Hifi buffs...

[Robert]

I'm sorry - this is a sort of rant. It annoys me seeing people going out and spending STUPID money on cables...especially when they're DIGITAL! WTF! Even speaker cables which are decent are going to make such a small difference it's untrue. Then it's "omfg can you hear the difference..it sounds so much better" - no dude it sounds better because you are conning yourself into believing that £100 cable is worth it. Then it's..."make sure those speakers are positioned correctly...get a ruler out and get someone in to check the acoustics of the room" - whilst I agree positioning can be important...I find it hard to believe that decent kit could sound any better by positioning it mm perfect, get them a decent way apart and facing the same way = win. Then there's the AV type..."I've just spent £90 on a HDMI cable" - you do know a £5 would do exactly the same job - "Oh no the difference in PQ is stunning...so much clearer".


It seriously gets me. It gets to the point where differences in hardware just cannot be heard by the human ear...and the changes become so tiny, but still you get people screaming from the roof tops about how their krell amp can do XR$DX or it sounds "richer" or "fuller" I mean come on...they've invented their own language for christ's sake!

I say:

No more than £500 on an amp
No more than £10 on cables
No more than £300 on a CD player

Anyway...I'm probably totally wrong, but still

[Howard]

You're right about the cables, but wrong about the equipment. Pricey equipment will always sound better than budget equipment, and it's basically never ending. Unless it's Bose. Ew.


You need to buy yourself some gold plated optical cables I think

[Robert]

Originally Posted by Howard

You need to buy yourself some gold plated optical cables I think

Hahahaha! Quality.

Well...I say anything around £500 is going to sound superb.

[Taz]

I used to have a HiFi system based on a Linn Sondek turntable. My speaker cables alone cost more than £2000! They were specialist SonicLink cables, the speakers were tri-amped and tri-wired. The whole system was insured separately for £12,000. The speakers were Linn Kabers and required an annual service from Linn, so I had to ship them to Scotland every year!

When I eventually got a CD player it was just a transport with separate outboard DAC. All the interconnections used Michelin gold-plated phono plugs. The stylus on the turntable cost £500 (it was a moving coil cartridge).

Of course, it sounded absolutely perfect...to me.

[pr0p4g4nd4]

If your spending £500+ on an amp (therefore about the same with speakers) you honestly might want to get a slightly more expensive and thicker cable and probably bi-wire the amp & speakers. No more than £100 on cables I'd say (including bi-wire).

Originally Posted by Taz

I used to have a HiFi system based on a Linn Sondek turntable. My speaker cables alone cost more than £2000! They were specialist SonicLink cables, the speakers were tri-amped and tri-wired. The whole system was insured separately for £12,000. The speakers were Linn Kabers and required an annual service from Linn, so I had to ship them to Scotland every year!

When I eventually got a CD player it was just a transport with separate outboard DAC. All the interconnections used Michelin gold-plated phono plugs. The stylus on the turntable cost £500 (it was a moving coil cartridge).

Of course, it sounded absolutely perfect...to me.

Unless you have amazing ears (which even only a small percent of true audiophiles have) the differences are negligable once you pass the £1500 mark I've found. I think most expensive hi-fi setups are based on the placebo effect.

[unrealrocks]

Trust me, decent quality gear sounds very different. I've recently left the budget arena by getting some B&W DM640i speakers, and they sound brilliant. Although day in day out I get to use Genelec and ADAM monitors worth well over £10k each and they sound so much better! As it gets more expensive you do spend more in order to get higher quality but depends how much you want to spend or what you want to use it for.

One of my lecturers swears by decent cables (interconnects at least) and he said he'd lend me a pair of Nordorst interconnets, so I shall be able to judge for myself if they really make much difference

[99Flake]

Whilst you have a point on the digital cable side of things I would disagree on speaker cable. Whilst I would never advocate spending £10 per metre on speaker cable, spending £3-4 per metre to get decent, thick and shielded cable will make a huge difference over the thin standard stuff, same goes for any analogue interconnect. A £20 phono cable that is thick and well built will outperform a horrible supplied cable and will last for years.

And I would agree with the others on the equipment. I have a £500 Denon amp and a £250 Cambridge Audio Azur 640c CD player. I don't use the Denon to actually send the sound to the speakers, instead I have a pair of Rotel power amps that run in bridged mode, one for each speaker. These cost over £500 each when new (I got the pair for £250 second hand) and blow the Denon out of the water for sound quality.

