Hifi buffs...

[heathster]

Clunk, what I am saying is that the £30 dvd player is poor quality CD audio. Cheap components, poor circuit design and scant regard for audio quality are imposed by its pricing point. The CD audio part is on a chip costing less than $1, it also does the DVD bit too, and as long as it goes from 20Hz to 20kHz, everyone's happy. I'm not saying that it doesn't carry out the functions asked of it, it just does them rather more poorly than a more expensive unit.

You must accept that there are different quality levels in all products, plasma tvs, cars etc... A Kia Pride may get you to the same place as a Lexus, but the ride was horrilble, the engine was underpowered, all because of cost constraints. Everything in the mass market is built to a cost, rather than to a high quality. The low volume companies strive to keep high standards, but quality costs!

[Howard]

It'd be interesting to connect the digital output of a £30 supermarket DVD player (or cheap Ariston CD Player (No offense Alex if you're reading this )) to a DAC, and the same output of a (much) more expensive CD player to a DAC and see how they both compare

[Syd]

...Because your view is that it's sensible to piss away hundreds of pounds on cables that make sod all difference to the sound of your hi-fi. You could be directly responsible for people wasting tens/hundreds of pounds on cables that make no bloody difference. Hence, you are a dangerous troll intent on getting people to waste their hard earned cash on useless crap. That's just my opinion of course.

Rave, I think you must have misread the bit where I suggested people TRY the cables out for themselves to ensure that they would be getting a benefit, NO self respecting decent retailer would object to refunding a set of cables where the customer cannot tell the difference, and Rave I don't know why you are getting quite so aggressive about all this, if others want to discuss this subject and you have nothing constructive to say then I can only suggest you avoid this threadThat's just my opinion of course

[BenW]

From personal experience i do believe that mains cables can make a difference. I went from a 20year old hard wired cable and plug through a daisy chain of extension cables to a single shielded cable with an inline socket on the amp. It did make a difference, could be because the speaker cables run along the mains cable so the shielding makes a difference.

However, i went from a bog standard phono cable to a mark grant cable (Very popular on avforums.com) which is meant to rival cables costing £100s and i noticed no difference

[Rave]

Rave, I think you need to calm down, it's only a piece of cable.

Yeah sorry, I was drunk.

However, I'm not setting my wife up for anything, I was merely informing you that she is a sceptic of hifi hocus pocus, but that she can hear differences between interconnects, much to her surprise.

Yes, but was it a blind test? I can 'hear' the difference when I know what I'm supposedly listening to. In a blind test, I can't. That is my point. I am so confident that nobody can hear a difference in a blind test that I'll happily bet £500 of my cash to that effect. Surprisingly, so far, no takers.

I personally can't see the point of spending £350+ on the latest graphics card to get an extra few fps running 3D Mark, quantifiable maybe, pointless definitely!

A few more frames per second? Not noticeable. Higher res and/or AA/AF in game? Noticeable, and worthwhile. You get a direct, and measureable benefit from spending more on a graphics card. You do not get any benefit from spending more on cables. The real pity, and this is why I get so angry at people advising others to spend out on cables, is that you can easily hear the difference between cheap and expensive speakers. Every hundred quid that gets wasted on cables is a hundred quid that could have been spent on better speakers which will make a big difference. For someone with a pair of B&W Nautiluses, £100 on cables is a drop in the ocean (although still a waste). For someone with £500 midrange speakers it's a big difference.

Here is some further reading:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...opic=45432&hl=
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volum...s-12-2004.html

I have more, which I will add in an edit.

Edit: Here's a classic.

[mcmiller]

A £30 dvd player may try to extract the same 0s &1s, but it's what it does with it that differs. The transport/laser will be nowhere near as good, and will require more error correction, the DAC will be a cheap DVD player on chip. !

actually i wouldnt have thought that the quality of laser would make ne difference with cds, the major difference would be in the quality of the DAC.
Ive seen a few questions asked about DAC & ADC's where ppl wonder what information is being added and removed that shouldnt be, never really bothered to follow it up but i guess with cheap dac's this is probadly a major problem with the dac making error correction mistakes

[iranu]

Are yes - this is one of the classic "debates" along with "Intel are crap, AMD all the way" and "I'd never go Nvidia cos ATi is the best"

There are a number of things that will happen with the cable debate.

