What annoys me today in marketing and media that too often today then talking on hi-fi, science is replaced by bizarre belief structures and marketing fluff, leading to a decades-long stagnation of the audiophile domain. Science makes progress, pseudo-science doesn’t. Hi-fi world is filled by pseudoscience, dogma and fruitloopery to the extent that it resembles a fundamentalist religion. Loudspeaker performance hasn’t tangibly improved in forty years and vast sums are spent addressing the wrong problems.
Business for Engineers: Marketers Lie article points tout that marketing tells lies — falsehoods — things that serve to convey a false impression. Marketing’s purpose is to determining how the product will be branded, positioned, and sold. It seems that there too many snake oil rubbish products marketed in the name of hifi. It is irritating to watch the stupid people in the world be fooled.
In EEVblog #29 – Audiophile Audiophoolery video David L. Jones (from EEVBlog) cuts loose on the Golden Ear Audiophiles and all their Audiophoolery snake oil rubbish. The information presented in Dave’s unique non-scripted overly enthusiastic style! He’s an enthusiastic chap, but couldn’t agree more with many of the opinions he expressed: Directional cables, thousand dollar IEC power cables, and all that rubbish. Monster Cable gets mostered. Note what he says right at the end: “If you pay ridiculous money for these cable you will hear a difference, but don’t expect your friends to”. If you want to believe, you will.
My points on hifi-nonsense:
One of the tenets of audiophile systems is that they are assembled from components, allegedly so that the user can “choose” the best combination. This is pretty largely a myth. The main advantage of component systems is that the dealer can sell ridiculously expensive cables, hand-knitted by Peruvian virgins and soaked in snake oil, to connect it all up. Say goodbye to the noughties: Yesterday’s hi-fi biz is BUSTED, bro article asks are the days of floorstanders and separates numbered? If traditional two-channel audio does have a future, then it could be as the preserve of high resolution audio. Sony has taken the industry lead in High-Res Audio.
HIFI Cable Humbug and Snake oil etc. blog posting rightly points out that there is too much emphasis placed on spending huge sums of money on HIFI cables. Most of what is written about this subject is complete tripe. HIFI magazines promote myths about the benefits of all sorts of equipment. I am as amazed as the writer that that so called audiophiles and HIFI journalists can be fooled into thinking that very expensive speaker cables etc. improve performance. I generally agree – most of this expensive interconnect cable stuff is just plain overpriced.
I can agree that in analogue interconnect cables there are few cases where better cables can really result in cleaner sound, but usually getting any noticeable difference needs that the one you compare with was very bad yo start with (clearly too thin speaker wires with resistance, interconnect that picks interference etc..) or the equipment in the systems are so that they are overly-sensitive to cable characteristics (generally bad equipment designs can make for example cable capacitance affect 100 times or more than it should). Definitely too much snake oil. Good solid engineering is all that is required (like keep LCR low, Teflon or other good insulation, shielding if required, proper gauge for application and the distance traveled). Geometry is a factor but not in the same sense these yahoos preach and deceive.
In digital interconnect cables story is different than on those analogue interconnect cables. Generally in digital interconnect cables the communication either works, does not work or sometimes work unreliably. The digital cable either gets the bits to the other end or not, it does not magically alter the sound that goes through the cable. You need to have active electronics like digital signal processor to change the tone of the audio signal traveling on the digital cable, cable will just not do that.
But this digital interconnect cables characteristics has not stopped hifi marketers to make very expensive cable products that are marketed with unbelievable claims. Ethernet has come to audio world, so there are hifi Ethernet cables. How about 500 dollar Ethernet cable? That’s ridiculous. And it’s only 1.5 meters. Then how about $10,000 audiophile ethernet cable? Bias your dielectrics with the Dielectric-Bias ethernet cable from AudioQuest: “When insulation is unbiased, it slows down parts of the signal differently, a big problem for very time-sensitive multi-octave audio.” I see this as complete marketing crap speak. It seems that they’re made for gullible idiots. No professional would EVER waste money on those cables. Audioquest even produces iPhone sync cables in similar price ranges.
