"Premium" Speaker Cable- - My Family's Test

[easyeyes]

I know that this topic has been discussed on many occasions and I'm familiar with both sides of the argument. Now, that I've spent a few dollars of my own money, I can say that I have noticed the difference between the spool speaker cable and "premium" cable.

My cables arrived yesterday, hooked my right KLF 30 with the IXOS 6003 Gamma wire and the left speaker remained connected with the off the shelf OFC wire. The sound from the IXOS connected speaker was louder, more pronounced and better sounding. The bass was tighter and the mids/highs were more apparent. I actually had to readjust my settings after final connection. Actually, the other side sounded rather muffled. My wife nor my kids saw me change the one wire. After connection, I asked my wife and oldest son (7 years old)to stand in the middle of the speakers, about 10 ft apart, an see if there was a difference.

Well, both of them thought something was wrong with the left speaker, they said that the right one sounded clearer and louder. I know that some of you will not change your minds and argue to the contrary. IMO the $50 bucks that I just spent was a good investment. I too was and still am skeptical to a point when it comes to spending "high dollar" amounts on speaker cable. To me, this was a good investment and guess what, my system sounded even better when I connected the IXOS to the other speaker.

[TBrennan]

Doesn't signify much, left and right speakers can sound very different just because of the room. Switching between left and right tells little, better you should test with one speaker or both.

[Prana-Bindu]

Yeah, dude: whatever difference you heard is unreliable. You need to be sure everything in the room is symmetrical, that the line perpendicular and equally dividing the line between the two speakers lines up exactly with the center of gravity of the tidal forces at work in your particular geographic locality, that you use the same ear to listen to the difference, that you're wearing the same clothes, eat the same meals, crap at the exact same times and that you freeze time to prevent ear and other equipment aging during the conduct of the test. No one expects the Scientific Method!!

After all, just because 1+1 appears to equal 2, doesn't mean that 1+1=2....

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May the bridges we burn light our way....

[Ray Garrison]

Prana-Bindu,

You forgot that he must be sitting in The Comfy Chair!

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Music is art

Audio is engineering

Ray's Music System

[dougdrake2]

Oh no, not the Comfy Chair!!!

I guess the test might have some validity if there was no perceived difference between left and right before the cable change, and now there is a perceived difference after the cable change (assuming nothing else was changed in the room).

Doug

[justin_tx_16]

why not put the speakers nixt to each other and just sit infront to examin the sound? might not give you the real HT sound output but could get a close up comparison.

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-justin

I am an amateur, if it is professional;

ProMedia help you want email Amy or call her toll free @ 1-888-554-5665

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[TheEAR]

Cables(speaker wire)does not improve the performance much.I agree with this.

However amps do,preamps and CD players(DAC) will change the sound.

Speakers have the greatest impact by far.

Cables change the sound,very very little.You need a heck of a revealing system and you must know the music and sound to hear any thing more.

TheEAR(s) Now theears

[lowe byrrd]

Wire, o.k. The change may be relatively small but it's definitely noticeable with my humble system. My 11 yr. old daughter can easily hear changes to the system, wires and otherwise, for better or worse. Though not like changing a speaker, the little things all add up, esp. with the Klipsches on duty.

[Ray Garrison]

lowe byrrd,

I have to step in here and point out that many people feel that, unless these tests are done under double blind level matched conditions, they are meaningless. To have any credibility at all, you have to take the following steps:

1) Acquire another 11 year old female human.

2) Dress her identically to your daugher. Any cosmetic difference, such as hair color or skin hue, should be reduced to something approaching a 99.6% visual acuity confidence level.

3) Expose both girls to the system and allow them to formulate their own independent opinions as to whether or not the cables make a difference.

4) Have a disinterested third party randomly select one of the girls for commentary.

5) When the chosen girl tells you that she damn well does hear a difference and she doesn't care what anyone says, document whether this girl is (a) your daughter, ( the control, or © cannot be identified.

6) Tabulate results.

7) Anything with less than a six sigma confidence level of daughter recognition indicates that you cannot be certain beyond experimental error whether, in fact, YOUR daughter actually heard a difference.

I'm sorry, it's late, my two year old had a bad night, I'm outta here...

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Music is art

Audio is engineering

Ray's Music System

[T2K]

What a joke! The guy says he spent $50 and got an improvement in his system.He probably doesn't give a shiite whether you or I believe him or not.He simply offered his non-scientific results for our benefit.

