[shieber]

Someone's been reading wiki. 

 

[Steve Eddy]

Someone's been reading wiki. 

No, CDA and material properties texts.

se

 

[SimonPac]

Audiophile Hat: Cables sound different. Different dielectrics, different conductors leave a sonic signature which can be fairly pronounced. 
 
Engineer Hat: No honest physicist or engineer has any measured evidence as to why. Show me it if I am wrong. For speaker/headphone cables this assumes equivalent resistance between compared cables. This is because speaker cables can easily have significant resistance compared to the speaker and this will affect the transfer function and therefore the sound in several ways as signal level is modulated by frequency dependent speaker/headphone impedance and amplifier damping factor is reduced by different amounts. But if the resistance of the two cables compared is the same then one would expect no differences. It also assumes an amplifier stable into small capacitive loads; i.e any competent design. For signal interconnects used as normal with low source impedance of tens or hundreds of Ohms and load impedance of a few KOhms, there is no reason whatsoever to believe there would be a meaningful measured difference in transfer function until way beyond audio frequencies.
 
Phase distortion has been suggested. It will be tiny in any interconnect driven by a low-ish source impedance; anything reasonably well designed. Total delay in a 1 metre cable will be about 5nS overall, with very very much smaller frequency dependent variations. This can be compared to the 50uS period of a 20KHz sine wave, highest a young person can hear. Any claim that there is differential time delay necessary to produce phase distortion would need to be examined in the light of that fact. Total travel time of a 1 metre cable is about one ten thousandth of the period of a 20Khz wave. Alternatively one might invoke hf rolloff due to finite source impedance combined with cable capacitance, and the later does vary quite a lot between cables. A source device with a 100 ohm source impedance used with a cable having 500pF capacitance will roll off to -3dB at about 3MHz. It will therefore give a phase distortion of a tiny fraction of 1 degree at 20KHz. With speaker cables it will be even smaller. 
 
As to claims there is a dielectric memory beyond that associated with normal electrical reactance; has anybody seen it on an instrument?
 
I am not against cable experiments and subjectivity. I have done some myself. I am against dishonest claims about the mechanism. It produces misguided statements by the technically non-educated.

 

[Speedskater]

The burden of proof is on the person making the extra-ordinary claim.