Going higher and my dad has a £2200 Linn Ikimi CD player, Quad amp and a pair of £4000 Wilson Benesch speakers. This setup sounds so good you can't help but sit and listen as it picks detail out of a cd you have never heard before.

So as for your rant - no never pay for a digital cable (digital is NOT sound until it make it into a DAC somewhere) but spend a bit on other cables. And better equipment does make a difference.

[Robert]

I still don't agree on the cables...aslong as they are correctly wired the difference is going to be so negligible it's untrue. I'm not saying buy some tatty old cable from a second hand shop, rather some decent cable which will do the job fine.

Edit:

Atm i have a naim nait 3 amp
B&W 601 S3s
soon a CD player

So I have some good kit...I think maybe a newer amp and I'd be set.

[Taz]

I would agree that there is a placebo effect happening to some extent but I went through a phase where I actually became obsessed with getting the lasty 0.0000001% of signal out of my records and CD's.

I was spending everything I earnt in the 80's and 90's on HiFi, upgrading constantly to a system that was quite astounding. It got to the point where you could actually hear how bad the original master recordings on CD's were, particularly AAD recordings (which are rare these days).

The speaker cables were impedance matched to the drivers in the Linn Kabers and were directional. There were made out of silver.

I was into suspending mains cables in the air to reduce capacitance, turning off the fluorescent display on the CD player to reduce interference (it was an Arcam Delta CD transport on which you could switch off the display), using sorobothane (special rubber) feet on all system components to reduce vibration, using spikes on my system rack and speakers to reduce vibrations, etc.

I stopped just short of having a separate ring mains wired in my home with gold-plated sockets! I guess it was turning into an obsession and to get the next 0.01% of pure sound extracted from my audio source was becoming exponentially too expensive. It was a classic case of the law of diminishing returns.

[kalniel]

OMG!!!!! Someone's advocating digital?!? Don't you know the performance hit in sampling???!!! </sarcasm>

Analogue all the way

I refuse to go near a hi-end hifi setup - I'm just about okay with my JCV T1 micro and I know that if I listen to something costing 5 grand I'll never be happy again.

But then again I'm into classical and I'm still not all that happy with anything that isn't live and in a good concert hall

[schmunk]

Originally Posted by Taz

The speaker cables were impedance matched to the drivers in the Linn Kabers and were directional. There were made out of silver.

Directional, eh? And how exactly does that work?

[Howard]

The Linn £10/metre cable I'm using on my front speakers is directional

[Taz]

Originally Posted by schmunk

Directional, eh? And how exactly does that work?

This is usually for shielding purposes to reduce distortion.

There's an FAQ here:

http://www.monstercable.com/faqs/

"Will I notice a difference if I hook up my cables in the wrong direction?
You probably will not, but if you think that you are experiencing noise problems, check that they are. Cables are directional for shielding purposes only. Should you not see these arrows, remember that the signal flow should go in the same direction of the print on the cable jacket, reading left to right away from the source (source to destination)"

[Clunk]

i also agree on the cables, but not on the equipment. for years there has been some serious hifi snobbery about cables and its only in very recent times that you will see people that used to spend hundreds and hundreds on cables that are now forced to admit that it is indeed a waste of money and is the 'snake oil' effect.

im all for good kit, i bought some B&W 603 s3 speakers and as part of the deal they threw me in some QED silver anniversary bi-wire stuff (around £10/metre) and i did a blind test with some mains cable from b&q (cost a few pence per foot) and not one of us could tell any difference. yes, the QED stuff looked nice, was solidly built and made of silver, but whats the point if it sounds the same, and who wants to look at speaker cable anyway?

just my 2p/metre.

[schmunk]

Originally Posted by Clunk

just my 2p/metre.

[Syd]

OK, prior to my current occupation I worked for a Nationwide audio specialist for 5 years.
In that time I had a good proportion of every dat to experiment, listen, read, listen and listen. I became slightly obsessional ending up with cables costing as much as the average
joe's HiFi system. Yes I beleive they did make a difference - but not necessarily an improvement, often different cables would change the sound, ie more low end bass response but witout the high end detail. The most obvioudly different I can remember were Van Den Hull carbon based cables which gave beautifully open midrange but were not as controlled and tight as others in their price range.

But why criticise people for what they want to do witht their money, it is no different to the PC Geek (a la moi) who upgrades from Pata to Sata hard drive or Pcie from Agp, people benchmark to see that their system is better, isn't using your ears better?????

I know run a more conservative System nowadays but I still feed My B&W Nautilus speakers with good speaker cable!!!!