I've run into a lot of people on this forum think that all you need is a cheap Monoprice or equivalent cable. Or as long as the cable is of quality construction, you won’t be able to hear a difference. I’d like to share my first experience with upscale cables that happened to me over 20 years ago.
In the early 90’s I was working at a small mid-fi audio equipment store in the Midwest. We sold stuff like Yamaha, Adcom, NAD, Sumo, Klipsch, Kef, and Magnepan. At that time your option for speaker wire in the store was Esoteric Audio in 16, 14 or 12 ga. This was essentially the equivalent to Monster Cable from the same era, but it was a little cheaper. If you really wanted to go upscale we’d put some spades or banana plugs on the wire for you.
One day the Audio Alchemy rep came in (the days before AA decided to sell direct and screw their dealers who had built their brand to legend status for them), and said he just picked up a new wire line called Audioquest. We didn’t care and didn’t want to hear it. The sample that he had was a flat solid core wire that was the equivalent of about 17ga if I recall. It retailed for about .80/ foot. We decided to hook it up anyway just to make the rep go away and leave us alone. So we picked a NAD system with Magneplanars where the preamp had a mono switch so we could easily compare the L/R channels. One channel had the Audioquest on it and the other had the 12ga Esoteric. We expected the Esoteric to annihilate the Audioquest. After all, the Esoteric was a lot bigger and a little more expensive wire. So we popped in a CD and listened to one channel in mono and then set the balance to the other and went back and forth a few times. The difference was huge. The Esoteric had bigger bass, but it wasn’t very controlled. The Audioquest had very precise bass, but the real difference was on the mids and highs where they opened way up on the Magneplanars. The difference was not subtle. Everyone heard it. So we bought the line and rewired the whole store with it.
There’s a couple of things to keep in mind here:
1. 1. We didn’t want to hear a difference. So to suggest that we wished any improvement into reality simply isn’t true.
2. 2. These were both cheap speaker cables on a pretty modest (~$3000) system, and the differences were very obvious.
A couple of years later we had a visit from Bill Low, the founder of Audioquest. He did his famous demo for us where he wired up a $200 JVC boombox with Audioquest, popped in a CD and let it roll for 15-30 seconds, and then swapped in the next higher model of cable and repeated the process on the same tune. Again there were clearly differences as he went from <$1ft cable up to stupid expensive models. Not that anyone would put multi thousand dollar cables on a boombox, but it showed the improvements with each model.
So with both of these demos, speaker cables were used. I really believe the differences are more obvious with speaker cables than with interconnects. At least that’s what I heard. And interconnects are hard to compare. So a year or two after that we got a “comparator” device from Wireworld on loan from one of our reps. This made it possible to A/B interconnects without having to power down and rewire a system before trying another cable. Again we heard differences between the models we tested but you had to listen a little longer to get a feel for what the cable sounded like. It wasn’t as easy as when we compared speaker cables.
So here’s what I learned from these experiences and 10 years from selling upscale cabling and audio/video equipment:
1. 1. Speaker cables sound different. But not all of them. We could clearly hear the difference between a cheap Audioquest and Esoteric cable, but the difference between the Esoteric models, (say, a 16ga vs. 12ga) was pretty subtle if any.
2. 2. We could hear a difference in interconnects but sometimes they were subtle when they were comparably priced. A $30 vs. $500 interconnect from the same company was usually a pretty noticeable difference. In a $30 vs. $50 cable, the difference was sometimes harder to detect.
3. 3. Keep it real! It doesn’t make much sense to throw a $200 interconnect on a $250 receiver. But a $30 interconnect on the same receiver could be a noticeable improvement over a generic $2.99 cable. That brings up another issue. The sweet spot for interconnects from these tests were probably $50-$125. Meaning that the most bang for the buck was in this range, especially if the system had more to it than a cheap A/V receiver. Once you got into expensive cables the refinements were smaller. You can probably get more enjoyment for the $ by buying better gear than spending an extra $500 on a cable.
4. 4.The differences in digital cables were subtle. Usually we had to compare cheapest to most expensive to hear more noticeable differences. I tend to believe the biggest differences had more to do with quality of the connectors rather than manufacturer Y used PVC insulation vs. Manufacturer X used Teflon.
5. 5.Video cables can be some of the easiest to demo. Not everyone listens for the same stuff when music is involved, but in a high resolution video system, it can be easy to show improvements if the improvements actually exist. I think true changes become more objective when it comes to video. Not that we can’t argue what looks more correct, but whether you see the difference or don’t.
That was my experience 20+ years ago. I have no idea if those price points still apply. I’m sure there are exceptions to every rule given different companies views on the preferred wire purity and thickness, insulation material, and configuration. The brands we compared were pretty limited, so it’s possible that other manufactures cables could be more or less difficult to discern differences.
