Do cables make a difference to your listening experience.

I'm mostly far too lazy to be arsed with cable comparisons. Several years ago, I replaced some freebie cables with the then AoS flavour of the month cables. The FOTM cables sounded much worse, a finding that was greeted with disbelief here on AoS. Earlier this year, however, I swapped in a spare set of VdH cables in place of the set of freebies connecting my headphone amp to the preamp in the upstairs system, and the difference was immediately noticeable, and represented a considerable improvement. So, yes cables can and do make a difference, but different doesn't always equal better.

In the downstairs system, by contrast, swapping around interconnects seems to make relatively little difference (but there's effectively only one swappable cable anyway, between the CDT and the amp/DAC, so not much scope for experimentation).

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Originally Posted by Haselsh1

In response to others who have posted here and clearly do not know how to listen, when I change cables in my system, my partner Sue and I can hear a clear difference. The difference we hear is as clear as crystal and the equivalent to a cartridge change.

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I don't listen to cables or anything else in my system. I simply make a substitution and if there is a change or a difference that is important to me I will hear it, whether I want to or not. After a week or two, I will reverse the substitution to see if the change was genuine or illusory. Then I have to decide if the change is an improvement or not, and thus make the substitution permanent.

I have tried a dozen or so cables over the years, and whilst I have at times heard differences, they have been so slight as to not be worth worrying about.

I stopped using cables years ago.

Didn't the op ask for a simple yes/no type answer?:cool:

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Originally Posted by Pieoftheday

Didn't the op ask for a simple yes/no type answer?:cool:

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Maybe. :D

Analogue: YES

Digital: NO

Mains: ?

Ah but how does one determine whether the difference is better or not...? Sue and I can clearly hear a difference but how does one decide whether it is better or just different...? We now have a set of cables that we are happy with so to answer the original post 'yes' cables did make a difference to our experience.

Going from bell wire to heavy guage high strand count speaker wires did make a big difference but never fell for the £1000 interconnects being that much better than £50 interconnects nonsense.

The laws of physics just does not back it up, Audiophools and their money syndrome again. Once their money is spent people will hear all sorts of unproven improvements just to justify their spending to themselves,

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Originally Posted by Puffin

I stopped using cables years ago.

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Same here, I just glue all my kit together. Sounds great.

Marco.

Could do with a few more votes on this. It's interesting.

So far 12% say they never hear a difference. I mean I voted 'sometimes', but 'never'? Can't get my head round that.