HIFI Cable insulators/supports (expensive blocks that keep cables few centimeters off the floor) are a product category I don’t get. They typically claim to offer incredible performance as well as appealing appearance. Conventional cable isolation theory holds that optimal cable performance can be achieved by elevating cables from the floor in an attempt to control vibrations and manage static fields. Typical cable elevators are made from electrically insulating materials such as wood, glass, plastic or ceramics. Most of these products claim superior performance based upon the materials or methods of elevation. I don’t get those claims.
Along with green magic markers on CDs and audio bricks is another item called the wire conditioner. The claim is that unused wires do not sound the same as wires that have been used for a period of time. I don’t get this product category. And I don’t believe claims in the line like “Natural Quartz crystals along with proprietary materials cause a molecular restructuring of the media, which reduces stress, and significantly improves its mechanical, acoustic, electric, and optical characteristics.” All sounds like just pure marketing with no real benefits.
CD no evil, hear no evil. But the key thing about the CD was that it represented an obvious leap from earlier recording media that simply weren’t good enough for delivery of post-produced material to the consumer to one that was. Once you have made that leap, there is no requirement to go further. The 16 bits of CD were effectively extended to 18 bits by the development of noise shaping, which allows over 100dB signal to noise ratio. That falls a bit short of the 140dB maximum range of human hearing, but that has never been a real goal. If you improve the digital media, the sound quality limiting problem became the transducers; the headphones and the speakers.
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, ‘audiophiles’, only IT will break the sound barrier article says that today’s loudspeakers are nowhere near as good as they could be, due in no small measure to the presence of “traditional” audiophile products. that today’s loudspeakers are nowhere near as good as they could be, due in no small measure to the presence of “traditional” audiophile products. I can agree with this. Loudspeaker performance hasn’t tangibly improved in forty years and vast sums are spent addressing the wrong problems.
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, ‘audiophiles’, only IT will break the sound barrier article makes good points on design, DSPs and the debunking of traditional hi-fi. Science makes progress, pseudo-science doesn’t. Legacy loudspeakers are omni-directional at low frequencies, but as frequency rises, the radiation becomes more directional until at the highest frequencies the sound only emerges directly forwards. Thus to enjoy the full frequency range, the listener has to sit in the so-called sweet spot. As a result legacy loudspeakers with sweet spots need extensive room treatment to soak up the deficient off-axis sound. New tools that can change speaker system designs in the future are omni-directional speakers and DSP-based room correction. It’s a scenario ripe for “disruption”.
Computers have become an integrated part of many audio setups. Back in the day integrated audio solutions in PCs had trouble earning respect. Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? posting tells that it’s been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced (a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs) and many enthusiasts still consider a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It seems that in general onboard sound is finally “Good Enough”, and has been “Good Enough” for a long time now. For most users it is hard to justify the high price of special sound card on PC anymore. There are still some PCs with bad sound hardware on motherboard and buttload of cheap USB adapters with very poor performance. However, what if you want the best sound possible, the lowest noise possible, and don’t really game or use the various audio enhancements? You just want a plain-vanilla sound card, but with the highest quality audio (products typically made for music makers). You can find some really good USB solutions that will blow on-board audio out of the water for about $100 or so.
Although solid-state technology overwhelmingly dominates today’s world of electronics, vacuum tubes are holding out in two small but vibrant areas. Some people like the sound of tubes. The Cool Sound of Tubes article says that a commercially viable number of people find that they prefer the sound produced by tubed equipment in three areas: musical-instrument (MI) amplifiers (mainly guitar amps), some processing devices used in recording studios, and a small but growing percentage of high-fidelity equipment at the high end of the audiophile market. Keep those filaments lit, Design your own Vacuum Tube Audio Equipment article claims that vacuum tubes do sound better than transistors (before you hate in the comments check out this scholarly article on the topic). The difficulty is cost; tube gear is very expensive because it uses lots of copper, iron, often point-to-point wired by hand, and requires a heavy metal chassis to support all of these parts. With this high cost and relative simplicity of circuitry (compared to modern electronics) comes good justification for building your own gear. Maybe this is one of the last frontiers of do-it-yourself that is actually worth doing.
