I love seeing this story… it reminds me of 30 years ago when I worked in the telephone industry. Heard about telephone copmanies rolling out service in very very rural areas - running signals over barbed-wire fences because it was too expensive to run dedicated cables. That did degrade the signal, but it worked.
I know it’s a completely different thing entirely, but it just gave me nostalgia remembering hearing about that.
I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.
I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.
But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.
But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.
But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.
Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.
That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.
I’m jealous of people who can’t tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
To be fair, “audiophiles” are morons.
To be fair, the signal is only going through these suboptimal conductors for a very short distance.
Try wiring up your stereo with 50 feet of bananas, and you might start having problems.
The article isn’t clear on one thing : was it an analog or digital signal ?
The results are entirely unsurprising if the signal was digital. Also, I’d like to see a similar test in an environment with more electrical interference, I think the unshielded materials would fare less well there.
I worked at an online shop for high end audio equipment. It was always both amusing and painful when customers asked about the sound characteristics of various power cables in the price range between $100 and $10,000 that we carried, or the same with USB and optical digital cables. Some came with the firm belief that they needed better power cables to enhance the bass of their setup. They even bought gold plated “audiophile fuses”.
The advantage of good wire is isolating the signal from interference. However, if you aren’t in an electrically noisy environment, anything that can conduct electricity will do just as well.
Something in my computer monitor isn’t shielded and will alert me to a incoming cell phone call a second or two before the phone rings.
Your monitor is like the blinking stickers we used to put on our phones.
Yes my knees creak, why do you ask
Are you implying that gold isolates better from interference than copper?
He’s talking about the electromagnetic shielding in a cable, not the contact-points. Usually a copper mesh sheath housed underneath the outer-most rubbery layer and runs around and along the entire length of the signal-carrying wires inside the cable. Works like a Faraday cage, helps prevent electromagnetic interference from large power sources, other unshielded cables running parallel, or anything else that can generate an electromagnetic field near the cable.
Very important to protect signal integrity, widely used even outside the audiophile world (although there are of course plenty of audiophile gimmicks related to shielding).
Basically, if you have a bunch of live unshielded cables bundled and zip-tied together along with your speaker wire, you’ll definitely hear it. Run the signal through an oscilloscope, and you’ll even see it
Seems like you know what you’re talking about. If I may ask, how do ferrite beads figure into this? Do those actually help protect signal, or is it less effective?
Simply put, both protect against certain types of interference in different ways, and each is effective in ways that the other is not.
Mesh shielding is going to help prevent electrical interference from being introduced via the wire itself from an external source. Like other cables carrying signal and running very near/parallel, or electromagnetic fields generated from other devices, certain electrical components, household appliances, etc.
The ferrite beads protect against radio-frequency interference (RFI) via induction, acting like low-pass filters which attenuate specific bandwidths of very high frequency signals. Essentially, they intercept and absorb high-frequency electrical noise, and convert that energy into a small amount of heat instead of letting it pass through further down the signal path. This kind of interference can be from an external source, or generated internally from the various electronics/components in the signal path (which mesh shielding would do nothing to protect against). They also help dissipate any RFI that the mesh shielding itself may be carrying, so you often see both ferrite beads and mesh/foil shielding, like on laptop chargers or USB cables for example.
But the article is about what material is used as a conductor
Yeah, but the comment you replied to was making a point that the conductor doesn’t really matter if there isn’t any noise present. What makes a good cable has much more to do with proper shielding, because electromagnetic interference is what will muck up your signal, not a lack of gold plated connectors
The benefit of gold is that it doesn’t corrode
As I understand it gold is used as it doesn’t tarnish or corrode - it’s not there to benefit the sound in any way.
Exactly, silver is a better conductor I believe, but tarnishes like copper does
This just shows that bananas and mud are materials for excellent audio equipment. I am looking forward to my gold-plated banana.
I mean yeah, audiophile cables are 100% a rip-off every time. You can spend thousands on a cable without it having any real benefits.
It makes more sense to just buy decent speakers and a decent amp, along with a good audio source (any CD player).
This is about a digital signal right? Cause I’m pretty sure if I add a banana midway into my bass’ pedalboard that I’d be getting a significantly different sound. I’m tempted to try and proof myself wrong tho lmao
This is why I like to get mid level stuff. Once you get past the cheap rubbish it’s all the same imo.
will be converting to bananas tonight, thanks op
The eye opening moments for me were
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Listening to $35 Porta Pro headphones and realizing you don’t need a lot of money for great sound
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ABX testing and realizing I couldn’t tell the difference AT ALL and certainly couldn’t remember the last sound bite well enough to make a real comparison anyway.
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If you can’t hear the difference, don’t pay the difference
