At Salon Son & Image, I had my ears opened to
the differences cables can make when Nordost's Bruno de Lorimier demonstrated several of the company's interconnects, from the popular Blue Heaven ($230/1m pair) to the hallowed Valhalla ($5000/1m pair). I wrote:
The change from Blue Heaven to Red Dawn resulted in subtle differences in volume (increased) and transient response (faster). Moving from Red Dawn to Heimdall, I noted a much more obvious change: Bass impact and quality were improved, percussive speed was again increased, and the sound was more immediate overall. Finally, the change from Heimdall to Valhalla was profound: I noted much more air around all of the instruments, Mika's voice was startlingly present, and there was a heartwarming body and truth to the violins that had been previously neglected altogether.
I now, more than ever, believe that cables do make a difference. Great.
It's not that I was some sort of cable skeptic. I've always
believed that cables could make a difference. I just didn't really want to know that they could make such an
extreme difference. But don't get too excited. I'm not going to go all cuckoo searching for the best cables in the world, or anything.
As with the other individual components in my system, I have no problem with settling for less than "the best," so long as the system as a whole makes me happy. And happiness, in this instance, has everything to do with the discovery of great new music. Your system, I believe, should help you enjoy your music and lead you to discovering
more music. And cables—like speakers, amplifiers, and source components—play a role in that process.
So, it's encouraging to see that the folks at Gizmodo, the popular gadget blog,
also believe that cables can make a difference. Gizmodo's Wilson Rothman writes:
While there aren't a lot of parts to audio cables, there are more than you might think, especially on higher-end cables. Their goal, like most wiring, is to transmit an electrical signal from point A to point B without losing signal strength or clarity. But because this is the real world and not fantasy land, there will always be some kind of loss, and when the signal is analog—rather than digital—there's less of an all-or-nothing tradeoff.
Rothman briefly discusses some of the variables in cable design, including resistance, inductance, capacitance, and insulation, and then concludes:
This isn't necessarily a validation of extravagant spending when it comes to speaker cables and interconnects, but it does acknowledge that even skeptics can hear the difference between a $200 speaker cable and a $1000 speaker cable, given the right (generally very expensive) sound system. In fact, many say that higher-end systems reveal the qualitative difference between cheap and high-end cables better than they reveal any variation among various expensive ones. That is, the jump from $20 to $1000 is much more clearly audible than the jump from, say, $2500 to $5000.
I don't know about all that. I bet you could put together a relatively inexpensive system that would work wonders at resolving differences between cables. Just as you might put together a very expensive system that would have nothing at all to say about the matter. It all depends. And notice that during the Nordost demonstration, I heard the biggest difference between the $700/1m pair Heimdall and the $5000/1m pair Valhalla. Meanwhile, Bruno de Lorimier stressed that the
real killer would be the difference between the Valhalla and
the $16,000/1m pair Odin. Of course, the listener can also play a role in all this. I was pleased that I was able to hear differences at all. Pleased more to learn that John Atkinson heard
the same differences. Gaining experience with different components can only be a good thing for any listener.
Ultimately, though, the choice is yours. Personally, at this time in my life, I doubt that any sonic difference would be worth $16,000. It's beyond my means. I've stated my preference for affordable, skinny cables over expensive, ugly ones. And I like to think that if I had the money, I'd spend most of it on new records. But, who knows?
For now, Gizmodo believes. And that's pretty cool. This whole cable controversy has been going on for awhile. Back in 2004, 56% of our online readers who participated in
a survey felt that cables made a big difference, while 12% said all cables sound the same. And way back in 1995 (when I was a senior in high school listening to
Experimental, Jet Set, Trash, and No Star on a GPX boombox), JA was telling it like it is. In "
Wired!!!", he writes:
I have heard differences between cables ranging from the almost nonexistent to the obvious. The only physical difference between AudioQuest Clear and AudioQuest Sterling speaker cables is the conductor: high-purity copper in the former, high-purity silver in the latter. Yet the improvement in low-frequency definition offered by Sterling is so large that it might almost be audible in a blind test.
Sassy.
