'New' cables on 'old' equipment

Been doing a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with speaker cables these last few days and got to wondering about how, with the change in how hi-fi's sounding over the last decade or 3, the cables we use (specifically speaker cables) may well work better with one 'era' of equipment than others.

For example:

I've been using Chord Rumour with my Exposure amp, and it sounds really good - well worth the praise it has received in the press, and certainly at the price. However, with the Sugden it sounds harsh, slow and generally untidy.

Go to a good old heavy guage multistrand (NACA4 in this case) and the thing just comes to life. Cleaner, clearer and with real punch.

In other words, more modern cable works well within the modern equipment's performance, and older with the older etc. Or maybe this is just co-incidental??

 

"Neither do men fit old cables to new equipment. If they do, the cables will burst, the electricity will run out and the sound will be ruined. No, they fit new cables to new equipment, and the sound is preserved."

(Matt.9:17, slightly updated)

 

Yes, you need to be careful about using vintage cables - you don't want a load of 60's copper atoms enjoying free love and getting stoned when they should be concentrating on passing your signal along.

 

Strange thing is though Pete, I find most bands sound better stoned, so why not cables ?

 

Bands may sound better when you are stoned. Just listen to The Doors for what too much dope does to musicians :SLEEP:

 

Gromit
permit me to make a serious reply, forgive me for not jumping on the ridicule bandwagon.
It seems a plausable idea, where one may lack the cable of same vintage may help to boost that area.

 

I personally suspect that it depends on where you are on the cycle. I suspect that, as companies are constantly restructuring, so are metal atomic lattices. Now, when a lattice is restructured by MicroKinsey, it will take some time for the thing to come together again and function as a whole. Should you have a cable that was made at the time of a recently-inaugurated restructuring, none of the little Cu atoms would be passing those electrons along properly until they ascertain their proper position in the new structure. The sound will therefore be deficient. The trick is to get a mature cable, immediately prior to restructuring, when everything is humming along nicely.

The same applied naturally to the equipment. Take a restructured cable and a yet-to-be restructured amplifier, you will lose out. As this happens in cycles, as it does in business, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the age of the equipment.

Thus, not only is Gromit's original observation explained, so is the entire cable phenomenon. The unbelievers have heard only cables and equipment that are not simutaneously in the same state, so hear no difference. The believers are fortunate enough to have heard cables and equipment both is the best possible state. It might well be that the best cables, like the best companies, never need restructuring, so they always sound good.

 

i tought there was an agreement that cable sceptism or non would be kept out of relevant threads

 

But, Penance, ol' hoss, I've just put the differences made by cables on a sound business basis (don't know about scientific, but you gotta start somewhere)! Surely this deserves some accolades?

 

No Tones.

it doesn't.

 

I think what my Elder namesake is trying to put across in a use of words with more than 2 cylibols, could be this
"Oh shite, we run of cable made by method 'x' and it now costs too much to make"," Sod it!! will make it this way and say its 'X' percent better, (oh and a shiner Jacket too )
Or have I got this wrong? You old cynic you !

 

seconded.
I thought all this shit had been gotten over.
But no, even though it is the believers that apparently are the ones saying things out of place.
I may just go find a forum where people are permitted to say what they hear.

 

Who, sir? Me, sir?

 

Aw, c'mon, Penance, t'was only a little joke! Nobody is stopping anyone saying what they heard, are they?

 

Oh...I see...serious stuff this cable, eh?

 

Penance,

it's not worth getting too upset about, sarcasm being the lowest form etc.

IF you accept that cables can act as tone controls, and IF you also accept that modern kit is voiced differently to vintage equipment, then there may be a remote chance that the latest wonder cable would not satisfy when connected to say some Rogers and an A60. I doubt it though.

If on the other hand you do not believe any of the above, then I guess you could always choose not to post on yet another cable thread.

 

Merlin, your probably right, but it gets very tiring when this seems to happen every other week.
Apparently it is OK for non-believers to tell us we are wrong and to ridicule it, but vice versa and we get a 20 page thread telling us we are in the wrong.
Seems there may be more to life than hanging around a forum with double standards.

If only people all thought that way.

 

I'm still running 25 year old Monster cable to my speakers - I'm happy with the sound and kept these cos they're flat and will be unnoticeable under the carpet...
I also tried 30 amp cooker cable, and some expensive Transparent stuff and could hear very little if any difference between them! So I kept the Monster, used the cooker cable for some re-wiring and returned the Transparent.
I remain in the sceptics camp - or mebbe all those years of critical listening in TV dubbing theatres has made me a touch deaf, or un-appreciative, or thinking I could buy 40 cds for the price of the cable or all of those...

 

Come on penance (and merlin) - tones' post was entirely light hearted and certainly not even close the kind of incessant ridicule the non-believers were subjected to for a while.

The double standards seem very much to me to be your own. Seems like for you it's OK for non-believers to mercilessly have the sh1t ripped out of them for weeks but the slightest bit of humour (and not even at anyone's expense) going the other way is "ridicule" and "double standards" .

If non-believers weren't allowed to post on cable threads that would be as absurd as saying that vinyl junkies couldn't post on CD threads or valve heads couldn't post on threads about solid state amps. There's not really a lot of point in having a forum where everyone agrees - it would be very dull indeed.

Michael.

 

Agreed