Explains the Monster cable 'gold-plated banana.'
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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I thought audio quality was more to do with the source and the destination. If you have a shit needle on a record or a speaker made of wood then its gonna sound like ass.
I never once thought it had anything to do with the cables. Unless they were frayed or damaged in some way.
But i am not an audiophile, i record my own music and mix etc, but never worried about cable quality before.
Exactly this, the cables never mattered. They're the least significant part of an audiophile system and I doubt anyone could tell the difference between a crappy cable and a good quality cable. People get good quality cable for durability rather than sound quality.
As long as its not too crappy. Otherwise you’ll wonder why you’re picking up radio.
Even more than the actual contact with the media, the entire system breaks down at the ears. If your ears aren't well-trained, then you don't even know what to listen for. You might think loud bass is good, or booming drums, and never notice that you can't hear any mids.
So in a blind test like this, some people just might prefer a sound that this experiment has little impact on, so they wouldn't be able to notice any differences.
A well-trained ear might be able to detect differences between them, but still not have a real preference. Besides being able to hear all the different frequencies, you have to know what the instruments sound like in real life to know if those frequencies are reproducing accurately. Again, if you don't what it's supposed to sound like, you really don't know if ANY change in components makes a positive or negative difference in the natural sound, you only know the difference relative to your personal preference.
TL;DR: This "experiment" doesn't prove anything. It's just funny.
Interesting, do you know where I can buy a set of trained ears? - Audiophiles, probably.
Some of it is genetic, but a lot of it is years of training in hearing and teasing out all the frequencies.
I spent years in the audiophile record business back in the transition days from analogue LPs to digital CDs, and spent a LOT of time with beyond top-of-the-line audio gear, including high end stuff that wasn't even on the consumer market.
My ears got trained from many years in bands and orchestras, then recording sessions, then hearing the final recordings on CD, as well as thousands of other recordings, and many live performances by some of the greatest orchestras in the world. I know what it is supposed to sound like at every stage of the process.
Bottom line, cables aren't going to be a major issue. Guarantee you've got at least 10 other variables making a bigger difference, and most of them can't even be fixed.
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I heard one guy talk about the importance of cable shielding and connector material and shit once, but the ones I actually know just talk about the other hardware (speakers, mixing pults, lots of terms I couldn't recite).
Speakers are made of wood, the good ones are at least.
Unless your referring to the actual drivers, then yeah wood wouldn't really work in that case.
Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn't limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That's why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There's also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a "dead" (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.
Well, paper is a very popular material in speaker cones, including high-end
The only reason for reasonable quality speaker cables, is so that you get consistant volume between left and right channels if the volume is the same. That and so they don't break when you pull on them.
Nah it's literally only the latter.
Cheap and expensive will give the same volume. But cheap will snap if you look at them wrong, whereas expensive you could throw off the tallest building in the world and they'd have nothing happen to them when you fetch em.
It matters in digital signals more than I expected.
A bad-quqlity HDMI cable over a long run will start getting a bunch of noise on some of my displays that shows up as random green specs popping off due to signal loss, whereas better cables will give a clean signal.
And back when more broadcasts were analog and I ran tech for a road show, I'd occasionally pick up random stations on poorly-shielded cables that would get amplified by powered speakers. The cables essentially became antennas. Though I haven't run into that in over 20 years.
Poorly-shielded cables and speakers also used to have a lot of issues with cell phones. Anyone else remember the series of 3-beeps you could sometimes hear on speakers a few seconds before a phone in the room started ringing?
Why tf did they only test blind people?!
the removal of one sense hightens the other senses
The speaker is what they hear, not the signal to it. Regardless how it's transmitted.
The way audiophiles tell sound quality is 99.99% subjectivity and 0.01% objectivity.
Well, yeah. Everyone's ears are different.
Fun fact: this is where the "banana connector" came from. Before copper was discovered, early humans used bananas for all their audio connections. The name stuck, even though wires are made of metal today.
Additional trivia: The term "banana republic" originates from countries best known for exporting high-end audio equipment back in the day.
"banana split" stems from a failed experiment where scientists tried to split audio frequencies by sticking the connectors into ice cream and running the audio through it
And Bananarama was so named for their high-fidelity recordings which were performed, mixed, and recorded entirely on bananas.
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TIL! It’s fucking bananas that I never knew this.
Bravo
This will now be a standard AI response. Well done.
O noes!
Anybody else read the beginning of the title as "Blind taste test"?
well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
I've got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti... wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
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You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls
So get the good stuff it’s not sound quality it’s so it lasts
You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls
Copper wiring is protected from the elements (that is: oxygen) by its insulation. The gauge of the copper wiring is a far greater factor in audio quality than the voodoo science behind OFC.
You don't have to worry about corrosion in your speaker wiring unless your speaker installation is literally in the ocean.
I knew this fucking pineapple was too good to be true
Yeah, but then again normal 230v or 115v electrical wires are not OFC and they outlive you too so even that is questionable.
Is this a joke? Like actually? If your speaker wire is "rusting and failing" I got bad news for your 120v/240v service and plumbing.
This is just dumb.
Also who the fuck would rip out celling and walls for low voltage speaker wire run. Being a bit dramatic there bud. Just use the old shit to pull the new wire through. Cut small holes where you can't.
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