Headphone cables

[nm2285]

I float around headfi.com occassionally and I noticed, those guys put quite the premium on replacement cables for their headphones. I can imagine there could be some slight improvement from stock cables due to thicker gauge or better connection. Nothing to make it night and day, though. They need a site like this one to help dispell some of the rumors about cables.

 

[jaxvon]

Very true. But then again, it's not exactly a nice thing to hear when you've dropped a few thousand on expensive cables. At that point, many people want to believe in what they bought so they don't have to face the fact that they wasted their hard-earned money.

 

[WmAx]

I float around headfi.com occassionally and I noticed, those guys put quite the premium on replacement cables for their headphones. I can imagine there could be some slight improvement from stock cables due to thicker gauge or better connection. Nothing to make it night and day though. They need a sight like this one to help dispell some of the rumors about cables.

It can be very difficult to get worthwhile info from the Head-fi forums. They go balls out on B.S. on that forum. I took a few of their more elite members to task a few times last year, but as expected, they more or less ignored me or responded with basicly inane replies.

As for cables, specifically, it is possible that some cables can make an audible difference, due to the resistance differences. For example: At least one headphone that I know of uses steel cable(not copper), and at the extremely small wire diameter used, it might be adding around 20 ohms(though I have not had an opportunity to measure this particular cable) of series resistance. Since the headphone(Sennheiser HD25) in question is of moderate nominal impedance(70 ohms), 20 ohms may affect the frequency response slightly as well as reduce SPL by a small amount.

-Chris

 

[jaxvon]

But then again, any decent quality headphone set that I know of (like my MDR-7506s) has high-quality OFC cable anyway, so it's a waste.