I am formally trained as an engineer, and like many of my brethren, I accepted the wisdom of the day, that cables were just wire, and wire is wire.

I too, was skeptical about audio cables, and when I was assigned to research a US supplier for the raw cable to be used in American-built Gold-Ens interconnects (by Discwasher), I threw myself into my work with a passion, doing what I always do, and finding out as much about the subject as I can to prepare myself for the project work.

After researching the optimal materials (based on the technological wisdom of the day), and weighing the costs, I obtained a large number of samples of commercially available cables from Belden, and began comparative listening tests of my own.

Once I was actually doing this, I noticed that the el cheapo cables that came with the gear did not sound as good as some of the Belden samples, much less that I could actually hear something different between them.

I reported to my supervisor that I had found at least one cable sample that seemed to sound much better than the others, and was even better than the then currently Japanese sourced Gold-Ens. He was also incredulous, and did not quite believe me. So a formal listening test was scheduled to test between the existing cables, and the new sample I preferred, and I was placed under blind conditions (double-blind equivalent). A variation on the original ABX procedure was used, with hand swapping of the cables, instead of a switch box. Much to the amazement of my supervisor and fellow engineers, on the first set of ten trials, I scored 8 out of 10 (still warming up), then 9 out of 10, then 8 out of 10 again. I could tell I was getting fatigued on the last run, and said so. Taken as a whole, the three trials together, for 25 out of 30, approaches near certainty.

This was the beginning of my long journey with audio cables, and the why and wherefore.

Since 1980, I have been conducting controlled listening tests on audio components, most of which were for audio cables.

After literally hundreds of cable listening tests under controlled conditions, I have no doubt personally that cables can be detected and some sound better than others. I know this, and no one can take this away from me, there were too many tests with overwhelming positives, too much rigorous science involved.

After conducting many tests, and finding out early on that they were not always so easy to get results from, I found that there were weak spots in the original ABX procedures, and with many of the amateur DBT's that had been, and were being run (mostly by cable naysayers). I wrote and presented an AES paper in 1991, AES preprint #3178, outlining some of the issues connected with listening tests, and based on my own experiences with having conducted so many listening tests.

My entry into "hifi" or audio was a result of having a technological bent as a youngster, and having built my own DIY bookshelf speaker kits and Dynaco and Heathkit electronics.

My first endeavor was brought about when I received my first "record player", a single box portable Westinghouse automatic with a monophonic ceramic cartridge. I wanted to hear the music in stereo, and my parents did not allow me to use the "big stereo console" in the living room, probably as much for fear I would take it apart and modify it, as for fears of breaking something!

So I set about finding out what I could about stereo, and what it would take to convert the monophonic record player, by visiting the local electronics parts and stereo distributor retail store as often as I could, and pestering the repair technician and the salesmen for answers.

I begin to discover that there was more to it than merely changing out the cartridge, and that I would need another set of electronics to run the other channel, and a speaker as well. I finally did get it running in stereo, but the extra parts were hanging out of the box, and the extra speaker was not baffled or boxed, so the end result was pretty sad.

However, I did learn a lot from that experience, and this lead to my confidence that I could make the kits work properly.

After I had finished the project for Discwasher, I continued to investigate quality cable materials, and to conduct controlled listening tests, so I could find out what the best cable I could develop for my own use was. After reaching a culmination, and having developed a set of cables for my own use, I decided to share this information with others via the Internet.

I posted my first DIY cable note at AOL in 1996, and then on the rec.audio newsgroups back in 1997. After experiencing the battle grounds that the rec.audio newsgroups had become, I was looking for other places to share my information and experience at, and found several message boards that were dedicated to audio topics.

Audio Asylum was not in existence then, it was created as a result of the very poor management of the Audio Review message boards, and what became a total lack of moderation activity, and the ever increasing ad content at AR, which later became rampant with Pop-Up ads.

Audio Asylum was founded by one of the frequenters of AR, Rod Morris, and a handful of folks who volunteered to become unpaid moderators for various forums. I was asked if I would moderate a forum on Cables, and accepted the offer.

It has evolved over the years quite a bit. At first, premium aftermarket cables consisted entirely of heavy-duty zip cords and gold plated connectors, those were the only big changes from the common wires. Then the materials and construction came under scrutiny, and that’s when the big changes occurred.

I think that there are a lot of folks who discovered their own revelation regarding cable sonics, and they decided to start a company and sell the fruits of their labors.

Most of them are passionate, and involved with music or audio in a very intense way.

Many people do not understand the requirements of staying in business, and what common mark-ups for merchandise are.

Lets take a look at a well known DIY coaxial cable, Belden 89259.

It currently costs around $1.25 a foot, and this is a stock item for the manufacturer that they make in quantity when they manufacture it. The cost here is mostly due to the teflon insulation material and teflon jacket. If you wanted a custom run of it, say changing just one thing that did not cost any more for Belden to make, then it might cost $3 or 4 a foot, and you would have to commit to a minimum quantity buy of say, 50,000 feet. This cable uses a good grade of ETP copper, not 99.999% pure, or some umpteen nines purity silver.

Let's say that you wanted OFHC 99.99% copper, this might jack the price up to almost double what it was as a very simple custom cable, now in the range of $6-8 dollars a running foot.

