Studies, research findings, and interesting tidbits from the ever-expanding scientific world.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Help, in an effort to save money I connected my tube amp to my speakers with bananas and I'm not fitting the rich, lossless sound quality I was led to expect from this headline, in fact unless the speakers are broken, the banana doesn't work very well as an audio cable
Did you use banana plugs?
This surprising similarity prompted an important clarification: the test didn’t rely on exotic or high-end gear. It used ordinary consumer gear like a laptop, a USB audio interface, and standard recording software.
Well this could be part of the reason other than the banana ,etc, just adding resistance.
But you'd have to vet your random participants. Like for instance my wife's phone speaker is terrible and she turns it up to 100% to watch videos. She doesn't notice anything wrong, but for me the distortion and clipping hurts my head. Some people just dont "hear" bad audio.
If audible differences were present, they failed to provide reliable markers for identification. And although a slight listener preference for the banana recordings emerged, it didn’t correlate with accuracy.
Hell yes, 2026 the year of banana hi-fi meta 🤘
I bought and installed Monster cables for my fairly high end (Not audiophile) HiFi setup in the 80s. Oxygen free copper yada yada. It's true that they are fat conductors (good), very flexible sheathing (good), transparent (cool), but I could have saved a bunch by using fat plain electrical cables.
My experience with cables is that they do matter, especially on the interconnect side, but price has very little to do with the perceived difference in fidelity or sound signature.
As for interference and shielding, yes this can indeed make a difference, but it's rarely an issue unless we are trying to measure the noise floor, or using a really weirdly balanced levels. (like very quiet source attached to an amp that is cranked to max)
Bestbuy employee said cables are their profit generators, they are marled up 400%
Yeah, I worked at Best buy when they still sold CDs and our discount was store cost plus 10% so we'd get the $100 monster cables for like $15.
My buddy and I legit made $5k one summer just flipping that shit on eBay before he got caught doing it and got fired.
The noise floor only really matters when you're watching A Quiet Place
What about trying to listen to 4'33"?
I mean, Monty at Xiph.org is on file for stating that Hi-Res music is snake oil.
FLAC is great for critical listening and Jukebox mode. Otherwise, a decent Opus file on a modern DAP works fine.
Audiophiles when they can’t tell the difference between lossless and 320kbps mp3:
If you are using a digital signal out that is being converted to analog at the receiver with decent speakers you can tell the difference between FLAC and 256kbps. I can't tell the difference at 320kbps.
That's my coworkers face when I said I find mp3 rips sound muddy to me, so I have been using flac and wav.
I had to prove it to him with two back to back rips.
But for many people, like my darling wife, she can't discern the difference and a clippy phone speaker is the same for her as my DAC on a 5.1 system
me listening to music I encoded at ~90 kbps opus
When I was younger I would listen to music recorded on my phone from the radio. They were 128 kb/s, which sounds OK until you see they're .wav files so they don't use the bitrate effectively: just mono, 32kHz sample rate, 4 bits per sample. They sound worse than 24 kb/s MP3s, which is something you'd stream over a 28k modem in 1999!
(The SoC can and does do AMR compression when recording MPEG-4 (more specifically 3GP4, which uses MPEG-4 part 2, not the well-known AVC, which is MPEG-4 part 10) video but the manufacturer just didn't take advantage of it, maybe the library for video recording was proprietary and the AMR codec not well documented.)
Things are better now, mostly.
I used to record songs from the TV and TELETEXT "radio"... to tape.
Do you realize that 4 bits per sample has a theoretical maximum S/N ratio of some 24 dB? That's 10x the noise amplitude of the worst tapes. Not to mention I often recorded in a bus, resulting in extra noise and dropouts.
I used to use teletext but what is teletext radio? The bitrate of VBI is way more enough than audio but I couldn't find any information about it being used that way...
I used to use teletext but what is teletext radio
Sometimes there was music in the background, some sort of radio. Don't stress over it, that was not a technical endeavor.
