[KinGensai]

You might need this and REW to get sufficient measurements. Just a heads up.

 

[Tomtattoo]

God bless the deaf. Reading this thread, i'm quite envious now. Envious to people who cannot hear (or don't want to) the difference between cables, because they can save up a lot of dough. They just buy 10 meters of cheap cable for 5 bucks and that satisfies their needs. Don't get me wrong, i'm not a "hardcore" audiophile who spends 2000 dollars on a 1.5 m interconnect (although i know a few) but stating that there's no audible difference is simply stupid. Also treating the guy who started the thread is just childish, sorry.

 

[tjkohli]

You might need this and REW to get sufficient measurements. Just a heads up.

Is there any way I can do it using just a good mic and my computer? Lol. Perhaps a recording and spectrogram analysis? I spent my entire holiday budget on Hi-Fi audio equipment

 

[KinGensai]

Is there any way I can do it using just a good mic and my computer? Lol. Perhaps a recording and spectrogram analysis? I spent my entire holiday budget on Hi-Fi audio equipment

Probably not, headphones need that kind of rig to get useful measurements out of, and it's probably the only kind of measurements they'll be willing to accept.

 

[Riccioli30]

Is there any way I can do it using just a good mic and my computer? Lol. Perhaps a recording and spectrogram analysis? I spent my entire holiday budget on Hi-Fi audio equipment

no! no! big mistake! you're posting in the wrong forum, you obviously haven't read all 17 pages of this thread. You will not have answers here, on your personal evidence (better to say "feeling") on the sound of the cables (which I fully agree with), but - at most - an eighth grade lesson on the fundamentals of physics, chemistry, electromagnetism and an invitation to go by an ENT specialist. hi friend, try again elsewhere.

 

[gregorio]

Some facts to counter your suspicion:

• I got them both for free (one came with the headphones and the other from a friend who had two)
• I initially did think that they had no difference except color, but realized my headphones sounded worse all of a sudden — and then used logic to determine the only thing I changed was the cable
• I ran a rudimentary blind test on my wife and my brother, my brother confirmed the copper had "more bass" and my wife, on a totally separate day and location, said the silver one "hurt my ears more" with the treble/sibilance.
• A quick Google search brings you literally a unison consensus that silver is anywhere from 5% to 9% better conductor than copper (in any application where current is involved)

But none of those counter my scepticism.
1. Regardless of how much you personally paid for them, they do in fact have different price points.
2. If you had actually “used logic” then you would have checked that your headphones did actually produce a different sound and it wasn’t just biases causing you to perceive/imagine a difference. Jumping to a conclusion without eliminating the other possibilities is not “using logic”!
3. If even your wife could tell “more bass” and the “silver one hurt your ears more” the difference must be relatively massive and therefore trivially easy to measure even with cheap equipment (mic/ADC). In fact you can test just with a cheap ADC and some free software.
4. Sure, so how does that relate to resistivity? Answer: The resistivity of copper is 1.68 x 10^-8 ohm-m and of sliver it’s 1.59 x 10^-18 ohm-m. So 1m of roughly 18 AWG copper wire is about 0.021365 ohms and with silver wire it’s about 0.020194 ohms.

God bless the deaf.

You mean god bless all the trained professional sound/music engineers and the commercial studios who make the recordings you listen to, who never use audiophile cables!

stating that there's no audible difference is simply stupid.

No, what’s really is “simply stupid” is claiming there is an audible difference but never being able to provide any reliable evidence to support it, particularly in a sound science forum of all places!

G

 

[tjkohli]

But none of those counter my scepticism.
1. Regardless of how much you personally paid for them, they do in fact have different price points.
2. If you had actually “used logic” then you would have checked that your headphones did actually produce a different sound and it wasn’t just biases causing you to perceive/imagine a difference. Jumping to a conclusion without eliminating the other possibilities is not “using logic”!
3. If even your wife could tell “more bass” and the “silver one hurt your ears more” the difference must be relatively massive and therefore trivially easy to measure even with cheap equipment (mic/ADC). In fact you can test just with a cheap ADC and some free software.
4. Sure, so how does that relate to resistivity? Answer: The resistivity of copper is 1.68 x 10^-8 ohm-m and of sliver it’s 1.59 x 10^-18 ohm-m. So 1m of roughly 18 AWG copper wire is about 0.021365 ohms and with silver wire it’s about 0.020194 ohms.

You mean god bless all the trained professional sound/music engineers and the commercial studios who make the recordings you listen to, who never use audiophile cables!

No, what’s really is “simply stupid” is claiming there is an audible difference but never being able to provide any reliable evidence to support it, particularly in a sound science forum of all places!

G

I'll be happy to give you scientific proof — can you please help me set up a test? I have the following recording equipment:

1. Shure MV7 (USB w/ XLR)
2. 2 DJI Lavalier mics
3. Teenage Engineering TP-7
4. iPhone 15 Pro Max
5. MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon)

I am willing to spend $100 more on equipment if needed.
Please tell me what to buy and what software to use, and I'll prove it to you — because yes, the difference is massive.
I won't engage in your hostilities — but respectfully, maybe you are forgetting the most critical element of all this — everyone's ears are different. Just because you can't hear a difference doesn't mean no one else can. I'm 30. My brother is 20. My wife is 28. As people age, their sonic abilities and range of frequency detection decrease [source].

