Recommend me some banana plugs pls

If you have particularly difficult to drive speakers, or a sensitive amplifier, then speaker cable does make a big difference, it's really as simple as that. It certainly is not a placebo in any way - different setups can require different cable. However, these systems are not your average systems and i think this is where the...confusion comes from. You generally wont hear much of a difference on a cheap Onkyo AV amp and a £500 set of mission surrounds, for example. I assume people who flat out deny speaker cable does anything haven't had the pleasure of playing around with the type of kit that is more sensitive to cable.

Really,you'd find a couple of £££/meter will cover just about everything most people are likely to own. You dont really need to spend more than that in most cases unless you are running long lengths of the stuff. When you see people spending £20/£40/£100 a metre, that's where you start to see the purchase justification / placebo but in some cases they really aren't making it up.
 
Surely if cable made a difference it would be pretty easy to prove? I mean it's easily proven that HDMI cables don't make a difference, people have done CRC checks etc and found the image identical.

Surely proving that cables change the frequency response of a speaker in a way that is audible should be fairly easy and yet there isn't one concrete report of any kind of experiment that proves that speaker cable makes a difference, why is this?

Of course manufacturers push speaker cables, the profit margins on them are massive.
 
sorry but you're wrong - sometimes the difference is surprisingly large when changing cables, sometimes its very small.
i have heard it many many times on all sorts of cables. it is not the placebo effect.

Nope.

I believe that you believe there's a difference but it's placebo.
 
Surely if cable made a difference it would be pretty easy to prove?

In some cases, it is.

http://sound.westhost.com/cables-p2.htm#spkr-leads

Difficult Loads
While it is true that reasonable quality twin cables (figure eight or zip cord) are adequate for nominal 8 ohm loads over short distances, there are a number of popular loudspeakers that are anything but nominal at high frequencies.

Two that a reader advised me about are the AR11 and the Quad ESL (old model). Both of these drop below 2 ohms in the treble frequencies. The AR bottoming out at 5kHz and the Quad at 18Khz (although anything from 15kHz to 18kHz is common). The dips are fairly sharp and so the load impedance is highly capacitive on the way down and inductive on the way up. The frequencies are high enough to not worry good amplifiers but what about the response at these dip frequencies?

Twin wire cables all have significant inductance which increases in proportion to length. With 10 amp rated twin flex over only 5 metres the response was down by 2.5 dB into one Quad ESL at 18 Khz, and 3.5 dB into the other speaker which had 8 metres. This was audible and unacceptable.

The only way to reduce cable linear inductance is to make the two wires talk to each other. Running in close parallel is a start, tight twisting is better but only by using multiple wires for each and interweaving can you really get the inductance down. Several cable makers have done this and sell them as low impedance cables, which is exactly what they are. There are several different cables that use this method, and twin coaxial cable is also used to achieve a similar result.

One construction uses two groups of 72 strands of enamelled wire plaited around a solid plastic core. Using these cables with difficult loads, the droop at either 5 or 18 kHz disappeared and the sound was distinctly better. There would be virtually no other way to solve the problem short of mono amplifiers sited next to each loudspeaker.

The twin-wire cable dropped 1db @ 18khz every 3meters of cable which is very real and very measurable :)
 
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That's a different thing all together, the cable used wasn't specced high enough to carry the load, I'm sure you could have got cable to spec that was still cheap, that doesn't prove that stupidly expensive speaker cables make any difference at all, just that the cables have to be up to spec for the load they are carrying.

Your own link states the following in the summary.

Use quality cable, but extravagance will buy no more genuine performance.

And

Be willing to experiment, using 3-core mains cable (not the types described above, either), and paralleling two of the conductors for the speaker negative connection (or the positive - the speaker will not care either way). Save yourself a fortune, so you can buy more music instead.

For the types of runs most home users are using and the systems they are using they could probably use pretty much any speaker cable and have no issues at all.

Though thanks for the link, I found the following interesting also

http://sound.westhost.com/cables-p3.htm#interconnects

Especially since Nick1881 was claiming to hear a massive difference changing one of his.
 
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That's a different thing all together, the cable used wasn't specced high enough to carry the load, I'm sure you could have got cable to spec that was still cheap, that doesn't prove that stupidly expensive speaker cables make any difference at all, just that the cables have to be up to spec for the load they are carrying.

It's the cables inductance that is the problem there, and that changes with different cable constructions and it's exactly what i have said and I'll quote it again for reference:
james.miller said:
If you have particularly difficult to drive speakers, or a sensitive amplifier, then speaker cable does make a big difference, it's really as simple as that. It certainly is not a placebo in any way - different setups can require different cable.


Broken Hope said:
Your own link states the following in the summary.
Use quality cable, but extravagance will buy no more genuine performance.
Yep, see above :)

Broken Hope said:
And
Be willing to experiment, using 3-core mains cable (not the types described above, either), and paralleling two of the conductors for the speaker negative connection (or the positive - the speaker will not care either way). Save yourself a fortune, so you can buy more music instead.
For the types of runs most home users are using and the systems they are using they could probably use pretty much any speaker cable and have no issues at all.
Yep, see above. Or this:
james.miller said:
Really,you'd find a couple of £££/meter will cover just about everything most people are likely to own. You dont really need to spend more than that in most cases unless you are running long lengths of the stuff. When you see people spending £20/£40/£100 a metre, that's where you start to see the purchase justification / placebo but in some cases they really aren't making it up.

