There is significant disagreement in the audio community about whether cables make an audible difference in sound quality. Some of this disagreement comes from the point of view that it is well known that there are not or cannot be differences. To wit, in reply to observed differences between cables:
"This is the kind of black magic that makes me shake my head and cry."
"I, like many others, am convinced you can't hear a difference"
"There is NO WAY that substituting one (working) cable for another will influence sound quality. Period."
Many posters cite "evidence" for these views. Almost always, the admissible evidence is indicated to be either blind ABX listening tests or instrumented data. It got me to wondering what the published evidence of this form actually looks like (we publish plenty of straight-ahead observational listening tests here, so I'm leaving that out of this picture).
The purpose of this thread is to catalog instrumented tests and blind observational comparisons of cables that have been published.
The rules:
1. Please post only links to tests or (if not in violation of copyrights) actual test data.
2. Please be sure state what was tested and when
3. No comments, except to articulate details of the test method that you are posting (if you wish to comment, start a separate discussion thread)
Thanks.
Instrumented test of three different speaker cables into 8 ohm load and two different loudspeakers:
http://www.audiodesignline.com/howto/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201807390
Date: 2002
(Thanks to ScottB for pointing this one out to me)
CEO and Editorial Director, Nextscreen LLC
Tom are you being devil's advocate or are you for real?
I'm for real, if by that you mean "I'd like to build up a repository of data about what people can and cannot hear". As indicated above, I think it would also be useful to have a cache of some instrumented testing of cables (e.g. standard electrical parametric testing). The latter doesn't really address what we can hear, but if there are no instrumented differences you have to wonder what causes different sonics (something we're not measuring?) or be skeptical of claims of sonic differences.
CEO and Editorial Director, Nextscreen LLC
here something interesting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlDaWRd8URg
Note: requires knowledge of French.