[Scott Dorsey]

geoff wrote:

As I've mentioned before,once upon a time I did a (single)blind
experiment with Monster and several other 'esoteric' brand interconnects
at -10dBV Line level, compared to unscreened coat-hanger wire. I could
not perceive a difference, even wrt noise level. At phono cartridge
level there was noise pickup which would have masked any wire effect.

It was repeated later in a double-blind scenario with the same result.

Gabe Weiner and I did an A/B test between some low voltage lighting cable
(giant zip cord with doubtful dielectric) and MIT interconnects, and there
was a clear difference. He opened up the box on one end of the MIT cable
and found inductors and capacitors in there. So, of course it sounded
different. It was designed to sound different.

There are a lot of cables in the high end home market that specifically have
weird distributed reactance in order to deliberately be used as a tone control.
I am not a fan of this, but it's a thing that people do in the world of
high-Z interconnections.

It is easy to make things sound different. It is much harder to make things
sound better.

I urge people to do null testing, because if you do it in a high impedance
environment you'll hear all kinds of weird stuff, and if you do it in a
low-Z 600 ohm pro audio environment you won't hear anything at all. To my
mind this shows the superiority of the balanced low-Z interface more than
anything else.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."