 

[gregorio]

I'll be happy to give you scientific proof — can you please help me set up a test?

Sure. Put your headphones on a stand, position you Shure MV7 close to the cup and plug it into your Mac. Play 20-30secs of music and record it. Change the cable, without moving your HPs or mic at all and play exactly the same 20-30 secs of music and record it. Next part is far easier if you have/can borrow a PC. Instal the (free) Deltawave software and follow the instructions to perform a null test on your two audio files. This is hardly a very accurate methodology but should be ample to show the huge mid/treble boost you’re claiming.

but respectfully, maybe you are forgetting the most critical element of all this — everyone's ears are different.

But respectfully, cables don’t have ears! First let’s see if there is this massive difference you’re claiming, then we can discuss whose ears can’t hear such a difference, whose perception is playing tricks on them or variables other than the silver/copper that could be responsible (as mentioned by @castleofargh)

G

 

[KinGensai]

https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Profes...KjhJyhEjnFXE6aULgo6XZ3W_44090jX4aAo8DEALw_wcB

Would these work?

 

[castleofargh]

Is there any way I can do it using just a good mic and my computer? Lol. Perhaps a recording and spectrogram analysis? I spent my entire holiday budget on Hi-Fi audio equipment

A frequency response done with some care could be enough if it's simply about showing a clear impedance difference. Then any mic would do (the area we're most interested in for your headphone is near 2kHz). The main problem is that you need to have the very same placement between the mic and the driver measured by it (and not move the other one or maybe unplug it, although that does technically change the electrical specs). And that's usually where the PITA of repeatability starts manifesting. Because it's hard to swap cables without moving the headphone around. And it's just as hard to consistently replace the headphone after taking it away and trying to get near identical FR from several measurements. Something we need, as it's the difference between measurements that shows the actual change. If the graphs also have some serious deviations due to placement or other variables, the data can rapidly lose its validity for suggesting the cables as cause for the measured changes.

Using a mic is somewhat difficult but at least it could help show actual change in sound, while only looping the cable(amp cable ADC) is sure to show much smaller differences that will be harder to interpret as cause for sound change.
REW has a mac version, I checked ARTA that many people prefer at first but the website only talks of using a Windows emulator... Or you could use just about any RTA(real time analyzer) while playing some noise, and take screenshots. What's important is that you check if several tries going back and forth swapping the cables give you consistent results (again, measurements without repeatability are worthless).
If you're fine with only frequency response, which is my main guess based on the headphone's impedance curve, then that's it. If you want more, then I agree with gregorio, recording a short passage of music could be a good start. You could even share them with us, just remember to keep them short for legal troubles).
Deltawave doesn't seem to exist for mac.


On some cables, just moving the cable around would create measurable changes(I certainly wouldn't recommend that type of cable, as fidelity can only exist with some stability).

 

[Svperstar]

I own otherwise identical Copper and Silver-plated Copper Meze cables for my Meze Liric and I can tell a huge difference between them. The copper brings out the mids and sounds warmer, while the silver brings out more detail and feels brighter.

There is a YouTube channel that reviews expensive headphones, he said that a silver cable "tamed the highs" on the Susvara.......but wait, I thought silver = bright? How does that make sense? Is he right or are you?

 

[FunkyBassMan]

Is there any way I can do it using just a good mic and my computer? Lol. Perhaps a recording and spectrogram analysis? I spent my entire holiday budget on Hi-Fi audio equipment

Don't waste your time. There is literally no test you can do that will convince the ten or so members of the "everything sounds the same" faith here. Anything you do they will come up with some ridiculous criticism.

The only way to do it is like I did with a guy who happened to be high-school band mate who's big in the ASR cult and have them come over to your house and watch you pass the test themselves. In my case, it wasn't cables, but instead the Chord M-Scaler which these people claim does nothing audible. I bet him $500 I could identify when it was in full upscaling mode and when it was in bypass. I gave him the remote to the unit and had my wife verify as I proceeded to blind "guess" right 12 out of 12 times.

 

[gregorio]

There is literally no test you can do that will convince the ten or so members of the "everything sounds the same" faith here.

There aren’t ten members of that faith here, in fact I don’t think there’s even one, so who are you talking about convincing? For the rest of us, there is testing you can do to convince us, first off, as already explained, is a measurement demonstrating the claimed massive FR differences. Didn’t you even read what has been posted before your false rant?

G

 

[tjkohli]

I'm gonna take one for the team and try this guys.

 

[LanceSaintPaul]

Snarky meta-comment on thread withdrawn.
But simply keep in mind that frequency response is only one aspect of how different cables render the musical signal. Other differences can include soundstage, density of image. Items we have little measure for (although phase is relevant here). Quality differences.