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Very Complicated Situation

You wrote:
"The point I was trying to make (perhaps poorly) was if a manufactuer cannot provide a reasonable explination of why his wires "sound" better and are WORTH X amount of dollars.

Then in the eyes of the consumer he's paying X amount of dollars for just a piece of wire, dielectric and a jacket. So why should he spend X, when he could just go and buy Home Depot's wire much cheaper?"

First, you need to try and understand that at least half or more of the folks who started a high end cable company were originaly just trying to make cables that sounded good to them, for themselves. Of those folks, less than half probably had formal training in physics or engineering, and used an entirely valid and time-honored method of developng the cables that they felt were the best: trial and error empirical methods.

The reason that they were able to successfully better the retail/commercial cables that were out there at the time was that for the most part, cable science as a science, did not really exist. The physicists and engineers were taught that wire is wire, and if you make it large enough to carry the current, and/or it has a tidy enough impedance to carry that RF signal, you were done.

I was taught that way, it was "just L, C and R", nothing more. Dielectric quality was not even considered (the quality of the C portion), conductor quality was not considered, other than the very basic aspect of just simple resistance, and inductance was just a portion of the characteristic Z calcs, and not to be considered separately.

To this day, cable science is not taught in the schools or universities, mainly because so many schools no longer teach the students to think or encourage the students to think, to think for themselves, or to look outside the (textbook) box for other options.

Thus, even the designer/developer of a fine sounding audio cable may not have a definitive "scientific" reason that they can point to, to explain WHY their cables sound good, they know what sounds good to them, and stuck with it.

On the other hand, some of the folks who developed good sounding cables, _were_ formally trained, and do have a prety good idea of what is going on, and may even deliberately use LCR manipulation to achieve certain end goals and results. This would likley include taking the secondary and tertiary aspects of the primary L, C and R parameters into account. Some of them have patented their technology, and attempted to try and translate the highly esoteric and involved concepts they used into language that the consumer can maybe follow.

Sometimes these watered down explanations do not work so well, other times they might even sound like a form of snake oil. However, if you know how to read between the lines, and extrapolate what is being said about what and why, then sometimes the ad copy can start to make sense and you get an idea of what the designer intended, and what they were driving at.

Bottom line, there is no tried and true factual recipe for audio cable greatness. There are too many variables, too many different system situations, too many different individual and personal tastes as to what is THE greatest sound to achieve. As to why it cost so much, if you read my post and extrapolated the costs for just one basic and not too involved aproach to a high performance audio cable, based on the Belden 89259 coaxial cable, given the current costs of the teflon material, and the costs for high purity copper, or the use of silver, and even what amounts to a fairly basic high performance cable has reached the thousands of dollars price point. Add in a twisted pair construction, a separate shield, with resonance damping filler/spacer material, a really nice looking jacket, etc., and the price climbs even higher. I don't think that very many folks can appreciate the huge amount of labor involved in construction of a complicated audio cable, and the sheer cost of that labor. We are not talking about minimum wage workers gathered off the street, you need trained and experience assembly people, ones that can make adjustsments, and check the cables for proper assembly and performance, etc., this kind of labor does not come cheap.

Does any of this justify the $10,000 speaker cables, or the $8,000 dollar 3 foot interconnect? No more and no worse than the $250,000 hand built automobile, as I talk about in my cited post.

As for buying Home Depot wire, well, you already know the answer to that one, you listened, and found the Rat Shack and HD cables wanting, and decided to try something a bit more sophisticated. And it worked for you, and you are happy. Why worry about the Lamborghini's of the cable world, when you have found happiness with a used Mercedes? (or insert your choice of car here)

You made your decision by DRIVING (listening to) the car (cable), and that was all that mattered, not what the EPA mileage rating was, or the skid pad g-force capability.

As for me, I build my own, and have shown others how to do that, and am happy with my playback system. If you have never seen my web site, or my DIY cable info, check out:
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/cables.htm

specifically
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/i1.htm
and
http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/s1.htm


Jon Risch

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