3,027 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Music festivals gave me hearing loss. My best friend and I started making earplugs, and it’s now a multimillion-dollar business. : https://mrf.lu/Pk73
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BSJ49rmNr/
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
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audiophiles often debate gear choices, but the people who record, mix, and master music have a different perspective. Working engineers across forums and professional groups have shared what really matters in day-to-day audio work. Their comments reveal how music is created, what actually affects sound, and where common beliefs can go off track.
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
Tomi Engdahl says:
An independent testing project set out to do something the audio world rarely bothers with. The team ran more than 60 cables through a full battery of measurements to find out whether the differences people swear they hear actually show up in the data.
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
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do you believe cables can really change the sound, or is it mostly hype?
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.
Tomi Engdahl says:
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.
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.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/standard-tests-hiding-what-makes-cables-different/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=comment&fbclid=IwdGRjcASSDL9jbGNrBJIMu2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHlBQ23DYSjwt91dRfN8Yt5mqAm0ByhTGiluj1kJRkEnLao2PDye8vHaMaTbH_aem_-iQMhOG49omQobKKSz0JLg
Tomi Engdahl says:
After a deep investigation into the top 3 audiophile forums, we found that each community runs on a different definition of “good” that quietly filters what gets recommended, what gets trashed, and what never even makes it into the conversation.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/top-audiophile-forums-found-hidden-bias/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Chevy Silverado’s base sound system has fake exhaust noise baked in and no known way to disable it. One of the country’s best car audio installers says nobody knows how to turn it off. https://trib.al/VCEaePe
Tomi Engdahl says:
Decades of acoustic research say flat frequency response equals good sound. Michael Børresen says that research is wrong.
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
Tomi Engdahl says:
There’s a real physics reason a song can sound fine on earbuds and then feel like a completely different recording on a proper system. Budget drivers can’t handle sudden swings from a whisper to a full-band explosion, and the deepest bass notes simply vanish before they reach you.
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
Tomi Engdahl says:
A few years ago, saying Class D could beat a serious Class A amp would have gotten you laughed out of the room.
Besides, the first switching amps were cheap and ran cool, but they sounded harsh and rough enough that most listeners filed them under budget gear.
But that reputation is badly out of date.
Modern Class D has moved all the way up the chain, and independent labs have the test data to back it up rather than just opinion.
In fact, some of the same engineers who built the Class A designs people still chase have now admitted the technology they helped crown has been passed, and what used to be a budget choice is now setting measurement records across the industry.
Full story in the comments.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/11/class-d-crushes-class-a-independent-tests/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=comment
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audiophiles have chased the moving coil upgrade for decades, and the physics genuinely reward it. A moving coil traces the groove faster than a moving magnet can, which is where all that prized detail and rhythm come from.
Garth Leerer has distributed these cartridges for forty years, so he has every reason to keep that story clean. Instead he warns that the same upgrade can quietly strip away the detail it promises, and that the people who get burned almost always make the same overlooked mistake.
The fix is free, which somehow makes it even easier to miss.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/06/overlooked-flaw-draining-detail-moving-coil-upgrade/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
“A popular analogy compares ASR-style reviewing to evaluating wine solely by chemical composition. This analogy oversimplifies the issue, yet it highlights the tension.”
Except that’s a comically bad analogy. Flavor and the chemical analysis thereof is incredibly complex. However, if you can identify individual compounds, you can identify what major flavors are probably present.
Audio quality is just simpler. Distortion, SNR, noise, wow, flutter, bandwidth, etc. are all quite measurable. That lines up quite nicely about what we know about human hearing. I.E. 24 bit is almost totally useless unless you’re trying to emulate ear shattering explosions, for example. Or noise below a given threshold is totally imperceptible to any human that ever lived.