It's never about the price, its about the right stuff for the job. However the argument here, one that spoffle is championing, is that cables dont make a difference. They do and I know this, but I am also no more an advocate of over spending on speaker cable than you or spoffle are. Infact, my stuff cost me about £1/m as i recall. but then I'm only using that cheap onkyo/mission setup i mentioned previously - I wouldnt see any difference in spending more on a more elaborately constructed cable.
 
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It's the cables inductance that is the problem there, and that changes with different cable constructions and it's exactly what i have said and I'll quote it again for reference:




Yep, see above :)


Yep, see above. Or this:


It's never about the price, its about the right stuff for the job. However the argument here, one that spoffle is championing, is that cables dont make a difference. They do and I know this, but I am also no more an advocate of over spending on speaker cable than you or spoffle are. Infact, my stuff cost me about £1/m as i recall. but then I'm only using that cheap onkyo/mission setup i mentioned previously - I wouldnt see any difference in spending more on a more elaborately constructed cable.


No no, you've completely misunderstood what I mean.

I'm saying that expensive speaker cable making a difference because it's expensive magic infused stuff is the placebo.

As long as you use speaker cable that's correct (as in gauge) then you'll get the same performance.

I'm talking about the way people claim that their cable changes the tonality of the sound coming from their speakers.

There will be absolutely zero difference proper cable for a system, and silly expensive magic infused cabling.

Sound quality doesn't "change" or increase with magic cables, it simply goes down with inadequate cabling.
 
Yeah people will go on about brightness, musicality, sound stage, etc etc, I don't believe that magic speaker cable can bring about those sort of changes.
 
Funnily enough, most of the things people claim has changed in the sound are things that you can't really quantify, and tend to mean very little.
 
I never mentioned a change in tonality at all.

Have you actually listened for yourself with reasonably high end kit and tried different cables? If not then you aren't really qualified to comment.

Also HDMI cables don't make a difference as they are digital, speaker outputs are analogue and the cable can have an effect on things.

Possibly the reason I heard a big improvement moving from LV61 interconnects to G1000HD is the fact that the LV61 cable is measurably different, I read somewhere it was a higher capacitance.
 
I knew because I changed them, I'd welcome a test, the difference was quite dramatic. Remember the Epic has more silver, which is a better conductor than copper.

I highly doubt a fuse would make any difference, I have a Mark Grant mains cable, it made no audible difference at all.

I'm also running Mark Grant G2000HD interconnects, I originally had his LV61, I can safely say this change made a huge difference, I mean massive, like I changed amp or something.

You strongly implied it, see the above ^

Also with regards to the above, as I've already stated, if you take a speaker or amp apart, have a look at what has been used to construct it.

You'll never see all that wonder cable you believe in. It'll be basic copper and solder, no silver or any magic infused stuff.

So even if it was true, it's completely pointless because the basic copper in your speakers and amps would make the magic cable in between, completely pointless.

I never mentioned a change in tonality at all.

Have you actually listened for yourself with reasonably high end kit and tried different cables? If not then you aren't really qualified to comment.


Well, it doesn't really work like that. You aren't qualified to to comment simply because you believe you've heard a difference.

Human perception is a fickle thing, just because you've listened to high end "kit" (what does that actually mean?).

Until YOU sit a double blind test and can tell the difference, then you are not qualified to maintain your claims.

This is how it works.

Also HDMI cables don't make a difference as they are digital, speaker outputs are analogue and the cable can have an effect on things.

HDMI cables aren't digital, they are analogue, the signal sent isn't digital either, it's analogue.

What IS digital is how the signal is read and transmitted.

The reason there isn't a difference isn't because the process is digital, it's simply because that's how it works.

If you look at things like VGA or Scart. A "High Quality" VGA or Scart cable won't improve image quality, it's just that a bad cable will degrade the quality.

The process of degradation is quite similar between, say HDMI and VGA it's just that the degradation is displayed differently because of the way the standards work differently, and one processes in digital and the other in analog.

A bad VGA cable could result in bad colour data, for example, making the colours off, or the sharpness, resulting in a fuzzy image.

With HDMI you'll get artefacts, image break up, image blocking and eventually no image, the "it's digital, it works or it doesn't" isn't exactly how it's portrayed, what it really means is that the image will be perfect (as it was sent) or it'll be noticeably broken in some way.

Possibly the reason I heard a big improvement moving from LV61 interconnects to G1000HD is the fact that the LV61 cable is measurably different, I read somewhere it was a higher capacitance.

You think magic interconnects make increase quality too? OH LAWD.

The same applies to those too, but to a lesser extent (as in, they can deal with lesser thickness/gauge as they aren't being used to drive something like a speaker).
 
