Some of these tracks were built around intros and dynamics designed to exploit exactly what cheap speakers throw away.

Across 35 songs spanning the 1920s to recent pop, each one falls apart differently on bad gear, and the way each one comes back together is the reason the list exists.

Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/04/songs-sound-wrong-until-hi-fi/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption

Børresen is the CTO of Børresen Acoustics and co-founder of Raidho, a Danish designer whose speakers range from $5,500 to roughly $500,000 a pair. In a recent interview with Next Level HiFi, he argued that the industry’s obsession with flat measurements has made modern speakers sound harsh, fatiguing, and fundamentally unnatural.

But this claim directly contradicts Floyd Toole’s landmark research at Harman International.

Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/12/flat-measuring-speakers-sound-worse/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption

Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/top-audiophile-forums-found-hidden-bias/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption

Maybe I could say that different frequency’s do require different start and stop times to align them correctly. Do yourself a favor and draw some different waves on tracing paper and on real paper and slide them along in time. You see how they compare and where in time do you put one frequency vs another of a different length. This is where I speak of perception and how are ears really work. The frequency’s need reconstruction to make them right to our perception. our ears work on patterns so this with good designed equipment can bring it to our ears. I all ways rant about timing. how we get to final result matches. Having a great cable isn’t matching how frequency’s and time through out components work. Engineering with time in mind and old analog eq can shift phase and actually fix issues.

I’m trying to say everythign matters in relevance. that is where good sound comes from, not from cables along but how components marry time and phase and everything through the response. Time is frequency my audiophile buddies. Altering time does not matter as a single parameter. it matters than the right parts of the sound are together in time, so compensations can ensure things come together. we have angles and that affects distance and that effects time too. it’s a combination of everything. even volume whilst it isn’t time, the peak level will be lower in comparison to something else making it more further away and quieter. the brain is complex in the way it works out the sound but i say it one last time.

Coherent timing through out is what really matters, This is the best ever experiment. get some engineers to do blind tests with people. have your insanely expensive cables and have cheaper ones but ensure that each cable has a different system attached to it and each is tuned correctly. so measure the timing and compensate through system design. my point is to engineer both systems. the expensive cable system to match and the cheaper cable to match the rest of the system to correct timing errors and make it all match. I bet as a final result. no one would tell the difference. The brain is sensitive to timing. Component matching by design matters. You may be still able to measure something that would look different but i bet you would think they sounded the same.

Ben Feltham brain is sensitive to timing. A proper cable based signal transport system has very minimal / practically non-existent timing problems at audio frequencies at few meters distance that typical hifi systems have. Well built equipment and technically decent cables, significant differences are pretty much impossible to hear or mrasure. There are equipment not so well built, bad cables and cables that try to sound intentionally different – those can mess up audio more.

Comments at https://www.facebook.com/share/1BNHQwSS53/

Headphonesty mostly placebo

Headphonesty If you make a cable bad enough it definitely *can* change the sound. The overly simplified claim is all cables sound the same. The reality is the vast majority of competently designed and built cables are audibly transparent. But there are ways to make a cable less than audibly transparent.

Headphonesty I know by experience that some do. It’s not all that hard to determine. A/B comparisons. Plus, what is usually left out of the argument is, that the ability for a line output device to drive a complex load factors in heavily with regard to cable choice.

Headphonesty if you compare 10 similar violons and well done, from Chinese study violon to Stradivarius you can ear a real differences just if the violonist is excellent.
If you ear a Stradivarius compare to a study violon both played by a young music student, what can you expect ?
And of course if Maria Duenas or Hilary Hann plays a 100 € violon, their talent save the result (but they prefer to play and record with a Stradivarius).
Cable never add talent, but if your system is really resolutive, then you can easely ear a huge sound’s differences and choose your favorite taste.

Headphonesty see my comment. i had it demonstrated to me in my local audiophile store. definitely make a difference but which is better is up to the listener, not a measurement. of course that was back in the 80′s and it may be less true now with advancements.

Different cables can sound slightly “different”. But I don’t know how one would really judge “better” or “worse”. We use decent quality balanced cables in the studio mainly with Neutrik XLR or jack connectors. I build my own as required.