Audiophiles come up with the worse analogies possible which almost always rest on a total failure to understand or account for magnitude or relying on how things worked 50 years ago. The old, “Is there a difference?” Yes….but it’s orders of magnitude smaller than could ever be detected…
Tomi Engdahl says:
Post the same $99 DAC on three major audio forums and watch what happens.
After a deep investigation into the top 3 audiophile forums, we found that each community runs on a different definition of “good”.
Rather than being accidental, that reaction reflects three different cultures. And if you want to navigate audiophile discourse online, you first need to understand which game you are playing.
Post the same $99 DAC on three major audio forums and watch what happens. One community treats it as a breakthrough. Another offers cautious approval. A third shifts the conversation toward tubes and system synergy..
https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/top-audiophile-forums-found-hidden-bias/
Tomi Engdahl says:
There is a measurement rig in Dresden that runs the same automated test on every speaker fed into it, pulling frequency response from 70 points around the cabinet and scoring it against a standard that predicts blind listener preference with 0.86 accuracy. By that score, the $28,000 tower in this test ranks first, the highest passive speaker the database has ever logged.
Then someone ran a PA speaker costing 90 percent less through the exact same machine.
On the number everyone trusts, the expensive one wins clean. But the trouble shows up on a second number, the one the price tag never warned anyone about.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/06/luxury-speakers-fancy-sound-test-weakness-exposed/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
One of the three amplifiers in this test had distortion levels that should have been easy to catch. But when he sat down and listened without knowing which was which, he couldn’t tell them apart.
What happened next led him to rethink how his entire company evaluates whether audio gear actually sounds different, and why the most common testing methods might be getting it wrong.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/audio-founder-blind-tested-amps/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
Listeners evaluated nine op-amps through a phonostage built specifically for component swapping, and the chip they ranked highest turned out to be the oldest and slowest in the lineup.
The story isn’t just the price gap, though. It’s what the circuit’s own designer found when he went back to his measurements looking for an explanation.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/vintage-op-amp-embarrassed-modern-phono-chips/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/03/top-audiophile-forums-found-hidden-bias/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/08/test-vintage-cd-players-outperform-modern-models/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Being an audiophile sounds fancy, but all it really means is caring about how your music sounds.
Unfortunately, there are always a few gear snobs who like to complicate things. They throw around myths and made-up rules about expensive equipment, perfect hearing, and “proper” music.
But don’t let them fool you. Here are eight common things these snobs say, and why they’re completely wrong.
Full list: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/05/gear-snobs-trick-thinking-fake-audiophile/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.howtogeek.com/when-expensive-audio-cables-actually-matter/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=6a2d6bc6f120d200018db9ad&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwdGRjcASctltjbGNrBJy2VGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHvm5Gt-IH7OONdixspLBeczPiPph5WpYb0GaESVzkTsBePofu8Uympsy5btY_aem_w_sSmkA6EEEGE0oqOJTp5Q
Audiophiles and audio enthusiasts love to argue about which features are a meaningful investment and which are just a flashy waste of money. One of the most hotly debated topics is audio cables themselves. Does gold plating matter? Do fancy connections really make a difference? What is the real improvement between a coat hanger and a $1,000 premium audio cable?
High-power amplifiers and long runs call for heavier wire
Resistance can become a problem
Noisy RF environments spell trouble for cheap cables
You don’t want your speaker wire to act as an antenna
If you find yourself in an RF-heavy environment, you may need shielded cable. If your sound equipment is located near broadcast equipment, on a stage surrounded by wireless microphones, or in an industrial setting, unshielded cables will act like antennas. They will pick up electromagnetic interference that is audibly noticeable as hums or buzzes.
In any of these noisy environments, you should look for cables with proper shielding to block the interference. Keep an eye out for inflated or exaggerated technical claims when you’re shopping around. A “premium” or “luxury” cable without proper shielding is useless in a noisy environment.
