Stan Williams wrote: "Those home audio guys are really smart or really dummmmb !"
Well, sort of both. My experience has been that many high-end audiophiles are easily pulled into a brinksmanship contest. The one thing that no true-blue audiophile can stand is the idea that somebody else can hear something, and they *can't*. The only thing that approaches that as a motivator for an audiophile is that they all love a good argument...
If you say that a given whoopie-skippy high-zoot wire "unveils the top end", you'll have half of them lining up to agree with you, and half of them lining up to disagree, just for the sheer animal joy of it. Show up with decent measurement equipment and _demonstrate_ that there is no measurable difference, and they'll keep arguing anyway: there is no technical solution possible, because the argument was basically a religious one from the start. This can lead to one hell of a downward spiral. There have been several of these measurethons staged at AES conventions over the years, and the only thing that typically happens is that the audiophiles leave more convinced than ever that measurements are for the birds. They just _know_ thay they're right, just like they _know_ the sun's gonna come up tomorrow.
Companies that make consumer audio gear know this, and their marketers exploit this to the fullest. Take a so-so product, hype the hell out of it as something that does something so esoteric that it can't possibly be measured by our current technology, get three Respected Golden Ears to agree with you (and you can always find a few, because nobody wants to be The One Who Couldn't Hear It), quadruple the price, and rake in the cash.
Now, hear me out before you start pitching tomatoes. I'm the first to admit that there really are certain cables that sound better than others in specific applications. No question about it! However, I depart from the audiophile brigade in one important way: my experience has been that when this happens, it is always due to some very traceable (and _measurable_, and _explainable_!) issues that are present for the setup when one cable is used, and absent for another.
Lower resistance/low-inductance speaker wire can definitely sound better, if it allows the woofer to be controlled more accurately. Fact. This is also entirely dependent on the speaker and amp designs: one size does not fit all. Nothing makes me laugh more than seeing 80 feet of $2/foot cable connecting a 20W Radio Shack amp to a $70 pair of Radio Shack speakers...
Lower capacitance interconnect cable will almost always sound better in a high impedance, single ended setup (simply by reducing the effect of the parasitic lowpass filter created by the driving impedance of the source and the shunt capacitance of the cable). Fact. No news there: the high-zoot guitar cables should all be under 20pf/ft...
Long runs of balanced pairs in 600ohm service may sound better if they are both low-capacitance and low-resistance (low resistance to reduce the series attentuation of the long run, and low capacitance to prevent the load from becoming quite so reactive, which tends to destabilize the output driver). Fact. The telephone company has known this for years, since they tried to drive the first long lines with the earliest vacuum-tube amps, and got uncontrollable oscillations for their troubles: that's a first-year EE circuit design case study.
See? I said it! There absolutely *are* cases where you can hear the wire. But after some point (which happens at a much lower price than the marketers like to admit), you stop being able to measure a difference, and a lot of the high-zoot stuff is way the hell beyond that point. I'm quite convinced that these audiophile guys are hearing the voices of the angels, a bunch of the time.
Directionality of *speaker wire*? Floobydust. Show me the AES paper on it, and how they measured the difference, and the supporting math. I wanna see the peer-reviewed proof. Maxwell's equations don't scare me...
However, even I recognize that I'm getting old and senile. If you can hear the wire, more power to you: far be it from me to tell you that you can't! I've given up, myself. I find that I can't hear it unless it introduces a measurable phase shift, increases distortion measurably, or screws with the frequency response in a measurable way for the system as a whole.
I posted a couple of articles in the thread
https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=15482 that kind of touch on my experiences on this, so I'll shut up now.
Really smart or really dumb? Damned if I know: you make the call. Speaking solely for myself, I think that the audiophile community has been identified as easy marks. Caveat freakin' emptor!