Congrats on the tweek easyeyes.But think of the 4 CD's you could have bought that would have sounded inferior on your audio system without said tweek.Methinks your son's hearing is not affected by some BS he read in a magazine.

And thanks for the post.

Keen ear Keith

[jdm56]

EE,

Of course you heard a difference with the cable switch. EVERYTHING makes a difference. Geez, everybody knows that.

Oh yeah, and just in case you didn't know, tubes sound better than solid state, vinyl LP's sound better than CD's, and horn speakers are horribly colored...unless of course they are made in Europe, look like a dismembered tuba, and cost twenty-thousand dollars. I can't prove any of this, but just take my word for it, because I have spent a whole lot of money on my gear; probably more than you make in two years, so that makes me an expert.

Yours Truly,

President Al Gore

[TBrennan]

Prana---You seek to divert my arguement by making ridiculous statements and implying that I hold such views, that is a fallacy and fails to deal with my arguement that 2 identical speakers on opposite sides of the room can sound very different, you ridicule the notion but offer no counter. Play a mono source through your rig and switch back and forth, you'll probably hear a difference. Don't you think the room effects the sound?

[Kevin S]

What surprises me, is that on a board for devotees of Klipsch loudspeakers, a company founded by a man who was one of the biggest opponents and debunkers of un-scientific, unverifiable, unrepeatable claims of differences in audio components, has so many people who post who absolutely refuse to believe that scientific, verifiable methods should be used to confirm what can or cannot be heard. I just wish that in the smilies legends there was an image of PWK's famous "bullshit" pin that he wore under his lapel. It would save those of us who do believe claims of audible differences should be scientically proven, verifiable and repeatable a lot of typing.

I'm not saying that people don't hear what they say they hear. Just that until it can be proven, verified and repeated in a scientific fashion, it should not be passed off to others as fact.

BTW, it is a verifiable, repeatable, scientically proven fact that in listening tests, volume differences as low as a couple of tenths of a decibel between speakers will cause the overwhelming majority of people to say that the louder speaker sounds "better". It is also a fact that virtually no pair of loudspeakers are matched to much less than 1/2 to 1 db per pair. Therefore it has long been known that the best way to test for differences in the sound of components is to use a single mono loudspeaker kept at exactly the same level for all tests. Throw into the mix that Tom is also correct that placement in the room can exacerbate the level differences between speakers, as well as cause other room interaction anomolies, and you can see that no matter how well intentioned easyeyes listening test was, it does not standup to scrutiny under known verifiable and repeatable audio testing criteria.

Just my two cents. Please, don't anyone take it personally.

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[Prana-Bindu]

Meaning is use. The more that is said about a paticular subject, the more meaningful it becomes; more vocabulary surrounding the subject, more meaningful it becomes. One of the various tests for truth used by us hairless monkeys is coherence of the statement being tested with other statements we consider true. Certain types of statements are considered more true than others, especially those that have enjoyed uncontroversial use throughout long periods of time (this is an observed phenomenon: the language of science vs. the language of literary criticism, for example; or the language of Peter Jennings vs. the language of anyone at Fox News, as another good example).

The more that statements like "speaker cables make a difference in the perceived sound" are used successfully in the language of science or Peter Jennings, the more truth such statements acquire. TBrennan: it was not my intention to guide easyeyes through the gauntlet of verification (another popular test for truth). Rather, it was to counter the point, made by you, that easyeyes' observation "doesn't signify much." It signifies quite a bit. We can all feel a lot more comfortable about saying "speaker cables make a difference" when that statement coheres with other statements, such as with those arising from the language of science and Peter Jennings. But that doesn't mean that the statement is useless until science and Peter Jennings make it. I do indeed feel that room conditions affect the sound (more than speaker cables, obviously), but the kind of difference noted by easyeyes would not easily be attributable to room conditions if he was running the old cable on both speakers before he switched the one speaker cable with fancy-shmancy wire (which is what appears to be going on here). The only change to the system identified by easyeyes (we trust him to tell us all, don't we kids?) is the one speaker cable. Kevin: just because easyeyes didn't run his observations through all the tests that you demand from folks for them to have the invitation to share them doesn't make them useless (meaningless).

