On a related note, i wish all electronics had simple replaceable power cords. I’m sick to death of the ones permanently attached to the unit.

Oh, NOW you tell us –I just modded my studio to the new spec and now there are coats strewn everywhere. Oh, and the NOISE! DAMN YOU ELECTRICAL FIELDS!

Maybe it was just a crappy album. How good could it be if the group was blindfolded?

This would be a better kicker if the people did know that on, say, half the trials, er.., songs, there was a coat hanger while on the other half, there was a monster cable, yet they still couldn’t tell the difference.

To be specific: the part of the brain associated with taste did not change, but the part of the brain associated with how much we enjoy that taste did change. Expectation changes perception at a very real physiological level.

I loves me some high-tech phrenology.

I always just buy extension chords and slice off the ends: way cheaper, way sturdier, and easy to get lengths you can actually use.

With regards to batteries in stompboxes– many of us keep an almost-dead 9volt around for special recording purposes, it provides a unique sound in distortion boxes: the signal falls apart and breaks up, but of course it only last a few minutes before the battery totally dies.

One of the lead engineers at McIntosh rigged up a test box that switched between different huge long coils of different wires, nobody could tell the diff. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the gauge of the wire is sufficient for the length of the run and the impedance of the speaker – however this only seems to come into play over long cable runs.

I think that the main reason there are so many speaker wire scams out there is because hifi boutiques don’t make any money on amps or loudspeakers. They need a few high-margin items to stay in business – and the manufacturers know it, as do reviewers. It is in the interest of everyone but the buying public to know about this.

If people want to buy it…who cares. Some of the cables look pretty cool.

For those that don’t know, AC signals tend to restrict themselves to the outside of a circular cable. At the hundreds-of-MHz range, this can be significant. At audio frequencies, no effect whatsoever.

As far as using zip cord (lamp cord), there is a matter of quality. Bare copper will eventually corrode. If you plug in the speakers and then leave them for a decade or two, and the environment is just wrong (say, a house near the beach), then you might find that the wire has corroded itself to the connector. Better cables tend to have thicker, tougher jackets, gold-plated connectors (which resist corrosion), shielding (not important for speakers, but can be for almost everything else) and generally better quality. I have also seen the insulation on some old, cheap cable crack and break away. Also, if you are running speakers in the middle-to-high three digit wattages, you might want thicker cables to reduce the I^2/R losses. Quality is definately worth paying for, up to a point.

Best Buy and the like always sell this Monster Cable stuff and its way overhyped and overpriced.

I bet even PLASTIC coat hangers can be just as good as Monster too! LOL.

He actually may have a point here, as the static can intefere with the specific voodoo-coefficient on high-end optical media.

Here’s a screed I wrote some years ago on an speaker builder’s forum. One of the posters was bragging about the $200 amplifier power cable he had just bought and how much it improved the sound. “Opened up” was the term I believe…

——snip———

It’s more than just your power cable!

As long as you’re replacing the 4 feet of power cable from the system to the wall, you should consider replacing all the cheap 12ga wiring in your walls with solid silver wire. Remember, a system is only as good as it’s weakest link!

The circuit breakers in your home should have gold plated contacts. As for the circuit breakers, I find that Cutler-Hammer breakers sound much better than Square-D. They have a warmer, more lifelike sound. Some people prefer old fashioned fuses, but I think they sound slow.

The wire from your breaker box to the transformer on the telephone pole outside is usually inferior as well. I would suggest 1000 strand silver 2 gauge wire with a teflon jacket for this. It costs a couple hundred dollars per foot, but the results are well worth it! As a bonus, your socks come out whiter in the wash!

If you can, talk to the power company about upgrading the wires that go to the power grid in your neighborhood. Everyone within a square mile of your house will thank you for it when the sound and picture coming from their televisions improves tenfold!

Also, if you are a multi-billionaire, you have the option of paying the power companies to upgrade the high tension power distribution wires in your state. Since this is a high voltage application in excess of 50,000 volts, only the best will do! Copper shielded silver wire with braided gold plated magnesium outer layers works well in this application. Also, if your high tension power distribution line must cross other high tension lines, (especially inferior consumer grade lines) railroad tracks or rivers wider than 6 feet, then do so at a perpendicular angle. This may require the relocation of some high tension towers and the appropriation of additional farmland or nature preserve areas, but hey, we are seeking perfection! (Tip! Replacing the cheap ceramic insultors hanging from the towers with ones from Waterford Crystal is a worthwhile upgrade!)