HDMI cables aren't digital, they are analogue, the signal sent isn't digital either, it's analogue.

What IS digital is how the signal is read and transmitted.

I stopped reading at this point.

Quote from Wikipedia
HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is a compact audio/video interface for transferring uncompressed video data and compressed/uncompressed digital audio data from an HDMI-compliant device ("the source device") to a compatible digital audio device, computer monitor, video projector, or digital television.[1] HDMI is a digital replacement for existing analog video standards.

Also scart is analogue.

:o
 
I don't know whether I should laugh or get frustrated when reading spoffle's posts (in this thread and others), there is so much misconception and misinformation and lies it makes me wondering whether he is a troll or simply just making things up.

Surely we all know HDMI is digital like one know a wheel is round, it is like saying USB isn't digital.
 
I stopped reading at this point.

It's not my fault you don't understand.

Quote from Wikipedia

Oh cool, Wikipedia. If you understood properly, you wouldn't need to try and educate me on HDMI.

I am fully aware that HDMI as a standard is digital, what you don't understand is that electrical signals sent down cables are technically always analogue.

The way the information is structured is what differs between an analog signal and a digital one.

A Digital signal is sent and read as bits, however when it's going down the cable, it's sent as a series of voltages and forms a signal wave.

With digital, the signal wave on the other end will be read as either 1 or 0, rather than that and anything in between for analog, but the way the signal travels is largely the same.

This was my point as I tried to explain something further but somehow, your lack of understanding has become my fault or issue.

OH LAWDY LAWD.

Since you love to use Wikipedia, and obviously have a poor understanding of the subject, educate yourself on electronic circuits;

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Electronics/Analog_Circuits

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_electronics

I'll pick a part out for you to make it easy.

Every digital circuit is also an analogue circuit, in that the behaviour of any digital circuit can be explained using the rules of analogue circuits.



Also scart is analogue.

:o

I didn't say it wasn't :confused:

I don't know whether I should laugh or get frustrated when reading spoffle's posts (in this thread and others), there is so much misconception and misinformation and lies it makes me wondering whether he is a troll or simply just making things up.

See the above, just because you don't understand what I'm saying, doesn't mean I'm talking rubbish, so stop whinging and claiming I'm lying because you don't understand a topic.

Surely we all know HDMI is digital like one know a wheel is round, it is like saying USB isn't digital.

I never said HDMI isn't digital, a HDMI cable isn't "digital", the way data goes down it, isn't digital.

The way it's transmitted and received/decoded is the digital part.

The same applies to USB, the data signal is transmitted as a series of voltages.

What makes it digital is the bits on either end of the cable, not the cable itself, my point, that you haven't understood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal

In computer architecture and other digital systems, a waveform that switches between two voltage levels representing the two states of a Boolean value (0 and 1) is referred to as a digital signal, even though it is an analog voltage waveform, since it is interpreted in terms of only two levels.



Seriously, *facepalm*
 
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I do understand, it is digital, that is the point.

The end result is you get a identical file either end in perfect 1 & 0, it could be transmitted by 6th sense for all I care.
 
I don't need to educate myself on electronics seeing as I'm an electronic engineer working for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Regardless of the fact that it's an analogue voltage sent down the cable it's still completely different from an analogue signal, digital will either get there or it won't, it can't degrade the same way an analogue signal can. Why are we even discussing this? This thread has asked about banana plugs in an analogue situation.

I won't waste anymore time replying to spoffle, go troll somewhere else.
 
I do understand, it is digital, that is the point.

The end result is you get a identical file either end in perfect 1 & 0, it could be transmitted by 6th sense for all I care.

No I don't think you do understand, if you did you wouldn't have made that stupid post you made.

The fact that you say "it could be transmitted by the 6th sense for all I care" shows it too because I never once claimed HDMI wasn't digital, I said HDMI cables aren't.

I don't need to educate myself on electronics seeing as I'm an electronic engineer working for one of the biggest companies in the world.

No chance you're an electronic engineer, they tend not to believe in rubbish like magic cables and interconnects.

But you do clearly need to educate yourself on electronics based on your previous posts.

If you were an electronic engineer you'd have understood straight away what I meant.

Regardless of the fact that it's an analogue voltage sent down the cable it's still completely different from an analogue signal, digital will either get there or it won't, it can't degrade the same way an analogue signal can. Why are we even discussing this? This thread has asked about banana plugs in an analogue situation.

No, the point is that a digital signal down a cable is largely similar to an analog signal going down a cable.

The notion that it either gets there or it doesn't isn't true either.

Digital signals can and do degrade, it might not be identical to an analog signal, but it is quite similar.

The reason we are discussing this is because you've been making claims that your magic cables change the tonality of the sound from your speakers which is rubbish, you then tried to make out that anyone who hasn't used magic cables with "high end kit" isn't qualified to comment, when you yourself are not qualified to comment as you haven't done an ABX test to verify.

I won't waste anymore time replying to spoffle, go troll somewhere else.

So you don't understand what trolling means either? What is with people lately, trying to dismiss everything they don't like the sound of as trolling? It's getting pathetic.
 
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