I, too, dabble in tests for truth, but I hope I won't thereby fool myself into thinking that the tests I adopt will ever suffice for certainty; we all (including the dudes in the white lab coats) draw a line between comfy language and non-comfy language. I feel comfy with the language used by easyeyes, but I'm pretty damned lazy.... If I wanted to chase certainty, I would HAVE to take tidal forces and EVERYTHING into account (our perception is definitely affected by memory associations with things like clothes, smells, tastes, gastric cycles, etc. -- for example, if you study for a test while you're high, you should take the test high as well, while wearing the same clothes in which you studied). After all, you don't know that tidal forces don't affect speaker performance until you KNOW that tidal forces don't affect speaker performance....

I'm sorry if I was too derisive in my criticism. I love all y'all, because you have to read my drivel if you want to participate in this neverending dispute.

Despite my regret, I feel horrible about omitting the Comfy Chair.

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May the bridges we burn light our way....

[justin_tx_16]

ok, i think you won the best post in this thread, hands down!

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-justin

I am an amateur, if it is professional;

ProMedia help you want email Amy or call her @ 1-888-554-5665

Klipsch Home Audio help you want, email support@klipsch.com or call @ 1-800-KLIPSCH

RA# Fax Number=317-860-9140 / Parts Department Fax Number=317-860-9150

[dbflash]

I have no lab proof about this but i was biwiring my speakers with monster cable. I had some AudioQuest laying around. I changed the wire out. I thought the system sounded better. My girlfriend came home and after listening to a cd asked if I bought something new for the stereo. I asked why and she said it sounded better. the highs sounded smoother. it just sounded fuller to her.

i know this is not a valid test because my friend is older than 9 years old.

i believe that you can tell the difference between stranded wire and solid.

danny

[lowe byrrd]

Ditto Prana The ever-changing nature of existance will not allow complete "scientific certainty". But then you know what opinions are like.......we all got'em. have FUN!!! aloha...

[Prana-Bindu]

You know an issue has been beaten into the ground when you end up with quantum uncertainty.

The cable issue is so old.... I recently read about a phenomenon called phononic energy, created by electrons colliding with certain crystalline matrices on their way along a conductor. It is some kind of quantum resonance (wave) that behaves like a particle. It's created by electricity, but it travels at the speed of sound, and it's supposed to be converted back into electricty a points of changing impedence. This is where we get to the added noise to the music signal.... And you thought talking about cables was frustrating?

There's this dude named Bybee that has developed these filters from recently released military technology. I guess they used the technology for passive sonar, where electronic noise is the worst enemy. I learned about the phonon crap at Dan Wright's Web Page while waiting for my modified P-3A to arrive. Sorry: had to brag.

There's nothing like audiophilia to keep you in that mineral despair so crucial to survival....

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May the bridges we burn light our way....

[easyeyes]

Thanks for all the post, negative or positive--which I do not think any were positive, maybe one in its own way was sarcastically positive. My test, as unscientific as it may have been was exactly that, my test. My intentions were not to proselyte any of you to the "premium cable" clan.

I do not understand a lot of what was said about conducting an unbiased, fool-proof theory of so-called premium cable improves sound. As all of you know, the true test of whether an addition to your system is worth it is based on personal perception. Again, I'm not trying to justify why I spent $50 bucks of my hard earned money, it sounded and still sounds better than my previous wire.

Being new to home theater and Klipsch, my objective is to get the best sound that I can at a price threshold that I'm comfortable with. If a small investment into cable produces a satisfactory result to me, I'll take it.

EasyEyes

[mobile homeless]

And that, my perceptive friend, is indeed the bottom line when all is said and done. Although, I have to add that despite your supposedly unscientific tests, you are actually closer to the right track than a good percentage of the measurements brigade, who have left their ears and braindoggle in favor of hard, unrefutable, scientific, "real" validation. Meanwhile, the question about the validity of the measurements and just WHAT they are measuring is seemingly forgotten. Sometimes it is the tests that should be pefected....

Dont feel too bad. Based on the last 25 years or so of "unscientific" testing, I have found that wire construction and implementation do make a difference in the sound, although the differences can be very slight...and throwing more money into the equation does not always bring better sound. That being said, WIRE MAKES A DIFFERENCE. So do other components in the stream. But wire does not always bring the same benefits in every system; it too can be system dependent, reacting to the amp and speaker match in different ways. And to be even more honest, you can do better than the IXOS wire and for not that much more money.

But that is for a whole other time and place. Right now, you appear to be happy and enjoying your music.

kh

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