Not so bad you might think, as you only use about 3 feet per side in a 1M stereo interconnect cable for a total of say approx. 7 feet of cable. So only $42-56 worth of cable in the product. Ah, but then there is now the cost of the RCA plugs, these can run up into the range of $10 to $25 apiece wholesale for the really fancy ones milled from solid material and quality plated and finished.

Then there is the heatshrink, maybe some Techflex covering, silver solder, etc. Then the most expensive thing of all: hand labor to assemble them, as there is no way to afford machine termination for custom cable sizes AND off the beaten path RCA plugs for the smaller companies. In many cases, the simple act of soldering them up PROPERLY costs as much as the materials. So $100 worth of raw materials to make a pair of 1M interconnects may cost another $50 to $100 OR MORE to assemble and test/check.

Then there is the packaging, advertising, distribution, overhead, and so on.

In the electronics industry, the usual rule of thumb is to multiply the parts cost by 5X to reach what the retail price should be. This is for mass market consumer gear. High end gear, due to the limited production (loss of large scale production efficiency), tends to run around 10X the parts cost in order to assure making some amount of profit from selling the gear. (It needs to be kept in mind that many items typically get sold for 10X their cost to manufacture: clothes, many toys, many appliances, etc.)For the above mentioned example interconnect cables, this would amount to a reasonably fair selling price of around $1000 for a 1M pair of what amounted to a simple variation on good old Belden 89259 (using OFHC 99.99% pure copper). This is for a simple coaxial geometry, if the cables used a fancy geometry, or required even more labor to assemble, or used pure silver as the conductor, then the costs and final retail price would be even higher.

Now, once we get past this kind of price point and performance, we are starting to enter the realm of what the market will bear, what the consumer thinks the product is worth, and is willing to pay for it. Whether it is due to brand name prestige, or some other marketing efforts, if consumers are willing to fork over the cash, then they will make it and sell it. This is NOT unique to the cable or audio industry, just pounced upon by some who like to see it as some sort of conspiracy or such.

For a ten foot pair of not very fancy high end speaker cables, the costs to manufacture might easily reach $200 or more, if the 10X rule of thumb is used, then the retail price would be somewhere on the order of $2000 or more. How much more might depend in part on the actual materials and labor involved.

More ambitious cables, such as some of the woven/braided types that interleave the wires in a helical criss-crossing winding around a core can involve tremendous amounts of labor, very costly materials, and so on, so that actual costs to manufacture would stagger your mind. Again, with very limited production, no economy of scale, these are one-off hand-built products, and they need to recoup their expenses every time they sell a set.

A fully hand built custom car can easily cost 10 to 100 times what most cars sell for. Should everyone run out and buy one? Many folks are quite happy with their mass produced Chevy's and Fords, so I don't see the custom car business putting them into any trouble anytime soon. Same with the really high priced cables, they are there and exist for the same kinds of reasons as custom cars, etc. Someone knows how to build them ever so tweaky to the nth degree, and then offers them for sale.

I think that the vast majority of cable companies are not trying to deceive or confuse the customer. Many of the founders are not technically or formally trained in Physics, they may have arrived at the design of their cable by sheer perseverance through trial-and-error. They might have some idea of how their cables work, and why they sound the way they do, but then they have to bridge the gap between what they know, and what they hear, to another layperson, who also does not have training in Physics or Engineering.

I know how hard it is to explain things to lay people, without resorting to calculus or mathematical derivations, one must try to evoke more along the lines of imagery and sonic descriptions. Now we are into the realm of subjective impressions, interpretation, and trying to convey one man’s concept of what they hear into another man’s understanding of what they might hear. Hence, we end up with some flowery descriptions, some attempt to convey the Physics, all in the name of trying to explain and convince a consumer why they should buy THEIR particular brand (and model) of cable.

Does this sometimes result in a confused and vague description of the principles underlying the cable? Yes. Does this sometimes further result in hyperbole and exaggeration where the facts are concerned? Yes. Do ALL cable manufacturer’s do this egregiously? No.

I have personally maintained that the sonic differences between audio cables is of a subtle nature, and not of the "day-and-night" type of difference. However, when we are dealing with one’s personal home playback system, where the listener has become intimately familiar with it’s performance and overall sound, when something does change in such a system, they are going to notice it much more readily than a stranger would, or than someone participating in a blind test at an institute would. In the context of that persons playback system, a cable change might bring about a "night-and-day" difference, because it has pushed the performance of the system past the edge of disbelief of the playback event. If a new set of cables can allow the music to float free of the speakers, and achieve a sense of separate soundstage, while the old cables did not do this, the sound was "stuck" to the speaker locations, then to the owner/listener of that system, that is a "night-and-day" difference, even though in absolute terms, the sonic differences were small.

The problem has always been: how do you adequately communicate this kind of experience to some one else? How do you put that into a graph, or a chart? 200% more soundstage than before? 150% more depth of presentation? Where are the "soundstage" meters, how do you measure soundstage depth? So in attempting to communicate that kind of experience, the cable manufacturer comes up with an ‘energy coherence figure of merit’ or some other bizarre sounding term. Is it BS or snake oil? Not really, not if they are trying to convey the essence of what they heard, and what they think is responsible for what they heard. Yet a cable naysayer will latch onto that, and be certain that it is a deliberate attempt at fraud and deception, and he will cry foul and "unscientific".

Thus is born the battle between objective and subjective.