Do cables Matter? Yes. You couldn’t hear your speakers without them! But do expensive cables make your system sound better? Not necessarily
My background is in sound engineering, I have a degree in music recording tech, and I work full time at a pro sound retail store as a repair tech and salesman. I also had this article fact checked by my coworker and fellow repair tech before posting it here.
Cables to matter to the degree that using the right cable for the right application matters. Using the right gauge wire for the amount of power you’re pushing matters, knowing where to use shielded cable vs unshielded cable matters. Knowing where to use balanced vs unbalanced cable matters.
Balanced cable: have 3 terminals. (+) (-) and (ground). A balanced cable from a balanced source carries two out of phase copies of the same signal, and blends them together at the destination. This eliminates hum that is picked up along the length of the cable. Balanced cables include XLR and TRS. Balanced cables are best when running long lengths of cable, because the longer the cable the more EM interference will be picked up along the length of the cable. For short cable runs of a few feet, it won’t make a noticeable difference.
Unbalanced cables have (+) and (-) terminals. Examples of unbalanced cables include most speaker cables, RCA cables, and instrument cables.
Shielded cables have a (+) and (-) terminal where the (-) terminal is a wire shield that is wrapped or woven around the (+) wire. This helps to reduce EM interference. Most small signal carrying cables will be shielded, like RCA cables and instrument cables. Balanced cables are also shielded with the shield connected to ground.
Now, most speaker cables are going to be both unbalanced and unshielded. They have just a positive and negative terminal. Speaker cables need to be heavy gauge wire, this is because speaker cables are typically carrying relatively high amounts of power, so thicker wire=less resistance=more power handling. Speaker cables don’t typically need to be balanced or shielded, this is because the additional EM interference picked up along the length of the cable will be negligible compared to the signal being carried by the cable, and therefore not audible.
So, using the correct gauge of wire is really important for speaker cables because the more power you put though a cable, the more heat you generate as a byproduct. If the cable is too small to handle the load, it will melt the casing, potentially causing a short and damage to your equipment or worst case a fire. So that’s why you don’t use a guitar cable to connect your head to your cab even though they both have 1/4 ends. That’s why you use speaker cable for speakers. That’s it.
What to look for? What actually matters when choosing a cable? There are definitely differences in quality of cables, there are some things that will make a small improvement in fidelity in theory, and higher quality cables will also last longer than cheap cables. There may be a slight difference in noise floor when using a good shielded cable vs cheap shielded cable, and oxygen free copper will have slightly less resistance than standard copper which will improve fidelity. I generally like Mogami/Canere cable because they use good quality wire and good quality casing. Overall, you will pay slightly more for a high quality cable that will last longer and may have a slightly lower noise floor. Anyone selling cables for hundreds of dollars making wild claims about clarity and sound stage is selling you snake oil. Period. Looking at you, audioquest and Cardas. The difference in audio fidelity will likely not be audible in most home audio setups. I wanted to make this post because I see this question pop up here DAILY and I’m getting tired of it. Less beating a dead horse and more focal grande utopia’s please.
Theoretically yes, but it is important to quantify these kind of issues. It comes down to the ohms, or the reactance of the system if we want to get fancy.
Amplifiers have output impedance – internet says it is anywhere between 0.0x to 0.3 ohms for speaker amplifiers if it is a respectable solid state amp, and typically much, much worse if it is a tube amp. (This, somehow, doesn’t immediately disqualify tube amps from being used in audiophile circles, but it actually should, if we otherwise worry about minute differences in cable reactance.)
Very few people seem to worry about the output impedance of their amp. I think it’s just the way people think about audio – they do not consider amplifier as set of parameters that characterize its sound reproduction properties, but it is sort of like black box with its own identity almost. So they worry what are good enough cables to plug into the amp, rather than using the amplifier’s output impedance as guide and some kind of estimate of maximum impedance they can tolerate which is usually taken to be 10 % of the speaker’s nominal impedance, e.g. 0.4 ohms for 4 ohm speakers. If you use 0.2 ohm output impedance amplifier, you can afford about 0.2 ohms of speaker wire resistance, then. I think 0.2 ohm wires are somewhere in coathanger territory.