You know we’ve known this since the 80s right
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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But its easy clicks. Who even gives a shit, if people want to buy snake oil let them.
There's definitely a difference between properly made and shielded cables and the cheapo ones that can be unshielded. However once you meet certain standards like using the correct impedance coax there's basically no improvement from making the cables "better".
I've noticed that the few "Amazon basics" products I've tried were surprisingly good quality, they're probably just about at the right specification.
the analogy I always draw is to wine.
the difference between a $5 bottle and a $20 is perceptible. but, the higher you go, the returns diminish exponentially unless you have a specific taste... and at some point paying the excessive amount of money becomes status not necessity.
yes, potatoes are conductive, but they don't have any shielding and the distance the signal travels in those experiments is irrelevant to practical applications. it is essentially a big wire nut.
if your application is long distances through conduit or many cables run in parallel you need higher quality ones with shielding. Granted, that is not the typical listener's case.
I used to work in the brewing industry. Beer is 99% marketing, and people are morons. This is accurate:
With wine, the price literally affects how we perceive the taste of the wine. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/baba-shiv-how-wines-price-tag-affect-its-taste
Although this research came out before the fMRI debacle...
What fMRI debacle?
I remembered hearing about it. Turns out there was this published in 2016 which I'm pretty sure was the issue I heard about. https://www.vice.com/en/article/fmri-scanner-study-flawed-pnas-anders-eklund/
As to whether anything more came of this I'm not sure.
Wow I hadn't heard of this, but at least the article shows that they were fixing some of this stuff back in 2015. Hopefully by now those bugs have been ironed out. Very interesting, thank you
In this case scientific equipment determined no discernible difference in audio quality, though. I do actually believe in paying for nicer cables but up to a point and that's really mostly about build quality. $4000 for an RCA cable is just insanity.
Apparently that point only needs to be $7.
To be fair, the build quality is really what you'd be paying for with a nicer cable, though with an RCA cable that just stays plugged into your audio system all the time I guess that doesn't matter as much. I buy nice silicone USB charging cables for my phone because they'll last longer and are nicer to use, though the ones I like cost $12-$20, so not exactly $4k lol.
Yeah it's a scam and everybody knows that it's a scam.
Clearly the "audiophile" community doesn't.
XD
But the difference is huge and obvious. It is just not in the quality...
The one thing I would ask is if they were tested in an electrically noisy environment + how long they last.
$4k is ridiculous, just buy the one that is twice the price of you want build quality.
Fuck amazon. You can get pertectly good cable for cheap at many places.
I know one guy who considers himself an audiophile. He’s also an ass. He showed me his audio setup once, and he definitely overspent on cables. It made me smile.
As an audiophile myself, cable selection is very important. You see I have a very nice purple set of IEMs that came with a boring looking cable, I bought a nice looking purple braided cable the feels so nice in the hands and matches the shells.
There's another cable I got that looks classy and has wooden accents on the plug for my big headphones.
Listening in style is the what being an audiophile is all about 😎.
A connection through a potato yielded fine audio
But, wankers want to wank
One thing to consider is some of the cheaper cables have connectors that degrade after being plugged in more than three times.
Once again proving to the non audiophile world that audiophiles are silly. Audiophiles, however, will not take their fingers out of their ears and will continue to do things like buy $4000 cables.
That doesn't test durability over 10 years of use
You could replace the $7 Amazon cable every week and it will still be cheaper than a $4000 cable that lasts ten years
And then you'd be an asshole who damanges the environment.
Stop looking at cost in just dollars and cents.
Yes it's a scam but, when you spend $100.000 on a set of speakers, you just can't spend $7 on cables.
(Sorry I forgot the /S)
