Cables

Any copper cable is probably good#

Long story short, you just need cables that are made out of copper. That sounds a bit silly, because most cables are made out of copper. So spend 15 quid on a pair of XLR cables for your microphones and you are good to go. Fancy speaker cables, fancy power cables, audiophile USB cables and audiophile fuses do nothing for the sound. Neither do XLR cables, despite what I have been told about them adding a bit of juice. I once modelled the juiciest XLR cable I could get my hands on for a plugin. It turned out it does nothing whatsoever.

Whoever says the expensive one sounds better has to prove it, blind. See blind testing. Until then, a fool and his money are soon parted.

I passed audio through a spoon#

Someone ran audio through a banana and you couldn't really hear the difference from the direct signal. So I recreated it. I cut an unbalanced cable, stripped and tinned the hot wires, and looped it out of my audio interface and back in. Joining the two wires directly is the control. Anything clipped in between is what you hear.

The candidates: organic extra virgin olive oil, which the audiophiles watching will probably think should sound slightly peppery with a mild floral aftertaste. Tomato sauce, which should sound retro, reminiscent of '80s Italo disco. Balsamic vinegar, to make the elements in the mix cut through. Soy sauce, which will of course reveal more authentic details in my Merzbow records. Tahini, to make even the smoothest jazz smoother. A very ripe banana, a grape, a kumquat and an already squeezed lemon. A spoon, a knife, a cast iron frying pan and a guitar.

The oil and the tahini did not conduct at all. The spoon, the knife, the pan and the guitar were pretty much identical to the direct short. The sauces, the vinegar and the lemon conducted surprisingly well and differed mainly in level. Tap water was the worst of the ones that conducted, yet its frequency response was almost identical to the wire. The fruit showed slightly more high frequencies, which I cannot explain. It was a bit of fun, not a study. But if you can't hear the difference between a banana and the direct signal, you probably can't hear the difference between normal copper and audiophile grade whatever wire selling for thousands.

Digital cables are not a matter of taste#

If you think there is a difference between a gold-plated Ethernet cable and the normal one that came bundled with your modem, then you just don't understand how the technology works. The same goes for audiophile USB cables.

Mains power is fine straight from the socket#

I don't filter my electricity, because it is absolutely fine as it comes out of the socket, and I don't need any golden power cables. If the device has a good quality power supply, a conditioner doesn't really make much difference anyway. The exception is really dirty electricity, and I don't have that. Some uninterruptible power supply devices output a "modified sine wave" which is a euphemism for "the dirtiest power source in town". If you think you are cleaning your power by using one, you are ironically doing the exact opposite. Some of these devices output signals close to square waves.

An internal power supply with an IEC socket is not noisy by nature either. A high-end interface I tested had exactly that, and I wasn't hearing much noise after over a thousand loopbacks.

The studios never cared#

Audiophiles spend thousands on cables to hear the record as it sounded in the control room, yet most have never set foot in one. The studios where their favourite records were made used long lines of bog standard copper wire through a rusty old patch bay pulled out of a telephone exchange. They are called post office jacks for a reason. Meanwhile the living room with the four-figure cables has zero acoustic treatment, which is where the money should have gone. See rooms.

Avoid copper-clad aluminium#

There is one thing to avoid. In some cheap shops you get PVC cables that stink of PVC, and inside it is copper-clad aluminium. It is the lowest-quality junk possible, and I don't recommend it on quality grounds or for health reasons.