I mean, when browsing teletext with your decoder you'd get the TV channel's audio unless you muted it. Did you mean "teletext demo" programs that were often broadcast just before signoff? In Czechoslovakia before 24-hour TV, we'd get classical music, signoff, the anthem (pre-1989), and then a test pattern with a radio station. Video of this
I'd imagine some teletext demo programs did have radio playing.
The article is interesting, and I would not spend the crazy amounts that some people do on cables, but cable quality does still matter.
First of all, the article says that one area it definitely does make a difference is:
Interference-prone environments: Poorly shielded cables can pick up interference, affecting signal quality. However, these tests show a broader point. Detecting audible differences is surprisingly difficult when visual cues, price, and expectation are removed. Without context or labels, even ridiculous conductors fail to produce reliably noticeable changes.
However, the tests arent testing for interference at all. They're performed openly on a desk without much around, but it then goes on to conclude:
If wet mud and bananas don’t degrade the signal in ways listeners can detect, then subtle improvements from expensive cables are even less likely to be audible. In other words, the threshold for hearing real differences is far higher than marketing often implies.
Like yes, there is obviously marketing hype, especially if buying a name brand cable, but the quality of shielding legitimately can make a difference, especially if you're running it alongside power cables / extension cords.
The other factor that can make a difference, has nothing to do with audio quality but just physical convenience, in that pure Copper cables will be more expensive, but thinner and more flexible, then Copper Clad Aluminum (CCA). CCA is cheaper, and if your runs are static and unmoving there's zero issue with it, but if you're moving your speakers around a bunch, the stiffness compared to copper can be annoying.
CCA cables break if they are moved a lot. I've had trouble with CCA ethernet cables breaking.
Because all those materials are shit. Only deoxydised copper with gold coating will be ok, more or less! Barbarians!
Gold!? Oh boy, where to even start ...
Silver is a far superior conductor, and everyone knows about the "skin effect" in wires. So obviously you want silver coated solid core copper. That's not even getting into all the other factors involved in proper cable selection.
I recommend these cables for the entry level audiophile.
But the current, and therefore signal, goes on the outer side of the conductor, so you suggest the signal to go through unevenly rusted silver instead of unoxidizing in normal circumstances gold?
According to the people that make the £70,470.00 speaker wires: yes.
That's awfully specific!
I only use gold plated banana entwined with meteorite iron, thank you very much. Everything else is just a waste of sound.
Mmmm gold plated banana entwined with meteorite iron
And optical cables need to be gold plated. Basic audiophile knowledge.
make sure your optical cables are properly magnetized / demagnetized, too
if the cables are running in a north/south direction you want them magnetized with oblong polarity to the Earth's magnetic field, but if they're east/west they shouldn't be magnetized at all to avoid Maxwell-Gauss feedback loops
Nonono, only literal pure gold will ever transmit sound acceptably. If your cables are light enough to still be picked up by humans, they dont contain enough gold.
Are you part Dwarf?
Perhaps 🪨⛏
Not unless you’ve had a swami bless it, or you may as well not have bothered.
Are we making banana phone happen?
What could it cost, ten dollars?
Ring ring ring ring ring……
Over the years my relative has spent allot of money on these non balanced audio cables. Every time he 'upgrades' he says it sounds so much better. I hear no difference. Then he puts the volume up so my ears hurt and asks if i can hear it. I just smile at that point.
When I was like 4 years old, our neighbor had a fancy sound system he showed off to us. Next time he was at our house, I walked over to our TV to show him it could do the same thing, by just turning it up really loud.
I figure it's like I used to feel that my engine ran smother after getting an oil change. The brain is weird and can't be trusted.
I mean depends how bad you let your oil get.
When I met my wife she mentioned her car had trouble going up hill, I suggested a 5 (new to her for 1 year) year old car should be fine at going up hill.
Turns out she had never heard that you need to change oil, the dipstick showed no oil at all.
Oil change definitely made her car drive smoother 😀
Wait Can I be the conductor? Wireless is cool but Bluetooth is kinda iffy.
Technically! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_conduction
(Disclaimer: I know this isn't what you meant, but the wordplay is fun)