Do Cables Affect Sound Quality?

I only buy cables for build qualities or suitable length.

Speaker cable might be different though, I think. I heard differences years ago, when I switched from stranded copper to solid silver. (Mission flat cable) on two long runs to speakers. I think there might have been some kind of tonal difference. I have used mains cable too and to be honest, it was absolutely fine. (Even buried under the floor, going up the walls inside plaster and out into bedrooms, so we're talking very long runs)

Digital cable seems like bunkem to me. People in the past have convinced me that it sounds different. I was wrong. It doesn't!!

Headphone cables I just don't hear any differences. I have a £13 cable on my hd650 for portable use and it sounds no different to me than the standard cable.

Interconnect may have some. Influence. Again, I'm not convinced.

Your music has gone through miles of copper junk cables before it got to you in any case.

Inside the hd650, the cable connects to one single strand of copper inside the ear cups. It's as thin as a hair. So you could have a python cable which is terminated in reality, with a hair's width of copper to the drivers.

My feeling is that if you think you hear a diffrence then it's great that it improved your listening and so must have been money well spent. For me, it's a total waste of time. I have experimented with cables in the past and have really regretted it financially speaking.

Now someone will pop in and say what a huge difference it made for them.

The mind is a powerful thing.

Thing is Gordon, if you hear a difference, then that's fine, by whatever means.

I've got to a point where minutia of micro detail isn't quite as important to me as the sound or timbre of the music. I don't sit down and analyse what I'm listening to. At least not nowadays. I used to have to listen out for noise in particular, so I used headphones that would point that out rather than a pleasant home headphone.

The closer that the gear is to natural/neutral, then the brain just has to do less work which makes for easier listening. If the gear is skewed though, the brain does a really good job of translating it to as natural as it can under the circumstances.

I do think that once you get past analysis, you relax a great deal more into the music and learn to listen in a different way. I have to stop myself hearing noise/distortion sometimes because I'm so geared in to it though. So worrying about cables is the least part of my enjoyment if I'm honest.

Big differences can be made for absolutely nothing. I don't think many hifi people are aware of the effect of volume on all recordings. That has more effect on depth of field in the sound as well as space. Compression is lessened and timbre is way more balanced if you get the volume right for each headphone and recording. Those differences are far greater than cables imo.

I do think that some even need to be kind of 'shown' how to listen to a recording.

For me, the most important part are the mids. They need to be loud enough to sound close(ish). If the bass is lacking, I just turn up a fraction and if treble is too harsh, back off. Once you get into the 'sweet zone' which is different for various recordings and headphones, the sense of depth in the recording is increased, your ears aren't getting bombarded by too much sound and so don't go in to protection mode and 'compress' the sound to protect you and the sound is much more tonally 'correct'. Also, better dynamics.

It all hinges around something that we kind of ignore - volume.

I think of tone as contrast in a picture and the volume as brightness. They have to be adjusted for a correct balance. I think that's why I can tune in to headphones that aren't always brilliant, since I look for a 'sweet spot' in volume in order to give a balanced overall picture.

The cable makes less of a difference than getting the volume right imo. However, not many hifi people take any notice of it. They turn up to certain volumes by habit and then say that the gear is too bassy or treble laden, when it can be adjusted without tone controls easily. You just change yor perspective and distance from the players to suit.

Why does music sound so good at night time? No external noises. You listen at lower volume and adjust for decent presence. You actually listen better at night as well. The result is better tonal balance, proper dynamic range and better imaging ...... So music sounds better at night time!!!

Many don't realise that the ears go i to protection mode once a certain volume is reached and your brain actually starts to 'compress' what it hears in order to protect your ears. So for better dynamic range, back the volume off a bit.

I've not heard a single cable make anything like those differences for me. The silver cable to speakers made it seem brighter to me, so I started to back the volume off and it went back to what I remembered I guess. I didn't like it and preferred my music louder, so I went back to copper strand again. Whether that was in my mind or not, I'm not certain.

The most expensive headphone wire I tried cost around £300 and that was twenty years ago. Never again. £13 sounds no different!! Then some smart alec kid on HF tells me the HD650 deserves better? Only because he's been brainwashed. The guy everyone called 'voldemort' did have a point. He built a perfectly good amp at a fair price, but for some, it would have spunded better if he had quadrupled the price and put it in posh case. I still use mine and it matches most other stuff that I have.

A lot of our hobby is controlled by the head.

Hi Ian. I agree with you about volume being important. I definitely have a sweet spot & friends often wonder why I don't listen even louder. There's a level though which seems to allow the music to breathe properly without reaching the point where the compression you mention comes in.

We do hear better at night too. I think that's a primal thing that's unavoidable in our species. Something to do with being alert for predators.

Frans, you're absolutely right. I only realised I'd over-complicated the question when it was too late to edit it. So for anyone reading it for the first time be aware that only the first part is relevant. Sorry about that.

The only reason I'm asking is because of a full-blown row that's going on as I type over on HF. I have a silver cable that very clearly sounds different to all the copper ones I have. I'm not mad either, it's very obvious.

I feel the same as Jeff on this one. Some noticeably different, others less so. Not necessarily an improvement so much as a change in sound sig. 

My reasons for buying replacement cables tend to be for more practical reasons (e.g. shorter cable or lighter IEM cable) rather than looking for an audible change though. With one exception the replacements are around the same money as you'd pay for a stock cable.

Most times the differences are negligible or very slight. However, in a couple the difference has been more apparent (one clear as day - should add it was an IEM cable) and I wasn't going in with any expectations.

Not sure why that would be but that's what my ears were telling me and that's good enough for me!

Would I ever drop hundreds of pounds on a cable? Not a chance particularly so when the cable costs as much or more than the headphone it'll be used with. To my mind if a headphone doesn't sound good enough in stock form without a £300 cable then it's probably time to replace it

Edit: later realised we're talking about analogue cables in general. I have no opinion on speaker cables (rarely use speakers) and little experience with different rca cables so no real thoughts on those either. My comments are purely based on my experiences with headphone / IEM cables. Soz.

I have always been into hifi, even before I could afford to pay for it myself. I've also always believed cables can make a difference. Rarely a night & day difference but, particularly in systems that were already pretty well matched, a noticeable difference all the same.

Then about 25 years ago What-Hifi magazine started touting the theory that you should spend around 10% of your total system cost on cables. Alarm bells started to ring for me. I've heard very expensive cables that sounded crap in certain systems, regardless of the cost of the individual components. It was then I realised the hi-fi enthusiast had become a cash cow. We were effectively being played.

I've never had much money to play with in my life so around that time I essentially gave up chasing the dream. Then I bought a pair of Sony CD1000's. I got them for a song. They sounded incredible & I came to the realisation that maybe I could achieve a really high-end sound for what is a relatively small outlay. This was way before the internet remember so I had no access to the wider world of dedicated headphone amps. You just bought headphones, plugged them into whatever you had lying around and you were good to go. I was over the moon in my ignorance.

Then I got the internet. And so it began...

And who can blame them?