This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I thought audio quality was more to do with the source and the destination. If you have a shit needle on a record or a speaker made of wood then its gonna sound like ass.
I never once thought it had anything to do with the cables. Unless they were frayed or damaged in some way.
But i am not an audiophile, i record my own music and mix etc, but never worried about cable quality before.
Even more than the actual contact with the media, the entire system breaks down at the ears. If your ears aren't well-trained, then you don't even know what to listen for. You might think loud bass is good, or booming drums, and never notice that you can't hear any mids.
So in a blind test like this, some people just might prefer a sound that this experiment has little impact on, so they wouldn't be able to notice any differences.
A well-trained ear might be able to detect differences between them, but still not have a real preference. Besides being able to hear all the different frequencies, you have to know what the instruments sound like in real life to know if those frequencies are reproducing accurately. Again, if you don't what it's supposed to sound like, you really don't know if ANY change in components makes a positive or negative difference in the natural sound, you only know the difference relative to your personal preference.
TL;DR: This "experiment" doesn't prove anything. It's just funny.
Exactly this, the cables never mattered. They're the least significant part of an audiophile system and I doubt anyone could tell the difference between a crappy cable and a good quality cable. People get good quality cable for durability rather than sound quality.
As long as its not too crappy. Otherwise you’ll wonder why you’re picking up radio.
Anybody else read the beginning of the title as "Blind taste test"?
The way audiophiles tell sound quality is 99.99% subjectivity and 0.01% objectivity.
You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls
So get the good stuff it’s not sound quality it’s so it lasts
Yeah, but then again normal 230v or 115v electrical wires are not OFC and they outlive you too so even that is questionable.
You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls
Copper wiring is protected from the elements (that is: oxygen) by its insulation. The gauge of the copper wiring is a far greater factor in audio quality than the voodoo science behind OFC.
You don't have to worry about corrosion in your speaker wiring unless your speaker installation is literally in the ocean.
I knew this fucking pineapple was too good to be true
Fun fact: this is where the "banana connector" came from. Before copper was discovered, early humans used bananas for all their audio connections. The name stuck, even though wires are made of metal today.
Additional trivia: The term "banana republic" originates from countries best known for exporting high-end audio equipment back in the day.
"banana split" stems from a failed experiment where scientists tried to split audio frequencies by sticking the connectors into ice cream and running the audio through it
And Bananarama was so named for their high-fidelity recordings which were performed, mixed, and recorded entirely on bananas.
Yup. Failed spectacularly, which is why they went for mixing boards as a backup solution instead.
TIL! It’s fucking bananas that I never knew this.
Bravo
This will now be a standard AI response. Well done.
O noes!
well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
I've got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti... wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
Hoodoo is 3dB better than voodoo according to my tests.
Hoodoo? You do! Do what? Remind me of the babe!
So wait, did they send analoge or digital signals through? Because digital means you could send it through anything and as long as it gets through its the same. The cable only matters when you ARENT using digital signals.
If I read it correctly, it was analog and they found that only the signal amplitude was meaningfully changed, not the quality
Makes sense. As long as the transfer medium isn't highly capacitive or inductive, it doesn't matter as long as you compensate for the loss in signal strength.
..and now I fell into a research rabbit hole regarding mud capacitance.
EDIT: Mud is actually slightly capacitive. Source: "Static Dielectric Constant of Water and Steam", a 1980 journal article by M. Uematsu and E. U. Franck* published in Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data
