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Can't be

The most valuable posting I ever read on the internet about cables was authored several years ago by John Curl. He said he measuered noise from the 7th harmonic of 5 khz down -120 db for the cheapest $1 Radio Shack interconnect cable (the worst he could find) and down -135 db for the best cable he could find. This dispelled any lingering doubts I might have had about inexpensive interconnect cables being far more than adequate for use in ANY sound system. This hardly came as a surprise to me though since every test I tried where a 7 mhz video signal with over 350 times the bandwidth of a high fidelity audio signal appeared indistinguishable from the same signal sent to the same TV set as an RF signal for decoding by the TV set's own tuner. (The TV was Sony 36" Wega XBR extra bright and the source was cable TV feed to a VCR.) This is testimony to the dead flat FR of the cable and its immunity to noise at least in that application on that day. It is also in perfect agreement with my own A/B audo tests in which they are alternately inserted in the signal path an shunted by a preamp's tape monitor switch. Inexpensive cables have also never failed to sound indistinguishable to me from the shunt. Since I don't consider a cable a control element and I think most electrical engineers would agree, I consider any cable which performs differently from this to be defective and any cable more expensive that this to be an unnecessary waste of money. Nope, whatever the cause of the poor performance in Dan's setup, it wasn't the cable...unless of course he was foolish enough to use audiophile cables (sound's instead like he used Belden which is excellent.)

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