James and Alexis, I would think that in some cases the question of whether a change in cables produces a change in sound could be answered for a given hardware configuration by subtracting signals and looking at and listening to the difference signal. Only if the difference is not negligible relatively to the source signal should we even entertain the possibility of audible differences. What is "negligible", ie, how much and what kind of differences are too small to be audible to trained/untrained listeners? I don't know the psychoacoustics literature to answer that. Depending on the answer to that, you may be able to rule out audible differences by this sort of simple electronics method in some cases. More simply, from the perspective of faithful transmission of a source signal, if the difference signal between the original source signal and the signal after transmission over the cable being tested is negligible, the transmission is nearly exact. I agree with Alexis that this is a main goal for our cables.

Hugh, you are essentially saying that whether or not changing cables changes the signal/sound is dependent on how robust the hardware is to variability in cable parameters. This is a very important consideration for line level signals and I agree completely. With microphone cables, however, it seems to me that the output circuitry of different microphones is much more variable than that of line level devices, and the signals are orders of magnitude lower, resulting in lower S/N ratios than for line levels. Does your point carry over to microphone cables? In other words, do you think that the sound quality of high quality microphones should not vary audibly with changes in cables from normal studio quality cables to novel innovative cables?

Hugh your point about not testing a cable in isolation is key and shows that the simple test procedure I proposed is probably overly simplified and impractical, at least for microphones. It is easy to imagine significantly different results for different microphones, microphone / preamp combinations, or even different voices.

Post Extras