1. People who know very little will spout rubbish cos they heard it from a mate/hi-fi mag/shop
2. People will say I've got an x,y,z costing the GDP of a small African country.
3. People will say, "you should go out and buy a hi-fi costing the equivilent GDP of a small African country"
4. Bi-wire /slap forehead
5. People assume that £££ = better audible sound with regards to cable.
6. The thread will degenerate and you'll never get a decent answer.

My cousin used to be a sound engineer for movies and stuff and he took some reference cable from work (£1k+), a bog standard red/white cable (50p) to Richer Sounds (gotta love them) after a sales assistent tried to flog him £90 worth of interconnect. He connected the cables to a £1K system for a blind test with the assistant and guess what, the assistant could NOT tell the difference. (yes I know it's not speaker cable but it's a good example)

My cousin could tell the difference cos he was trained to listen but the difference is tiny and negligible to the casual listener between the 1k+ cable and the 50p cable - it will be even less between a £90 cable and a £30 one.

This tells you 2 things

1. Sales assistants are crap and are there to get you to part with your money and cables are a good easy way to do this - ditto Hi-fi mags whose "journalists" won't get anymore freebies if they just say that they are a waste of money.
2. The cable makes very little difference on a decent system*

*your definition of a decent system is different to everyone elses - some are happy with 10k hi-fi's and a others don't care. see below.

I usually do the Ford Capri / Ferrari test.

If you bought a Ford Capri would you go into a tyre centre and demand they fit the most expensive/best tyres they had?

If you bought a Ferrari would you go into a tyre centre and demand they fit the the cheapest tyres they had?

Of course not. So my advice is to buy some decent, modestly priced mid range cables - be sensible. Not worry about it and enjoy your new Hi-fi.

For those who spend 10k on a system then they are justified in spending large amounts on very high quality cable just as someone who pays £100 for an all in one is going to use the bell wire it came with - see Ford Capri/ Ferrari test

[Howard]

Iranu's post is the most sensible one in this thread. If you've got a decent enough hifi, spend a small (but not tiny) amount on some well made cables that will last. ~£10 on a nice 1 or 2 metre phono interconnect will be fine. And just sit back and forget about them

[mcmiller]

iranu right sales assistants telling you anything so they can make a sale, some of the rubbish ive been told, if they do start telling lies and i know better even if i am interested i just walk away

[heathster]

Rave, I thought as much No problem! I think I'm going to let this one lie now, cables are my least favourite part of a hifi system, and the only good cable is no cable! BTW my favoured cable out of the two I own is the cheapest, it cost me £20 when I worked in a hifi shop.

mcmiller, the laser assembly does make a huge difference to the sound quality. From the quality of the optic, to the motors driving the transport and the control software. If all or any of these are poorly made/implemented, then this will cause the error correction to kick in , thus degading the sound. This is a known fact, and lets face it , there's not much room in a £10-20 manufacturing budget to allow for high quality components. The manufacturers of my CD transport wrote their own transport control software, as the off the shelf Philips stuff allowed for too much mis-tracking and error correction intervention.

Cheers

Heath

[mcmiller]

sorry i should i have wrote much difference rather ne difference, but still the most major part of the cd is the dac this will have the major impact on sound quality rather than laser, lens, tray etc.. and as for the last part about the manufacturers wrote and built there own cd transport that just sounds like a marketting ploy i doubt u could even tell the difference, i guess the only way u could tell is to plug it into a oscilloscope and look at the signal differences

[5lab]

A few more frames per second? Not noticeable. Higher res and/or AA/AF in game? Noticeable, and worthwhile

ok, bit ot here, but *presuming* that higher res and AA/AF are noticable, what about having them on makes it *better*? do you enjoy the gameplay more??

same as a big tv, why is that *better* than a smaller one?

[bigblue]

Not gonna get too involved in this as I'm a hi-fi fan and therefore (gullibly perhaps) believe the price of your cables should rise on a scale with the of the price of the system. If you have a reasonably decent hi-fi dealer then they'll quite happily sort out blind tests for you when buying cables. In fact, most decent places will take back cables from you if you're not hapy with them.

