What would you pay for cables?

do they still make qed 79strand?

awesome cable for peanuts...

You can do far better online - Fisual and Van Damme do a 2.5mm speaker cable for QED prices and both are better. The donor stuff Linn use as their basic cable (and charge £10/m for) can be got for two to three quid a metre (the clear multi-strand with a large red stripe down one side). The QED stuff is sold to Armour Home who then sell it to the dealers who need to make something on it (used to be 40 - 45% as I remember). The two main ones I mention have less middle men and are often sold online...

Of course I have blind tested mains cables and did so with a whole bunch of people at one of my bakeoffs, so you are making absurd inferences and false conclusions that I am some novice who is easily swayed by expectation bias - subconsciously or otherwise. When I evaluate any cable I couldn't couldn't give a toss about how it's made, who made it and how much it costs - I have no interest in any of that so it has zero influence in any of my perceptions.

If it well documented in Psychology then kindly point us to a reference that can be studied, don't just say it exists and expect us to believe it unchallenged.



I'm not making any absurd references or false conclusions. But you are clearly not understanding that expectation bias is subconscious and affects all of us equally. Nothing to do with being new to the hobby or anything and I never assumed you were. I will find you some links regarding subconscious bias. You can have a read if you wish and then you might perhaps see where I'm coming from even if you still disagree.

I have no problem at all with people who cannot hear differences in cables. Very comfortable with that in fact, because everyone hears differently.

I have no issues with people who believe that cables are foo at rip off prices either. It is only an opinion after all, based mostly on gossip.

I do take exception though to people who use banal worn out and irrelevant or distorted "science" as weapons to beat me over the head with. Before anyone shouts "placebo" or "expectation bias" they had better ready themselves for a very robust debate about those subjects.

Damn good bloke too.

'To some degree' - yes, that is what I should have written.

How do you know that they don't blind test?

Your refusal speaks volumes, so I will make the assumption therefore that your statement is entirely made up. Why would you do that? I joined this forum in the hope that I would learn something new about the hobby from knowledgeable and wise people, so if I want fairy tales I will buy a specialist book on the subject.

I’ve decided to act and ban Rupert. It’s pretty clear by now that it’s not Jsz, despite using an email address that suggested it was. I let it run for a while but it’s starting to grate on other members and it’s detracting from keeping the forum all about the gear. Can we please return to topic without speculating about who it was/is, please, as that adds no value.

I want the forum to remain a place where we can enjoy the hobby for its own sake. No beefs, no personalities and no outside influences.

Listening blind doesn't dilute differences, it's listening sighted that exaggerates them.

I'm afraid I don't know what people are talking about when they say some kit 'conveys the emotion' more. I read the other day an amp designer claiming he 'designs for emotion'.


As Alexi Sayle would say, it's bollocks really isn't it? Emotional connection to music has nothing to do with the quality of the replay kit, if the music means something to you and you are in the right mood you will get an emotional response listening to it on the car radio, or through the PA in a department store.


if the sound is 'hard' or 'mechanical' or whatever that's down to a problem that can be identified rationally. Distortion or noise. Are a set of speakers really an 'unmusical' design or do you just need a better amplifier that can drive them properly? Is the amp 'unmusical' or is it just struggling to drive the speakers you have connected it to?

I don't think a lot of people like to think that way as it destroys the illusion that something magical or mysterious is going on, and that there are some unmeasurable, indefinable properties to hi-fi that explain it all but these secrets are know only by a select few.

I suppose we are going a bit o/t here but I have heard/read more than one amp designer saying that the idea that global feedback compromises the sound is just a simplistic trope propagated by subjective reviewers. I'm no double E so I've no idea what the reality is except that is clearly more complex than 'lots of feedback is bad.'

I think if you could produce a system that had zero distortion of any type (including in the speakers) a lot of people would say it was bland. People don't tend to like low distortion systems, otherwise how do you explain the consistent popularity of vinyl? With vinyl some of the technical limitations of the medium actually enhance the listening experience. Happy accident dictated by the limitations of 1940s technology of course, but it's the obvious poster boy for the importance of considering psycho-acoustics, what sounds 'right' to us is not necessarily the better technical solution.

Not all distortions sound bad to us. Simple as that. An amp that exhibits a little second harmonic distortion can actually make the music sound more realistic and engaging. Vinyl replay exhibits all sorts of distortions that digital does not but everyone likes the sound of vinyl.

The theoretical zero distortion system will reproduce the recording exactly, nothing added or taken away. My guess is that 90% of people would not prefer it to a system that exhibited some benign distortions just as at the recent bake-off the best of the valve pre-amps were preferred over the best of the solid state, by a significant majority. I thought it was pretty obvious that the solid state stages were more truthful to the recording. But no-one actually cared about that. The typical enthusiast or audiophile is not interested in accurate, he wants 'pleasing'.


This is the source of much of the objective/subjective divide you get on forums IMO. The objectivist wants accurate replay and he uses measurements to determine how accurate a piece of kit is (since he can't tell subjectively what accurate is as he was not at the recording sessions). He can't understand why anyone would not want accurate, since that is the whole point of 'high fidelity'.


The subjectivist wants something that sounds good to him. He does not care about accuracy. He does not understand why the objectivist pursues this goal. Even worse he may confuse 'sounds good to me' with 'accurate' and will then tell the objectivist that his system cannot be accurate because it does not sound as good as his own does. Because the best sounding system must also be the most accurate, right?


This also knocks on to recordings; many subjectivists have no concept of the whole recording process and think everything should be recorded live in one take, preferably direct to disc, since this gives 'the best sound.' Recording quality is very important to the subjectivist.

Whereas the objectivist takes the recording as the starting point and aims to reproduce it accurately. He is not interested in the recording techniques used, that is all irrelevant to him. If the replay is accurate and the sound is not especially pleasing he is unconcerned. It is what it is. The subjectivist finds this concept very hard to grasp. It's a completely different way of looking at things.

Two very different approaches to the same hobby which I think are entirely derived from education and upbringing with maybe a little genetics thrown in for good measure.


Apologies, that turned into a bit of an essay, but it's a big topic, you could probably get a PhD out of it.