Focal cables keeps their shape/kinks so bad that it irritates you so much until you break and have to replace them right there that day.

I don’t know about their stock cables, but the stupidly expensive meze cable I bought after the Focal Radiance one pissed me off so much is really good!

I just want to find a braided cable where the strands are as thick as the Meze ones but not as much as a rip off.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong - I haven’t been able to find anything that has studied or discounted it yet though!

This post asked for studies, I provided one and no one has provided any that refute it - maybe do that before you downvote without providing anything to the discussion…?

Alright, this is the small, insignificant hill I’m prepared to die on.

Firstly, placebo is the wrong word - I’d argue it’s more of a perceptual phenomenon.

Why? Because we prioritise visual information over auditory information - we know this from the Mcgurk effect where hearing a word said over a video of a different word being said causes people to hear a different (third) word.

In this scenario all the ABX studies would show this had no effect on the audio, but we can clearly see from studies ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196040/ ) that what is perceived by people and what auditory information they are receiving can be different things.

This would mean that we could equate the ABX studies to be victims of looking for or measuring the wrong thing. The see visual information on the cables as a confounding variable, when in reality they should be considered as part of the dependent variable - with audio and visual data being seen as one/a whole.

Also, we know that 2 headphones can have the same/similar FR, but will/can sound different.

So, what we need is a blind or some kinds of ABX test where copper cables are put in either copper or silver sleeves and vice versa, not tell the participants and then see what the results are. I haven’t been able to find any studies on this, and until I do I won’t accept that cables don’t change a persons perception of how music sounds - and after all, perception is reality.

Focal Radiance - I wear my clears more, bit the Radiance are worth it when needed. For IEMS, my jh7 ciems - your hear nothing but the music!

Our brain prioritises visual information over audio information, leading to things like the Mcgurk effect.

What we see can change what we hear, so people could see a copper cable and think ‘this now sounds warmer’ etc - the brain has been told that so it thinks that - just like how the same sound/word over a different video of a mouth moving makes people hear a different word.

Different to a placebo effect, and way more interesting if you ask me!

Other people want to try to justify the $$$ they spent on an expensive cable. Besides microphonics and looking pretty there’s not much else a cable can do.

You wear open backs, then get annoyed with the sounds and put some closed backs/ciems on for some peace and quiet, and let the fam know they need to use hand signals.