Comparison of $4,000 boutique audio cable to $7 Amazon Basics cable shows audiophiles waste a lot of money — scientific audio equipment analysis with analyzer shows no difference in quality
'Black Pearl solid silver conductors drawn in diamond coated dies and insulated with virgin FEP dielectric' doesn't help.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/sound-cards/comparison-of-usd4-000-boutique-audio-cable-to-usd7-amazon-basics-cable-shows-audiophiles-waste-a-lot-of-money-scientific-audio-equipment-analysis-with-analyzer-shows-no-difference-in-qualityOpen linkView original on piefed.social161
Comments43
Yeah it's a scam and everybody knows that it's a scam.
Clearly the "audiophile" community doesn't.
XD
There's definitely a difference between properly made and shielded cables and the cheapo ones that can be unshielded. However once you meet certain standards like using the correct impedance coax there's basically no improvement from making the cables "better".
I've noticed that the few "Amazon basics" products I've tried were surprisingly good quality, they're probably just about at the right specification.
the analogy I always draw is to wine.
the difference between a $5 bottle and a $20 is perceptible. but, the higher you go, the returns diminish exponentially unless you have a specific taste... and at some point paying the excessive amount of money becomes status not necessity.
yes, potatoes are conductive, but they don't have any shielding and the distance the signal travels in those experiments is irrelevant to practical applications. it is essentially a big wire nut.
if your application is long distances through conduit or many cables run in parallel you need higher quality ones with shielding. Granted, that is not the typical listener's case.
With wine, the price literally affects how we perceive the taste of the wine. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/baba-shiv-how-wines-price-tag-affect-its-taste
Although this research came out before the fMRI debacle...
What fMRI debacle?
I remembered hearing about it. Turns out there was this published in 2016 which I'm pretty sure was the issue I heard about. https://www.vice.com/en/article/fmri-scanner-study-flawed-pnas-anders-eklund/
As to whether anything more came of this I'm not sure.
Wow I hadn't heard of this, but at least the article shows that they were fixing some of this stuff back in 2015. Hopefully by now those bugs have been ironed out. Very interesting, thank you
I used to work in the brewing industry. Beer is 99% marketing, and people are morons. This is accurate:
In this case scientific equipment determined no discernible difference in audio quality, though. I do actually believe in paying for nicer cables but up to a point and that's really mostly about build quality. $4000 for an RCA cable is just insanity.
Apparently that point only needs to be $7.
To be fair, the build quality is really what you'd be paying for with a nicer cable, though with an RCA cable that just stays plugged into your audio system all the time I guess that doesn't matter as much. I buy nice silicone USB charging cables for my phone because they'll last longer and are nicer to use, though the ones I like cost $12-$20, so not exactly $4k lol.
Not when there's load (like for speaker cables). Turns out shielding only matters for signal cables (which means analog ones unless your digital cable gets so long that it would have real signal loss)
https://www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-a-blind-test-audiophiles-couldnt-tell-the-difference-between-audio-signals-sent-through-copper-wire-a-banana-or-wet-mud-the-mud-should-sound-perfectly-awful-but-it-doesnt-notes-the-experiment-creator
You know we’ve known this since the 80s right
But its easy clicks. Who even gives a shit, if people want to buy snake oil let them.
The one thing I would ask is if they were tested in an electrically noisy environment + how long they last.
$4k is ridiculous, just buy the one that is twice the price of you want build quality.
I know one guy who considers himself an audiophile. He’s also an ass. He showed me his audio setup once, and he definitely overspent on cables. It made me smile.
Fuck amazon. You can get pertectly good cable for cheap at many places.
A connection through a potato yielded fine audio
But, wankers want to wank
As an audiophile myself, cable selection is very important. You see I have a very nice purple set of IEMs that came with a boring looking cable, I bought a nice looking purple braided cable the feels so nice in the hands and matches the shells.
There's another cable I got that looks classy and has wooden accents on the plug for my big headphones.
Listening in style is the what being an audiophile is all about 😎.
One thing to consider is some of the cheaper cables have connectors that degrade after being plugged in more than three times.
Once again proving to the non audiophile world that audiophiles are silly. Audiophiles, however, will not take their fingers out of their ears and will continue to do things like buy $4000 cables.
Yes it's a scam but, when you spend $100.000 on a set of speakers, you just can't spend $7 on cables.
(Sorry I forgot the /S)
That doesn't test durability over 10 years of use
You could replace the $7 Amazon cable every week and it will still be cheaper than a $4000 cable that lasts ten years
And then you'd be an asshole who damanges the environment.
Stop looking at cost in just dollars and cents.
I tested this myself as a skeptic, just changed the cabels, but was able to hear a very clear difference with my ears. Although I couldn't explain that difference as I lacked the vocabulary, still do.
Maybe the testing criteria can't capture that difference either. Either way, you should do you own testing and figure out what you like since this is subjective.
Edit: the scientific method is to test for yourself.
Edit 2: I don't care if you downvote me, but if you refuse to test things like this out for yourself I am disappointed.
I don't care if you believe me, it sounded different in a indescribable way.
If music is important to you I think doing tests like this is something you should do to see if there is a difference for you.
Basically I see a test like this and it seems like this food has the same nutrients as this more expensive food so its the same, while not being able to test for how food actually tastes.
Expensive things are not automatically better, don't get me wrong.
You described the placebo effect.
Bruh you can tell us you have superpowers all you want, we have science telling us otherwise.
Thank you for proving the placebo effect is real.
That's not the scientific method lmao
You need someone to change the cable for you without you knowing which one it is, otherwise the test is worthless.
Yeah, that happened. Only the cables were changed on the same audio equipment. Although it was was a night and day difference. Not that it sounded bad before. I'm sure it was objectively fine, the sound was just much more preferable. More like the band was physically in there room.
When i was about 9, i was absolutely convinced i could find water with the help of two metal rods. Whenever I held it over water, they would just magically cross without me doing anything. Until my dad filled some opaque cups with water and kept some empty, and put paper over all of them. I failed hard at sensing the the ones with water, even though i had earlier confirmed it worked on a cup with water in it.
Ever since that day I learned never to trust my own brain with things like these. Even though it might not be on purpose, our brain subconsciously deceives us into confirming our own bias.
You can try it out yourself. Have someone else switch the cables while you are not in the room. The try and identify which cable they used purely by sound. It's not as good as a double blind test, but it should be enough to test your own claim.
Agreed, people should do that.
As I stated in a different comment, this is what I did with a friend. We had 5 different cabels ranging from cheap to about $4000 and we kept listening to the same song. I could not hear the difference after the cheapest performance cable however (Purple flare) but I definitely could hear the difference between those and the cheaper cables.
Again, I don't know how to describe it. I'm not an audio guy, but I did prefer it.
Again, I'm not an expert. But I'm willing to bet that there is some aspect of sound that is simply not being accounted for in tests like these. And for anything that has to deal with your senses, you should test it for yourself, not just take someone else's word or experiment for it.
Sure buddy.
You tested those exact SKUs (Amazon Basics and the other one) or something comparable?
No, not those skus. But it was a similar test with compareable cables.
Edit: I tested with more cabels in between. I couldn't hear the difference between the $1000 speaker wires and the $4000 ones however.
As long as the cables are the correct guage and have shielding, there ahould be no audible difference.
You should have a friend switch them randomly and do 100 or so test listens, then report how often you guess it right. That would be more scientific, and if you had a good success rate would probably be a good basis for future experimentation by more professional teams. I truly encourage you to try this