Pitfall Seven: Cables
Cables are the seventh pitfall, and by far the worst.
Without getting into theory, it's true that cheap interconnects (the wire
that connects tuners and CD players to preamps, preamps to amps, but not
amps to speakers) affect sound. Loose, tin connectors and cheap wires can
do audible damage to a signal.
Plenty of people will offer to sell you time aligned, silver plated (or
solid silver), spiral wound, gold shielded, unobtanium-insulated wire.
Prices start at extreme and reach up into the utterly unfathomable. Yes,
you can spend $5,000 per foot on a wire.
You shouldn't, but you could.
Avoid this pit. There's snake oil all over audiophilia, but nothing as
snakish as a cable manufacturer with silver in his wires and pages of
pseudoscience patter on his web site.
The truth of the matter is (and plenty of people will dispute this), is that a decently made interconnect cable,
using decent high quality copper, a good shield, and tight-fitting gold-plated
jacks on either end (often available for under $50), provides a proper, neutral pathway for signals. Properly made cable has low inductance, resistance and capacitance - and that's what makes for neutrality.
On the other hand, a silver cored,
platinum shielded, directional, frozen, gold-drenched, fairy kissed cable
running thousands of dollars, is unlikely to be more neutral. It might be less neutral, which may explain why some people swear blind that that works better with their amp. Perhaps it does. But if an amp reacts that differently to a few picofarads of change in a wire, it's probably going to sound different if the room temperature changes 10 degrees, too. And that's not a good situation to be in. And if the cable is altering the sound so much that it sounds different on every amp, then there's clear evidence to suggest that it's adding some kind of distortion to the signal. That might work for you today, but if you change anything - and audiophiles change things - then it may well stop working for you tomorrow.
Beware of mystics reaching for your wallet
You can tell who's blowing smoke
in this business: once people talk about silver sounding "sweet" (or
"harsh"), or wire being directional (musical signals are alternating
current, a truly directional wire would seriously distort music!), they
have left science and reason behind, and are simply mystics. Mystics
reaching for your wallet.
Silver and
copper have almost the same electrical characteristics, and if anyone knows that, it should be a cable manufacturer.
It gets much more extreme. Some companies will sell you special power
cords, on the premise that using special copper or silver in a power cord
improves a stereo. It doesn't. No one has ever proven they can hear a difference in a
blind A/B test between two power cords; this doesn't stop unscrupulous
manufacturers from charging $300 and up for something that a decent, $9.99, shielded power
cord does just as well.
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