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Comment by SlowRobotAhead | Hacker News Reader

We can measure the difference in cables though! I can put them through a scope or analyzer and I can even show you real hard differences between them.

What we can't do is prove that makes a difference to your ear vs mine and that's the real problem.

So there are two difference classes of scam here. The one where it's true there is a difference in this $10 and $10000 cable, but they're effective identical. And the scam where this is no measurable or even logical difference at all.

It's the former scam that I think allows the "audiophile" industry to thrive.

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There are a lot of areas in media production and consumption where you get into seriously diminishing returns and it's not hard to spend 10x, 100x, or more for differences in quality that require expert use and a discerning consumer to really appreciate the differences or even notice them.

It probably makes sense to go first class when you have professionals with big budgets who are trying to get every detail just so. All the very high-end microphones and lighting gear probably make less sense for a shoestring budget podcast or YouTube series.

At audio frequencies (and well beyond), you won't be able to measure any meaningful differences: https://www.lifewire.com/speaker-cables-make-a-difference-31...

And the absurdity becomes much more obvious when contrasting with the differences in speakers and speaker crossovers...

That depends on impedance behaviors between components, too.

As a guitarist, I did guitar cable listening tests. With passive guitar pickups (high impedance, low output devices), different cables have easily audible fingerprints. With active pickups, there's no difference at all. The difference between cables is no longer enough to audibly affect the signal.

And within this realm, more expensive doesn't always mean better. I've had cheap cables sound better than expensive cables.

That's a point, I was assuming low impedance output stages as would be standard for any ordinary hifi equipment these days (but not necessarily for the really expensive stuff of course...).

Some of the expensive cables are over-dimensioned or crazily constructed leading to excess capacitance and/or impedance which would lead to terrible performance with a high impedance driver.

Impedance is a difficult and complex thing (which is why failure mode #1 for dudes on the internet being all "objective" and "scientific" is failing to grok the difference between impedance and resistance). So how an output stage is constructed (or an input stage, for that matter) has a lot to do with its behavior in the face of 10 octaves of frequency range and 50+ decibels of real-world dynamics.

Is it transformer-coupled? (Rare in hi-fi, common in pro audio) Capacitor coupled? Direct coupled? Differential? All of these have different and frequency-dependent capacitative, inductive, and resistive behaviors. Put in those terms, it's kind of a no-brainer that cables would matter.

But in "objective" internet-land, it's all straight wire with gain, perfect flat resistance. Which is fine on paper...

Especially because measurements like Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) use sine waves for their measurements. People pay thousands of dollars for marginally lower THD (say, .02 % instead of 0.5%) but they listen to music, not sine waves.

Well, I assume this. Perhaps people buy high end audio equipment so they can listen to sine waves.

THD is a measure of non-linearity, which adds harmonics not present in the original signal. Yes, the standard tests use sine waves, but the results are applicable to other signals. Just because most people don't listen to sine waves for fun doesn't mean it's a valid measurement.

On the other hand, the highest THD in a sound reproduction system comes from the physical transducers. Worrying about the THD of an amplifier makes little sense when the speakers provide an order of magnitude more distortion.

-I fully agree with your sentiment, except I'd like to stress that a loudspeaker provides _several_ orders of magnitude more distortion than a competently designed amplifier driven within its limits.

This is the reason for measurements of intermodulation distortion and THD+N by frequency. A proper evaluation of, say, a power amplifier will look at a dozen, maybe a couple dozen different measurements; taken all together, these provide a reasonably complete picture of how the amp performs.

But - from an engineering perspective, music can in fact be decomposed into a series of sine waves - and effectively all digitally recorded music goes through this process as part of a/d conversion (sort of; it's complicated) or FFT-based digital equalization. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_analysis

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