When I first saw this thread appear, I wondered how long it would take until the conversation turned to cables and interconnects. It's a discussion that fills HiFi forums across the internet.
Most people here associate me with A2s, but outside my work on our little aluminium friends, I design and build recording studio audio systems. Here's an example of a studio I built in 2016...
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For those who have some familiarity with such systems, this is a studio based around an SSL AWS948 Delta feeding UA Apollo interfaces. Outboard includes classic stuff like Neve, Avalon and UA mic amps, 1176 compressors, a Fairchild, a selection of Chandler dynamics, AMS FX and lots, lots more. Monitoring is done through Neumann near-fields and a pair of Genelecs like those used by Skipton in his broadcast audio system.
I wired up this studio from scratch. There's not a single purchased cable in the entire analogue system. To make it all work, I did approximately 25,000 solder joints (small wonder I now find myself battling musculoskeletal issues!). I've created at least 30 similar studios across the UK and have been inside many, many more. One thing all professional recording studios across the world have in common: they don't pay any attention to the utter, utter nonsense that is peddled by the HiFi industry.
All the music you have ever listened to was recorded through humble copper wires. Admittedly, we're talking about decent copper wire rather than cheap bell wire, but nevertheless all the nebulous, unsubstantiated claims made by the HiFi industry about cabling is completely ignored within pro audio circles. Indeed, many pro audio engineers like myself and Skipton try to fight back against what we know to be fraudulent misinformation, but it's hard to convince anyone who has spent £1000 on a bit of wire that they could have achieved exactly the same thing for £25.
Cabling in recording studios is important and a great deal of thought is given to the matter. The most important thing is signal balancing, which is universally employed at every connection (and features on some expensive HiFi gear). Then there's the use of twisted pair and shielding. Skipton mentioned VDC Starquad in one of his posts, which employs all three of these technologies to ensure that signal is transferred as cleanly as possible. It is the industry leader because of science; repeatable, verifiable, unbiased measurement resulting in evidence-based conclusions. It costs roughly £4 per metre and will, absolutely categorically, do a better job than the Russ Andrews non-balanced RCA interconnect that's being sold on their website for £1816 per metre. Russ Andrews and similar manufacturers/vendors always advertise their cables using vague terms like "open", "tight", "revealing", "spacious", etc, precisely because there's no objective method of measuring such things. They're making sure that nobody can take them to task about their outlandish claims by deliberately avoiding talk of things that actually matter and that can be tested, like signal-to-noise ratio.
Directional analogue audio cables make no sense. Music is an alternating current! There is no net transfer of electrons in either direction. For every millisecond that the electrons are travelling in one direction, there's a millisecond when they're travelling in the opposite direction. Again, no professional recording studio outfit would give a moment's thought to which way around to use an analogue audio cable because it cannot make any difference. Physics says so.
Cabling does make a difference. A 2-core cable is basically a series of tiny resistors with loads of tiny capacitors in parallel. So, change the metal from copper to silver, for instance, and chances are that you'll find an empirical difference if you're measuring some parameter with an oscilloscope. But the room in which you listen will completely swamp that difference. You could make a more discernable difference by changing the fabric of your listening sofa. Room acoustics far, far outweighs anything as trivial as what kind of metal you're using over 50cm.
Expensive power cables also make no difference. There's approximately 3 miles between my house and the nearest power station. The cables cross railway lines, go over farmers' fields and are buried beneath houses. It then runs through the walls of my house as good old twin-and-earth. How exactly does my HiFi sound better due to the last 30cm being coated in some expensive material? Why is it always expensive materials that allegedly make things sound better? It's a scam. By all means buy a power conditioner that filters everything other than the 50Hz AC signal that you want, but don't waste your money on pretty kettle cables, as they're nothing more than that. Every piece of serious precision audio gear in the studio photographed above is connected to the mains using a bit of standard 3-core flex.
I love listening to music. I don't own a TV nor do I pay for a TV licence because there's nothing I'd rather do in the evenings than lose myself in one of my favourite albums. The make and model of my speakers are the same that were, for many years, used as the reference speakers in the Abbey Road Studios. Needless to say, they're breathtakingly wonderful. I chose which house to buy with their positioning in mind. I have modified the room acoustics by damping beneath the floor and above the ceiling. I also have a separate power circuit from the distro board such that the HiFi doesn't reside on the same circuit as my fridge and such. My point is, I take all this stuff very seriously because I get immense pleasure from feeling like I'm in the same room as the musicians when the recording took place. But I won't entertain cable voodoo or any of the so-called arguments in its favour. My system is entirely balanced, so I run VDC Starquad from my DAC to my preamp, and then from my premap to the power amp. I soldered the XLR connections myself. Nothing that Russ Andrews makes will sound any better. The speakers are driven along some fat VDC speaker cable that cost about £15 per metre. Its current-carrying capability is well in excess of what's needed, meaning no improvement can be made by changing the metal, adding some heatshrink in aesthetically pleasing places or by laying the cable on a series of little stands rather than on the carpet.
People will defend their choices because they have an emotional investment in doing so. Nobody likes to feel that they've wasted their money, that they've been duped or that they're simply wrong. But a lot of the HiFi industry - and particularly the world of cabling - belongs in the same category as tarot cards, angelic reiki, dragon healing, aura therapy and ear candling. It's a world of made-up nonsense. And all the audio engineers who have become regarded as HiFi gurus, whose word on such matters somehow must be respected, have simply been sucked into that same world of quackery.
Cheers,
Tom
