Blind Cable Taste Test RESULTS!

Originally Posted by Holybanana

Awesome!
Who gussed them all correctly?

Originally Posted by Edwood

Here's the real kicker.

Only ONE Head-Fier that participated guessed ALL THREE correctly.
And the best part, this person did the test and turned the cables around to send to the next person in the shortest amount of time of all the participants.

Thanks to all that participated, and putting up with the continual delays due to business, vacations, illnesses, etc.

-Ed

Originally Posted by Todd R

Thanks Ed,
So who's our golden ear boy (or girl?)

I have a comment/question about the test...
The guesses were assuming that we had some sort of preconceived idea of what a particular cable material was supposed to sound like, right?
Mine:
Silver=bright/detailed
Starquad=balanced/mellow
Rat Shack=harsh/unrefined

My assumptions may be different than someone else's, so I'm not sure what this chart really tells us.

What I would like to know is which cable did we all like the best? Will there be more graphs?

Originally Posted by taoster

interesting, it would seem most people heard differences between the cable

Originally Posted by Clarke68

I didn't get involved in this test to try and guess which cable was which, but rather to find out which cable I prefer. I figured my favorite would be the silver, since they're (I assume) the most expensive, but I've also heard that silver cables can be bright, so perhaps I'd prefer the star-quad, or not be able to tell any difference at all?

When I first got the cables I did a quick run through...my first impressions were that the triangle were my favorite (silver?), the square was a close second (star-quad?), and the circle was junk. I had a difficult time shaking my first impressions for subsequent tests, so I ran the rest of the tests blind. I'd pull one cable out of the box and install them (the way you did the 'band' around the middle made it easy to conceal the cables identity with a finger while still being able to read the directional arrow on the side). Listen to one track off McCoy Tyner's 'New York Reunion', install the next cable, repeat. When I was done, I "shuffled" the cables and put them back in the box for the next test.

I started out rating the cables as I went along, as my goal was to find my favorite. What I found, however, was that I almost always preferred the last cable in the test, and it didn't matter which cable it was. Clearly there's some other factors at play here besides the conductor material! So I abandoned the "rating" system and just wrote my listening impressions of each cable. There's some inconsistency in my impressions from session to session, but a few patterns did emerge:

square: consistently the most neutral, didn't add anything to the music, but (more importantly) didn't take anything away.
triangle: possibly a bit more extended in the high frequencies than the square cable, with a little congestion/muddiness in the lower midrange/mid-bass region
circle: my impressions were all over the map: at times overly bright, at other times neutral but a tad laid back (although my DAC is a tad laid back, so these could be the most revealing)

So that's how I want 'em. If I must guess which is which, then guess I will:

square: silver
triangle: star-quad
circle: cheapo

Note that the differences between cables were extremely subtle, and in fact impossible to differentiate at times. All this has taught me that for my ears, in my current system, cables are not a significant contributor to sound quality, and I'll be sticking with my "inexpensive, reasonably well shielded/constructed is fine" theory on cables until I have reason to think otherwise. Very interesting and valuable experiment...thanks for setting it up!