Somewhere in every setup there is one wildly overpriced cable nobody will admit made zero difference. The drawer of shame is real.

Blind tests are fun. Back in the days, we tested 20 different high end cables and an old phone cable.
Voting results from 8 people in the jury were mostly random, but the phone cable was considered slightly better than the others.

PS I’m a physicist, amateur musician, music lover and also a lover of good audio tech!

Kenneth Bodin The humble phone cable taking the crown over twenty high end contenders is the most audiophile plot twist we have read all week. Your jury accidentally ran the perfect experiment.

Engineering is the answer like i said all along. it doesn’t entirely matter the cable, it is how the entire chain relates. Coherent sound means the right frequency’s are coming together at the right times. All frequency’s have issues in the sense, they are all different lengths in time. Good systems attempt to align them up so there timing is coherent as final result. Hence one major reason why eq is needed to align phase(timing and frequency length) in a way they come together. So by altering group delay timings and looking at the total time of all the frequency’s how they work together is more important that what cable you have, the cable can change parameters but already we need alterations to make it sound right to our perception and hearing. I like to think of things as constructing time differences to compensate for delay time or any issue.

Maybe I could say that different frequency’s do require different start and stop times to align them correctly. Do yourself a favor and draw some different waves on tracing paper and on real paper and slide them along in time. You see how they compare and where in time do you put one frequency vs another of a different length. This is where I speak of perception and how are ears really work. The frequency’s need reconstruction to make them right to our perception. our ears work on patterns so this with good designed equipment can bring it to our ears. I all ways rant about timing. how we get to final result matches. Having a great cable isn’t matching how frequency’s and time through out components work. Engineering with time in mind and old analog eq can shift phase and actually fix issues.

I’m trying to say everythign matters in relevance. that is where good sound comes from, not from cables along but how components marry time and phase and everything through the response. Time is frequency my audiophile buddies. Altering time does not matter as a single parameter. it matters than the right parts of the sound are together in time, so compensations can ensure things come together. we have angles and that affects distance and that effects time too. it’s a combination of everything. even volume whilst it isn’t time, the peak level will be lower in comparison to something else making it more further away and quieter. the brain is complex in the way it works out the sound but i say it one last time.

Coherent timing through out is what really matters, This is the best ever experiment. get some engineers to do blind tests with people. have your insanely expensive cables and have cheaper ones but ensure that each cable has a different system attached to it and each is tuned correctly. so measure the timing and compensate through system design. my point is to engineer both systems. the expensive cable system to match and the cheaper cable to match the rest of the system to correct timing errors and make it all match. I bet as a final result. no one would tell the difference. The brain is sensitive to timing. Component matching by design matters. You may be still able to measure something that would look different but i bet you would think they sounded the same.

On the usual tests, the cables were nearly indistinguishable. Frequency response and distortion barely moved from one cable to the next, which is the result skeptics have pointed to for years as proof that pricey cables are a waste of money.

But then the team examined an area almost nobody bothers to measure, and the differences stopped being subtle. They were large enough that the testers could reliably hear them, and they lined up with why some cables make listeners feel tense while others let the music breathe.

Veteran engineer Joakim Juhl had been predicting this since 2007.

He argues the industry has been running the wrong tests for decades, chasing numbers that look identical while ignoring the one thing that genuinely sets cables apart.

The property he keeps describing is something he believes ordinary ears detect more readily than our best equipment can, which is exactly why the usual measurements keep declaring cables identical while listeners keep hearing otherwise.

Full story in the comments.

Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/standard-tests-hiding-what-makes-cables-different/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=comment

Here are the top 8 lessons they want listeners to know about what shapes the music you hear and where your time and effort make the biggest difference.

Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/08/real-audio-engineers-wish-audiophiles-knew/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption

As we have always though the reason for selling expensive cables is high dealer profit. note: the comment that the dealer made more profit on the cables than the receiver they sold. That tells it all.

I had the opportunity to see the “Engineering Department” of one of the leading manufactures of speaker cables. if you are interested in my story tell me in your comments and I’ll post it.

https://youtu.be/m22UmmnuYcA?is=dbQ6reSHrjge_JRu