With regard to whether it's "worth it" to buy expensive cables/gear then I guess that varies from person to person. I guess it applies to pretty much anything you buy, not just hi-fi. It just depends what makes you happy, how you justify spending your pennies and what YOU consider value for money.

I think my new amp sounds a few quid better than my old one and thefore I'm happy. My new £60 interconnect sounds better than my £20 one. Less conclusive but bugger it, I'm still happy.

On the other hand, as much as I love cars I don't really feel that my missus new car is better than the (less oomph) one she took for a test drive. Mainly because of the way she drives it If Jenson Button wanted to take it for a spin (slightly doubtful I know) I dare say HE'D prefer the new one but at the same time he'd still think it's a piece of crap compared to what he drives.

And when I was choosing parts for my new PC I went for GT rather than GTX because for me there wasn't enough difference to justify the extra dosh. To a lot of people on here I appreciate this wouldn't be the case. I wouldn't give a monkeys if it benched better, all I was worried about was if I'd see a massive difference when using it. I didn't so I saved a few squid.

On my hifi the price/performance ratio isn't as important. If I spend however much money on it, all that matters is that I get SOME increase. I appreciate that's the way a lot of people are about their PC's/cars/plastic surgery

You pays yer money...

[Syd]

And when I was choosing parts for my new PC I went for GT rather than GTX because for me there wasn't enough difference to justify the extra dosh. To a lot of people on here I appreciate this wouldn't be the case. I wouldn't give a monkeys if it benched better, all I was worried about was if I'd see a massive difference when using it. I didn't so I saved a few squid.
You pays yer money...

Likewise I bought a X1800XT over a XTX as it gave me similar
performance but at half the cost.

I'm sure the XTX benchmarks with better results but I personally am
disinterested in benchmarking, it runs my games at good enough res/fps to make me happy (till the X1999XTXgti comes out )

People come onto Hexus and read mags/websites for advice, from there on it's up to anyone with some intelligence to make up their OWN mind by taking different opinions and views into account, and if it is an expensive purchase by actually getting some 1st hand experience. For example, after reading THIS forum I was pretty dead set on buying a Canon 350D, until I actually went to my local Jessops and found that for me, it felt very wrong in the hand - kinda important!!!!!

Advice is one thing, 1st hand experience another and I can only echo my original opinion which is try before you buy.

[Taz]

If you have a reasonably decent hi-fi dealer then they'll quite happily sort out blind tests for you when buying cables. In fact, most decent places will take back cables from you if you're not hapy with them.

Good point. My HiFi dealer used to loan me equipment and cables for a few hours so I could listen to it in my home. If I was lucky I had the equipment over a whole weekend. If I liked the sound I bought it, if I didn't I returned it. HiFi is also about upgrading, trying to search for the ultimate is faithful sound reproduction. Most people don't start off with a high-end system. It goes through many, many upgrades.

The only real benchmark is if it sounds better to you then it's a worthwhile upgrade.

As for the cost involved, you can draw an analogy with other material goods. For example, should people wear Tag Heur or Breitling watches when a £5 watch will tell the time with similar accuracy? Is it actually worth spending £1,000+ on a watch?

[schmunk]

Those who are trying to draw comparisons between HiFi components and PC components are going about it somewhat wrongly.

Yes, the extra money spent on a more expensive graphics card / CPU / whatever is possibly not particularly well spent, but it should produce a measurable and repeatable difference to the quality of the experience (however small).

I contend that using a £500 HiFi cable over a £10 cable will not produce any measurable difference, as £10 will buy you a 99.99% pure, Oxygen-Free, reasonable gauge copper wire, and that's quite 'transparent' enough for the bandwidth that audible-band audio requires.

The equivalent PC argument would be to suggest that one should buy a £50 IDE cable (or indeed SATA), as it will somehow improve the quality of the data transported from HDD to mobo (never mind the fact that once it hits the mobo it travels along tiny narrow copper threads running in parallel with several other tiny copper threads carrying different data.