I totally agree! I’m not a hardcore audiophile, more of a wacky stereophile and just want decent audio with equipment that I can live with.
Take Blon 03. Due to the DD, I don’t think there’s much of a difference with cables for it, but the Yinyoo cable for them lays perfectly on my ear and I much prefer the feel of the cable over stock. If someone had bigger ears, I wouldn’t recommend the same cable as the stem is rather short.
For some IEMs with shitty stock cables, I’d see the worth of grabbing a $15 cable. That’s the joy of the IEM world that’s there’s cheap options available; no need to blow your budget on good cables. But if the cable that comes with them is good and fits someone well, I wouldn’t recommend an “upgrade” cable for a sliver of audio performance.
My priorities are comfort and the appropriate termination. If it looks nice too, that’s a bonus. Like with tubes, I will get acclimated to any sonic changes pretty quickly so I’m usually ok with it as long as the change isn’t dramatically worse
I agree completely, for the little bit of significance that cables might make, I don’t think it’s worth going nuts over especially when the end result is slightly different and not even necessarily “better”. Especially if you just want to enjoy music casually. There’s unfortunately no need to go down the rabbit hole unless you’re willing to invest a serious amount of money and time into this hobby.
The one thing I will say after being in this hobby for some time, is that eventually you will end up with a decent amount of headphones that all share a similar termination. For example, all ZMF, Audeze and Empyrean headphones all take mini XLR. If, like me, you own and plan to keep many of these headphones, suddenly a $500 cable that will be useful on multiple sets is a lot more justifiable. I have similarly upgraded iem cables that I can use across a few pairs too. My only recommendation would be to wait until you’re sure you plan to keep the headphone/iem before you start worrying about replacing the cable
I cannot understate though how much bad cables can ruin a good system. I think overall if people have a system with a good quality conductor (even if it is good quality house wiring copper) sounds better than some aluminum mashed combo that is poorly constructed. When shopping for cables, if the quality of the conductor is suspect just avoid.
Agreed. I as well have so many headphones and have spent good money for quality upgrade cables, but I’ve never been able to hear an audible difference with headphones.
With IEMs, especially MMCX, the connections are delicate. It makes no sense to spend a lot of money on an IEM and change the cable constantly because you will eventually damage the IEM or cable. Get a good cable for your IEM and don’t remove it for the life of the IEM.
+1 on this. I’ll add that also be wary of a cable that has a poor weave/braid to the 3 or 4 conductors in it. A shoddy braid will leave space between conductors and drive up the capacitance of the cable. Capacitance attenuates lower frequencies. Conversely, a too-tight weave can function as a coil of wire which is an inductor. Inductance attenuates high frequencies.
When I got my gl2000s and plugged them in using their cables and swapped to my he6se using the gl2000s cables there was a very noticeable drop in slam and I still don’t know why.
I don’t know how your post really contributed to anything in this discussion. Have you tried for yourself? Better yet, have you even read the earlier posts in this thread? It was universally mentioned that cables is not something you should invest a lot of your allocation for and there are occurrences that they make a difference, based on use case.
I don’t have the GL2000 or HE6SE so I don’t know much about their respective cables. However, the issue you raise can be a general cable issue. If the cables have multiple strands of wire for each conductor then the quality of the braid/weave of those conductors matters a lot. If the braid isn’t tight enough and there is space between wire strands then there will be some capacitance in the wire. Capacitors are reactive circuit elements and tend to look like open or broken circuits to low frequencies. If the wire has some capacitance in it you will notice some attenuation and/or lack of speed/punch in the low end.
This is bullshit. There is lots of stuff we cant measure in science. Hell, a large part of higher level science is knowing what is unquantifiable. Even Amir wont claim there is no such thing as stage and imaging, but how do you measure size of staging or accuracy of imaging?
I am very heavily in the camp of cables just cant make a difference unless you have impedance matching issues like with andromeda (where the change is literally measurable in FR), so I agree with your conclusion (and I doubt ill change my mind until I hear a difference myself), but your logic is just flat out bad.
I mean… This aint a great argument either… If conductivity of a wire changes how something sounds in a way that cannot be objectively measured, a mechanism must at least be proposed for what is happening.
The Fiio FD5 is the IEM that made it very easy for me to believe that different cables can make a difference.
The FD5 comes with a very nice sterling silver cable. I swapped it out for a pure copper cable and the sound transformed in a positive direction.
You’ve probably heard it before, but the pure copper cable skewed the entire sound in the direction of warmth. It added bass fullness and impact, mids were given immediacy and intimacy while also appropriately veiling the troublesome peaks in the treble which were to sharp when exposed with the stock silver cable.
The sound became less transparent and gains substance, body, much needed opaqueness.
Warmth is something we can objectively measure. It corelates with specific boosts and cuts in FR. With all the tech out there why have we never been able to measure an increase in warmth with a copper cable vs higher neutrality with silver? Also, why would this be consistent across multi-driver IEMs with massive variation in impedance and sensitivity between drivers for different regions (specificaly there is a massive impedance difference between BA vs D bass and EST vs BA tweeters) and different crossover implementations. Hell, even if we have 2 IEMs using the same company BAs for all zones, the BAs them selves can have different impedances and sensitivities needing different crossovers. Why would a singular cable effect all of these configurations in the same way?
Holy crap, you know your cable science! Thanks for your insights. I love learning as much about these things as possible and am very fortunate to have those like you so knowledgeable a part of the community to learn from.
We don’t have the means of accurately measuring things like soundstage but may have the technology to do so at some point in the future.
Yeah, we can’t (which I kknow was your point). The tricky part is we don’t fully understand how our own auditory systems localize sounds. We know that with 2 ears the time delay and distortion that happens from sound waves traveling both around and through the head help, but then someone who loses hearing in one ear will eventually learn how to localize sounds almost as effectively as someone who still has 2 healthy ears. Go figure. How do we even begin to measure an audio system’s ability to re-create spatial cues when we don’t even fully grasp how our own brains do it? (rhetorical question)
Not trying to hate on anyone, but i’m honestly quite surprised by how this hobby is filled with measurement geeks. Hearing music is done with the ears, just like measuring what makes someone’s life worth living, a happy life etc isn’t perfectly quantifiable there are many things that you won’t be able to measure with technology because it’s not the right tool. Use your ears, that’s as simple as it gets.