfortable sound but not a realistic one. I don't understand the science but I hope that makes some sense to someone who obviously does.

Do you really think that the engineer didn't know what the acoustic sound was in the space and that he never left the control room?

That's an interesting one. Speakers sound wildly different from one another, more so than any other component. They can't all be getting it 'right'.

HiFi is an illusion in which the brain constructs an image based on received stimuli. That brain is part of the process and injects its own component of that illusion. Of itself that illusion can be convincingly "real".

Yep.

I sometimes wonder if, in this subjective "can't you hear that" world, there is a kind of virility test going on? Some kind of "clique" of people who have convinced themselves that they do hear things - OTOH they maybe do.

I fear that there is a lot of 'influence' involved much of the time. Good salesmen have NLP skills to rival Derren Brown. The problem is that 'differences' can be subtle and even a big difference may go unnoticed if it is not an annoying difference. Listen to an excellent loudspeaker with very different presentation to your own speakers and the difference is immediately apparent. Carry on listening to that very different speaker for only 20 minutes and it is likely to sound so 'normal' that you won't be able to remember what your own speakers sound like. Substitute an inferior speaker and you will hear the shortcomings all the time. I fear that it is largely a matter of what is less annoying than of what actually sounds 'better'.

Sorry about the length but it seemed worth it as I typed

[Gordon]

When I made a workspace in the loft it needed a separate power supply anyway
at the time I was doing lots of analogue edits and was constantly interrupted by the fridge etc
so put in a radial as opposed to a ring circuit
no interference and no clicks but not sure if you are allowed to do that these days ?

Most houses are now earthed through a PME down the cable into the house and not with a rod
(or at least that's what I remember when I did a rewire about 10 years ago ...... which would probably be illegal now BUT did give me the opportunity to install contact microphones into the wooden floor where the piano is I guess that's a Clique thing ? )

I think radials are still allowed, most lighting circuits are radial; provided they are genuine ie taken directly from the consumer unit they avoid the main source of crud which is in the rings. You can take radial spurs off a ring but no more outlets than are already on the ring. If there are earth problems a rod is always helpful - provided you don't have to bore into concrete - but again that depends on earth conductivity in the soil!!! You may have to water the earth pins - but take great care!!!

[gradus]

I've never been convinced by that arguments about speaker cables transforming or destroying 'hi-fidelity' can be resolved, since the sound that pleases is subjective. My neighbour's ancient Dynatron radiogram sounds awful to me but he listens enchanted to R3 and frequently asks me to admire 'the tone'. Its the music really ain't it.