Blind Test: Most Listeners Can Tell the Difference Between Speaker Cables

Skeptics (including me) love to laugh at people who claim they can hear the difference between stereo components hooked up with one cable vs. another. Can wires really be that important in the audio experience?

The Wall Street Journal put the question to the test at a recent audio show, renting a booth, and hooking up two sets of identical components, differing only by the speaker cable. One set used off-the-roll, 14-gauge speaker cable from a hardware store. Another used a pair of Sigma Retro Gold cables from Monster, $2,000 for 16 feet of cable total and "as thick as your thumb." The writer couldn't tell the difference and figured no one else could either.

Surprise: People who visited the booth and listened to both sets of equipment (not in view) preferred the expensively cabled audio equipment 61 percent of the time.

What's happening here? For starters, jokes and skepticism aside, speaker cable really does make a difference, at least up to a point. Try hooking up speakers with a single aluminum-wire strand vs. a real braided-copper cable (even a hardware store cable) and you'll easily hear the difference; the cheap cable will make the speakers pop and hiss. It makes sense then that continuing to move up the cable quality ladder might keep making a difference. But how far? Maybe gold connectors will improve quality another 1 percent. Thicker gauge a further 1 percent. I'm not sure I'd buy $2,000 speaker cables for an extra few percentage points in quality (in fact, I'm sure of it), and I am far from stumping for mega-expensive cabling, but it does seem plausible that the high-tech speaker cables might really make a difference, even if it's a small one, just by continuing to refine the connection from point A to B.

Also at work: For audio junkies (like those who visit a big stereo convention) who've fine-tuned their listening rooms, the difference may be even more noticeable than to those of us who have to watch movies and listen to music in noisy environments, surrounded by screaming children. This helps to explain how testers might prefer one cable over another at a rate of nearly two to one.

On the flipside: The WSJ found virtually identical preference for high-end CD audio (played from a $3,000 CD player) vs. a WAV file played from a standard iPod. The shocking lesson: Cables may actually matter more than the source of the music, at least while it's still in digital format. 

LINK: If You're Not Insane About Sound, Maybe You Can Just Go Crazy