(This is an edited version of a post I made on another subreddit.
This post is not here to cause debate or discourse but to try and research and study this topic
before you read I would like to say that this entire post is for discussion/theorizing please do not take this post as undisputed fact. The information presented comes from me asking a professor outside of the audio community what he thought the effects of cables would be on various audio devices)
I would like to state that personally I haven’t bought any of the super high dollar premium cables because I’m a broke lad, but that this is more of a theoretical discussion!
I think the answer is yes cables do make a difference but they also most likely do not matter to everyone (or a majority of people)
I am a mechanical engineering student that is quite fascinated in material sciences and the more I’ve seen the cable debate the more curious I have become. I am more on the side of the cables not changing much if anything, but I simply wanted to know more.
My curiosity continued to grow and I happened to be in a materials science class this semester! So who better to ask than my professor whose entire job/field is researching the properties of materials!
So I asked the professor after class one day and we began talking and of course he was excited to share with me his knowledge. He told me that the difference would be found in the metal itself! The higher the quality of the metal in this practice would be related to the crystal size of the materials being used. Ideally you would want your cables made of larger crystals if not one single crystal, but of course this process is expensive meaning that to make a profit brands have to sell this premium manufacturing for a premium price. He told me that you most likely wouldn’t be able to sell any sort of “single crystal” cable for less than a hundred dollars at least so there’s a good chance that a lot of the “single crystal” cables seen online are in fact not single crystal and that they’re just marketed that way to compete with the multi hundred dollar cables.
Now when I asked him what the benefit of these higher quality cables would be I noticed an interesting response! He told me that as the power and signal moves up the cable you can think of each crystal as having a barrier around it (called a grain boundary) and that every time the signal SMASHES past that barrier it uses some of its power and it can potentially mutate the signal a tiny bit. If you have a super cheap cable with billions of these crystal boundaries then that’s billions of times where your signal is smashing it’s face into a wall potentially harming your signal more and more as it makes the short trip up the cable and to your ears. In premium cables where there’s only one crystal or maybe only a handful of crystals that greatly reduces the amount of times the signal is being forced to charge across the barrier!
The reason this response really interested me is because while the professor is not present in the audio community his description draws parallels in the instances where people notice a difference in the budget vs premium cables the things they note are more volume and a richer (commonly) warmer sound! That could very well be explained by the grain structure differences in the cables themselves!
Now in theory this would mean that everyone could notice a more powerful and detailed listening experience by gradually upgrading their cables HOWEVER in practice unless you’re rocking premium premium headphones the chances of you noticing a big difference is small because you also have to consider the quality of the materials your headphones THEMSELVES are made of! If you buy a 700$ cable for your 15$ iems the weakest link is still most likely the 15$ iems. This does mean however if you’ve already spent thousands of dollars on headphones maybe you can squeeze even more performance out of them with a high dollar cable upgrade since the components of the headphones themselves might be held back by the quality of the cable.
The moral of the story and the true question presented is while yes the cables can vary in quality which undeniably causes differences, are these differences significant enough to change how a human perceives the audio?
In the other post some individuals have found research articles regarding to this topic and with the numerous amount of people present here I thought it would be possible to gather even more information!
I would like to again say that the point of this post is NOT to cause any debates where the evidence is subjective information but instead try to find objective/logical/numerical answers
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Take the shortest headphone cable or adapter you have and measure the resistance. Then take all the cables and adapters you have and chain them all together then measure the resistance. Report your results here.
My advice to anyone who thinks cables do anything: Have a look at all of the wires that you can’t usually see. The wires inside the amplifier are crap. The signal also travels through thin copper traces a fration of a milometer thick. Before exiting your amp, the signal goes through resistors, which are basically the equivalent to the world’s worst wire.
The first thing that happens inside the headphone is that the signal goes into a wire that’s as thin as a hair.
Ditto for power cables. The wire in your walls are crap, the cables inside the amp is crap and the wirst place that the power cable goes to is a fuse (a super thin wire)
I am of the opinion a person’s mood makes a far greater difference to what they hear.
The audio signal (the electricity) flowing thru a headphone cable is low compared to a lot of things, low enough that premium cable material don’t matter. Like others said, the construction and how it handles noise or interference matters more. You’d be gaining something more on a premium cable if it is constructed to last.
Moral of the story is that the whole things are subjective AF.
Considering that some people even prefer coathanger over cable.“…maybe you can squeeze even more performance out of them”
Is that extra performance audible? most blind testing says no
You should ask your teacher about interfereance, cable sizing and power mangement in reticulated systems as well. The things he noted above are very important on medium/large scale electrical systems with balancing power loads in each system being seriously impacted by the cable material/quality.
The big thing, from an engineering perspective, is what you noted. You need to have quailty products at both ends of the cable with a cable that is “sized” for the losses between the two components (i.e. amp, Dac, IEM, Headphone and etc). This is in a perfect enginering world though lol, it does not necessarily translate to the real world.
It is an interesting topic to look into while you are studying if you have the time. Audio engineering and power reticulation is an important component of your engineering education.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter. It’s like trying to buy a headphone that produces amazing 50khz but your ears can only hear about 16khz. OR getting 1gbps modem for 1mbps internet speed.
I think the answer is yes cables do make a difference but they also most likely do not matter to everyone (or a majority of people)
Unless you can measure a difference and confirm that difference is audible in blind tests that are properly setup (volume matched, all other variables removed, etc). Then all of this is meaningless in practical terms.
There is all kinds of low level theory about cables that explain that technically speaking there can be very minor differences in the signal via different cables but basically none of them have proven to be reliably audible in 99% of cases especially with every day setups during every day use.
Have a look here to see all the failed attempts at finding audible differences in all kinds of equipment. https://www.head-fi.org/threads/testing-audiophile-claims-and-myths.486598/
Interesting take from your professor. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve also not gone too deep into the cable game but have noticed differences between them. However I seldom find a cable to be categorically better.
I’ve wondered about impedance and capacitance of cables affecting sound quality, but the single crystal note was interesting. I’ve generally ignored that as far as marketing materials go.
That said, I have come across a couple of cables that sound noticeably smoother than cheap cables, wherein the cheaper/generic ones tend to almost sound grainy in comparison. I wonder if the crystal thing has anything to do with that.
While all of this may be interesting from a materials science point of view, it is 100% irrelevant for headphone cables. For our purposes, we can treat wire is perfectly linear Ohmic conductor with some resistance/capacitance/inductance per unit of length.
I get what your professor mentioned, but the effects he mentioned aren’t really noticeable at the short lengths, with headphone equipment you would need a few hundred meters of cable to start noticing it, I wrote a comment about the same topic recently so I’ll edit this one in a few minutes when I find it
Here’s an analysis performed by a very experienced electrical engineer. You know, someone actually qualified to answer such questions:
There’s plenty more on the site.
Except Amir is not an EE.
You’re free to spend as much as you like on pretty looking wires, consensus is they dont make any audible difference.
Yours also free to fall into sunk-cost and defend them
The “issue” with both of these is that once you pass looks, there is zero evidence any audible or measurable difference exists, and it seems like cable companies or those companies that also make cables take advantage or people who don’t know how much they don’t know.
You can buy cables with higher impedance that may increase bass or change other things, but it’s far easier and cheaper to use eq or buy resistors to plug in
Amir of audioscience review, along with others have tested signals ran through expensive and cheap cables, and by flipping the signal and replacing the result, any difference would be audible, so far I’ve seen nothing of the sort