Re: A question about audio cables.
Reply #25 –
Thank you, all.
The real information about cables of various kinds and how they work is actually much more interesting than audio mythology.
On this would xyzee cable be a "better" cable for audio thing, according to audiophiles, sometimes... yes. There are those who use, for instance, various configurations of CATlatest networking cable, because they are convinced it will lend some magic quality to audio. It may add magic qualities to networking, because it is backed by decades of research and development specifically aimed at producing cable that does networking "better." Not for magic, but for real.
Then there are the people who use networking cables for... networking. The ones who are convinced that they must use CATlatest, because it's not data, it's music. And that's difficult.
And I'd like to see "audiophile" network cables come with certificates. And you can buy individually-tested and certified fly leads from one of the few audio-cable companies that I believe in supporting.
Odd. And perhaps slightly embarrassing. As a jack-of-all-trades small/mid-compny systems manager (good at sys admin, but no kind of actual engineer), I joined a lot of machines together with various networking flyleads (the stuff in the walls, though, was done by real pros, and tested) and it took an article from BlueJeans to make me aware that many of the CATsomething flyleads I used were probably CATnothing. Apart from occasional actual failures, though... it all worked. And what that says to me is that the protocols and methods of twisted-pair networking are so rubust they work even if the cable is below par.
But audiophiles think they need something special, because it carries "music."
(This has been my regular cable rant, repeated for the dozenth time)
(And no, if I'd been running a data centre, I would not have nipped to the local shop if I'd run short of flyleads. But I wasn't. And many of them would have worked if I had been)