Outdoor connections need to be resilient
Your home is a safe place for electronics; the outdoors are not
In an outdoor setting, the big problem isn’t usually signal integrity or power problems—it’s the environment. UV exposure, moisture, and extreme temperature swings will destroy a cheap cable jacket in a matter of months.
If you are installing a system in a garden or on a patio, you need to invest in cable that is specifically rated for the outdoors. Look for direct-burial ratings, UV-resistant jacketing, and CL2 or CL3 ratings.
Cheap cable is the right cable most of the time
Unless you are dealing with extreme power, heavy RF interference, large distances, or outdoor exposure, the $10 cable is going to sound the same as the $80 one. Just stay away from copper-clad aluminum (CCA), and you’ll be okay.
Instead of spending your budget on cables that offer no significant improvement to your sound, you should spend that money on better speakers, a nicer amplifier, or basic room treatment. You’ll get a much better bang for your buck.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/06/luxury-speakers-fancy-sound-test-weakness-exposed/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=comment
Tomi Engdahl says:
There’s a quiet assumption behind every Hi-Res subscription, that someone along the way actually checked the file before it reached you. But people comparing tracks across Tidal and Qobuz have started questioning whether that’s true at all.
The same albums keep turning up with odd EQ shapes, dynamic range that loses to a standard rip of the identical recording, and even pops, clicks, and faint surface hiss.
One listener even ranked the platforms by how clean their files sounded, and the order wasn’t flattering for the premium tiers.
Meanwhile, the services still advertise studio-quality sound, and they haven’t really explained how some of these files ended up sounding the way they do.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/06/tidal-qobuz-busted-vinyl-high-res-audio/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audiophile trust is hard to earn because listeners care about more than specs. A good brand needs headphones that sound right, last long, feel good, and keep their value after the hype fades.
We surveyed our community to see which names still get recommended when people ask what to buy. The results include studio staples, high-end specialists, budget favorites, and brands with a more narrow kind of credibility.
For each brand, we included the strengths, the weak spots, and the models that explain its reputation.
Here’s how the ranking turned out: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/06/headphone-brands-audiophiles-trust-despite-known-flaws/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/18umayZvQn/
Moving coil cartridges carry a near-mythical reputation among vinyl people, and the reason is grounded in actual physics. Instead of a magnet riding on the stylus, they use a tiny lightweight coil with far less mass to move, so the cartridge can start and stop faster as it traces the groove.
That speed is what listeners describe as pace, detail, and musical flow, and it’s why people happily spend hundreds or thousands stepping up to one.
Garth Leerer sells these cartridges for a living. His company distributes Hana and Clearaudio, and he’s spent over forty years watching audiophiles climb the upgrade ladder.
So, it’s a little jarring to hear him say that the same upgrade can quietly make a system sound worse.
His point isn’t that the cartridge fails. It’s that the detail a moving coil pulls from the groove can vanish before it ever reaches the speakers, and a single setup step decides whether it survives. Miss it, and the cartridge you paid a premium for ends up sounding like a step backward.
The fix costs nothing, yet Leerer says almost everyone overlooks it, which is the part worth understanding before the next cartridge purchase.
Full story in the comments.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/06/overlooked-flaw-draining-detail-moving-coil-upgrade/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=comment
The Physics Are Real
Before complicating the MC gospel, Leerer wants to make one thing clear. The physics favoring moving coil cartridges are genuine.
In a standard moving magnet cartridge, a magnet attached to the stylus cantilever vibrates past a fixed coil to generate an electrical signal
Moving coil designs flip that arrangement, replacing the magnet with a lightweight wire coil that has far less mass to accelerate and decelerate as the stylus traces the groove.
That speed advantage is what gives MC its reputation, because the lighter the moving parts, the faster the cartridge can start and stop with the music, which Leerer compares to image resolution.
