I nya TAS jämför de olika kablar i prisklassen 122-250$. I en av sammanfattningarna finns det en del att tänka på. Debatten om kablar har varit "hård" på denna sida. Jag själv går i kabel tankar och fick en del att fundera över. Eller, han skrev det jag själv tycker och tänker.
Saxat ifrån artikeln.
One final note: Fine-tuning a system with wiring is like taking 600-grade sandpaper to a marble sculpture: It's a finishing detail. Audiophiles should not hope to fix large sonic problems with any interconnect or loudspeaker cable. Careful selection of wire products can enhance performance, but no cable will fix everything, nor should it be used as an equalizer.
Paul's Curmudgeonly Conclusion
It is difficult to think of an activity more meaningless than subjectively comparing and evaluating any sort of wire. Unless wire does something obviously wrong—like, in Peter Walker's dry observation, failing to pass current, causing an amplifier to oscillate (as a few speaker cables once did), or picking up noise—there is no way of knowing whether its contribution to the sound is more accurate than the "reference." I use quotation marks because the so-called accuracy of the reference is itself an unknown inasmuch as its only claim to being a reference is that it happens to be the wire one has been using for awhile.1 But it's like surveying on quicksand: Not only won't the reference stay put, it's not even precisely locatable. All one can say is that one likes the sound of the new wire better, worse, or both than the old one.
Then there is the question of why wire sounds the way it does. Robert E. Greene once fretted, "What's frustrating about interconnects is that no one has come up with a coherent theoretical model as to how they work. Has anyone, for example, ever found [a] cable that measures well according to all the accepted criteria of capacitance, resistance, and inductance and that sounds consistently, system to system, bad?"
My own belief is that observed differences in interconnects—assuming no gross misbehavior—have to do with tiny anomalies in apparent frequency response that owe to shielding, length, their behavior as noise, degrees of compatibility with other equipment, and so on. Consider the irony that for 20 years, the audiophile community has rejected tone controls as a corruption of signal purity even as it has re-embraced the function of tone controls by way of interconnects, cables, line cords, connectors, not to mention pods, pads, cones, tips, stands.2 My experience suggests that if substituting an interconnect makes a huge difference in your system, the likelihood is that one or the other is doing something grievously wrong or that the frequency response of your speakers is seriously amiss.
Not only did we find the differences among these interconnects rather small and not always consistent from one source to another, but rapid A/B comparisons were just about the only way we could be sure we were hearing the differences most of the time.3 Indeed, I would not bet that I could tell which was playing several hours after an A/B session.
The principal value of this survey, then, is of a paradigmatic sort. Since any interconnect may make at least a tiny difference and the only tools most of us have are our ears, audio systems, favorite recordings, and live-music references, all we can do is what we've done here: Hook them up, listen, and buy the one that seems to work best in our own systems.
Recently a self-proclaimed instant- internet guru wrote (on his Web site) that if at least half the system budget isn't allocated to wire, it cannot be regarded as a serious system. The thought that people not only believe this but act upon it is depressing. When I told an audiophile friend that we were doing a survey of interconnects costing $200/meter, he said, "But cables don't start to get good until $500 a meter." I did not have the heart to inform him that one of the finest systems he and I have ever heard—wide-range, resolution of the highest, magnificently musical, with almost perfect tonal balance—uses mostly generic interconnects, 14-gauge outdoor-extension cable (the orange stuff) for the speakers, and power cords supplied by the electronics' manufacturers.
I won't argue with anyone who insists that wire costing thousands of dollars a meter makes his system sound better to him. But nobody—nobody—has ever convincingly demonstrated any real correlation between price and performance. If this survey does nothing more than persuade a few readers that this is the truth, it will have taken on some meaning.
1. As noted, my reference happens to be Kimber Select KS-1021, but when I call it a "reference" I am speaking descriptively, not evaluatively. It happens to produce consistently excellent results in systems I've assembled over the years (though conditions of late have made me wish Ray Kimber would rethink the desirability of leaving his interconnects unshielded).
2. None of these things is capable of the consistency, repeatability, and predictability of tone controls.
3. Bear in mind that we evaluated these only as a CD interconnect; you'll probably get different results in preamp-to-amp applications.
The reference cables we refer to are Kimber Kable's Select KS-1021 and Nordost's Valhalla.
Den som vill läsa hela artikeln;
http://www.theabsolutesound.com/newsletter/138/interconnect.htm
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Posted - 2002/09/21 : 19:30:42