This is very important! I’ll say it again. The quality of the system is only as good as it’s weakest link!

Then again, all this may be unnecessary. Depending on the distance to your power plant, it may be more effective for you to build your own power plant on site. This will save you billions in wire costs while shortening the length of your wire greatly. It has the additional benefit of being dedicated to your particular audiophile setup! You can choose whichever power generation technology that suits your system. – Coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, etc. –
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the sound of a coal power plant over nuclear, but if you are a sold state user, you may prefer nuclear or hydro. Solar or wind I’m afraid is out of the question. It just doesn’t have the peak current capability necessary for truly high end equipment! Solar power also suffers from a “space noise” problem that comes from the solar panels absorbing spurious radiation from sun spots, distant stars, pulsars, quasars and especially black holes. Black holes especially cause a sort of “suckout” in the sound of string instruments. I can hear this effect when there is black hole acting up on a solar powered system.

I suppose there are naysayers out there who will say that I can’t “scientifically prove” any of this, but what has science ever done for us?

Well, I can’t prove any of it, and I don’t need to! I can hear the difference because I have a golden ear. If I want to spend my money on things like this and I think it sounds better, then who are the objectivists to say I can’t enjoy it?

There are strange powers in the universe that affect our audio systems that our puny brains are far too feeble to understand! The best we can do is tweak things until we are emotionally satisfied with the results. Do not try to understand why. Just enjoy the music!

However, in a partial vacuum, the gold plating might be of some use. I think that’s up for more discussion.

The number one improvement you could do for a stereo is to run it off of a series of car batteries that you charge at night, and rip out any transformers. I run a battery-operated (el-cheapo) SONY CD portable player as my “drive” but it has a DIGITAL optical cable output that I run through a high end (but no longer sold so the ones these days are likely quite better) digital-to-audio converter, and use high end class-A (transistors always on so it’s always hot), run through $80/each cables, to coaxial driver speakers. In other words, for $5000, I’m at the point of no further return except for another $1000 for a single penny’s worth of improvement.

But the worst, utterly worst aspect of the history of “high end audiophilia” is that their standard measure of performance was how close a stereo system (always with only two speakers back in the day!) was how close it came to a “live performance.” In other words it was just classical music, since all modern music is electronically generated or modified anyway. Ever heard a *live* Pink Floyd concert? Or even Prince concert? Come on, guys, you go to see the performance, to connect emotionally to the performer, not to hear the very distorted and echo-filled audio along with ten thousand screaming fans, a hundred who are within stone’s throw of your delicate ears.

Corrosion may not matter if you use solder or gas-tight crimp connectors. But it does matter for the usual clip or compression type speaker connectors.

The problem with monster cable is they’ve take something valid and twisted it to sell a product. If you go into any decent studio or any other audio intensive location you’ll find that the money they spend on cables is astronomical. Of course they aren’t paying for gas impregnated wire, sealed by vestal virgins that is somehow (through divine intervention maybe?) going to make everything sound better. What they are actually paying for is the construction quality. How well it’s shielded, stress strength, connector assembly, strand thickness etc. Cabling in a commercial location can take a lot of abuse depending on the application and these are valid concerns. All these things have almost nil to do with your average consumer, who in the case of speakers, is going to jam the wire into the speaker and stereo and then tack or tuck the wire away inconspicuously and not touch it again for years. Copper wire is copper wire. Of course, I’ll never forget the guy who tried to tell me that speaker wire was polarized and the wire with the stripe HAD to go in the black terminal and the unstriped wire HAD to go in the red slot. Any explanation from me that the wires just had to go straight through and the stripe was just there as a guide so you didn’t cross them was met with a brief silence and then a dismissive: “You just don’t know ANYTHING about hi-fi electronics!”

I can and do make whatever interconnect, power cable or speaker cable I need based on the application. Length, cost and durability of connectors matter most to me after decades of hooking stuff up and unhooking it.
And I second the poster who hates attached power cords. They’re either too long or too short and always in the way. I will never build another piece of gear with that ankle-wrapping lasso hanging off the back of it.