The Matching Trap
The resolution advantage that MC earns in the groove can vanish before it reaches the speakers.
Moving coil cartridges output between 0.2 and 0.5 millivolts, while most moving magnets produce 4 to 6 mV. That gap means the phono stage has to deliver 10 to 100 times more gain for an MC cartridge. Gain alone is not enough, either. MC cartridges also need precise resistive loading that varies by model, compared to MM’s near-universal loading standard.
“Like everything in life, there’s pluses and minuses,” Leerer said. “So, the minus of the moving coil in theory is it’s got a lower output. So, it needs more gain. So, you need a better quality phono stage.”
A buyer can spend more on a cartridge, install it correctly, and still lose the detail they paid for if the rest of the system is not ready for it. Meanwhile, a moving magnet paired with a compatible stage avoids much of that setup burden.
Basically, for Leerer, the point is system matching. The cartridge, tonearm, cables, and phono stage all decide whether the upgrade actually reaches the speakers.
How a mismatch erases the upgrade
When the matching fails, The Vinyl Verdict’s loading guide maps the consequences with clinical specificity. Resistance set too high produces soft dynamics and lost detail. Too low, and the sound turns thin, bright, and what the guide calls shouting.
Cable capacitance compounds the problem, since every additional meter of tonearm and phono cable can shift frequency response toward harshness or dullness.
Parasound’s matching guide for phono preamps, for example, opens with a claim that cuts through the brand marketing entirely.
“The cartridge is the single most important component when selecting or configuring a phono preamp.” — Parasound
So if the most important component is also the hardest to match, the upgrade math starts working against you. Leerer says his $750 Hana MC competes with anything under two thousand dollars, but only when the phono stage lets it perform as intended.
A mismatched MC can erase the qualities buyers associate with the format, including detail, dynamics, flow, and tonal balance. The cartridge may get blamed, but the problem often starts elsewhere in the chain.
One Factory, Nineteen Brands
System matching is only part of what the MC upgrade narrative tends to flatten. The cartridge business itself is smaller and more intertwined than the branding suggests.
“They’re a big behind-the-scenes producer. You know, what we call an OEM manufacturer,” Leerer said of one company in particular. “So, for many, many decades, they made many of the brand cartridges that people thought came from that brand, but they were actually the people… the cartridge industry is very small and very specialized.”
He’s talking about Excel Sound Corporation, a Yokohama-based manufacturer founded in 1970, which, at peak production during the vinyl boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was turning out 50,000 MM cartridges per month.
Forum researchers have linked Excel Sound to at least 19 brands, including Adcom, Arcam, Benz Micro, Rega, and Shelter, while noting that the list is incomplete.
OEM manufacturing is normal in specialized industries, especially when the required expertise is rare. But it does complicate the usual story buyers are sold. Two cartridges with different badges and very different prices may still come from the same factory, shaped by the same technicians, tooling, and design culture.
However, materials, stylus profile, cantilever choice, generator design, tolerances, quality control, and final voicing can still separate one model from another.
So the point is narrower than that. Brand identity does not always map cleanly to manufacturing origin, and a higher price may reflect distribution, positioning, and exclusivity as much as a wholly separate production capability
The question isn’t whether MC can resolve more from the groove, because the physics genuinely support that claim. The question is whether your system lets that resolution survive the trip to the speakers.
Leerer sells moving coils and isn’t telling anyone to avoid them. But he has spent four decades watching buyers bolt on an MC cartridge without confirming their phono stage can deliver the gain, loading, and signal path that the upgrade demands.
When that step gets skipped, the new cartridge sounds worse than what it replaced, and the buyer blames the wrong component.
The fix isn’t another cartridge purchase. It’s an audit of the chain between stylus and speaker, the part that determines whether a moving coil’s physics advantage reaches your ears or dies in transit.
“Music is essentially physics realized,” he said. “And if you understand physical laws and how they work and design your audio gear to obey physical laws cuz it’s hard to defy them, tends to work a little bit better.”