Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

2021 Great American Beer Festival winners, includes sortable format by style or state:

https://www.greatamericanbeerfestival.com/the-competition/2021-gabf-winners/

of course the winner from my area was a sour beer
Marto in Sioux City is worthy

The issue with things like speaker cables is confirmation bias unless you do a blind study, and even then it's qualitative.  I might prefer the sound from cheap cables and you might prefer the other, but which of us is right?  We both are, but I end up paying less.

I use Monster type cables with good connectors, that makes sense to me, they are lightly shielded.  Maybe if I used expensive cables I could hear some difference, but is it better?  It's subjective, and nothing is as good as the real thing, a live performance (I'm talking classical music, rock often is so loud you can tell anyway).

I'm wireless here. Kinda like it that way, but I miss my Jamo system.

Truthfully, I'd like to get a halfway decent stereo system. 

But at the same time, I mostly listen to streaming music, so the quality level doesn't justify it. 

So if I do it, I will be absolutely looking at a halfway decent system. A couple hundred on a multichannel AV receiver, a couple hundred on speakers and subwoofer, and done. Spend enough that I can get decent volume, decent midrange and bass, but there's no source material I'm likely to use that justifies spending thousands. 

That said, even if I had all my audio in lossless FLAC encoding, nothing justifies stupid overspending on speaker cables.

BTW an audiophile will debate to the death about the value of their speaker wire, even though they're wrong.

At least speaker wire is analog, so you can have a debate about fidelity. But as for any digital cable, you should NEVER EVER even consider overpaying. 

Digital signals don't have to worry about fidelity--to a point. You either have a good enough signal to reconstruct the data stream PERFECTLY, or you don't. Cables are binary, either good or bad. And bad is bad...

As a cable company says here regarding HDMI cables: https://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/premium-hdmi-cable.htm

It remains the case under HDMI 2.0 as before that this isn't a subtle thing; if a cable is failing, you will see the failure manifested, in the great majority of cases, as one of the following, in order of severity:

(1) "Sparkles": individual dropped-out pixels, or
(2) "Line" dropouts where a whole line of video, or the rightward portion, drops out, or
(3) Intermittently flashing or jumping picture, indicating that so much picture data is being lost that the display is losing sync, or
(4) No picture.

These types of issues are what to look for. If you don't see them, your cable is doing fine with the signal currently being run through it. The effect won't be subtle -- it's not about qualitative aspects of the image like shade detail, contrast, and the like.

If your HDMI cable works, spending an extra $10 or $100 for a "better" cable won't do squat for you.

Yes, you are right, one could measure the wave form input with the wave form at the end of the cables, I hadn't thought of that.  I was more thinking of the aural experience, some humans might prefer the more distorted wave forms.  Shielding apparently is a "thing", for some. 

But when you're looking at stereos, you want hi-fi right? High fidelity. 

fidelity
[ fi-del-i-tee, fahy- ]SHOW IPA



See synonyms for fidelity on Thesaurus.com
📙 Middle School Level

---

noun, plural fi·del·i·ties.

• strict observance of promises, duties, etc.:a servant's fidelity.
• loyalty:fidelity to one's country.
• conjugal faithfulness.
• adherence to fact or detail.
• accuracy; exactness:The speech was transcribed with great fidelity.
• Audio, Video. the degree of accuracy with which sound or images are recorded or reproduced.

In audio, you don't want the wire to distort the signal to make it sound "better". You want the signal that was recorded to come out of your speaker. In no other area of audio that I'm aware of do audiophiles accept that distortion is preferred.

I bought the wife a sound bar with a wireless subwoofer a while back, the wireless connection would pick up ambient distortion fairly often, lightning was one item.  I can see that an unshielded wire could pick up ambient foreign signals.

That same cable company says this: https://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/speaker/index.htm

Speaker cable is a bit different from a lot of the interconnect cables we handle, in several respects. Because speakers are driven at low impedance (typically 4 or 8 ohms) and high current, speaker cables are, for all practical purposes, immune from interference from EMI or RFI, so shielding isn't required. The low impedance of the circuit, meanwhile, makes capacitance, which can be an issue in high-impedance line or microphone-level connections practically irrelevant. The biggest issue in speaker cables, from the point of view of sound quality, is simply conductivity; the lower the resistance of the cable, the lower the contribution of the speaker cable's resistance to the damping factor, and the flatter the frequency response will be. While one can spend thousands of dollars on exotic speaker cable, in the end analysis, it's the sheer conductivity of the cable, and (barring a really odd design, which may introduce various undesirable effects) little else that matters. The answer to keeping conductivity high is simple: the larger the wire, the lower the resistance, and the higher the conductivity.

I will say that one area where this might not be true is in car audio. Wire routing in a car can sometimes cause issues because of significant amounts of power running through the vehicle. However I think a good portion of this isn't even the speaker wire part, it's running the power cables to an amplifier in a way to avoid interference, and routing things like low-voltage preamp wires from the receiver to the amplifier in an area that it won't be subject to interference or crosstalk. 

I personally would not spend money on high end speaker cables, but obviously they exist, and some do.  As I say, if you invest say $50 K in the system, another $2K is not inherently out of balance with your budget.  My system is more in the $4 K area, which I think just about maxes out your return.

Maybe $2K for speaker wire isn't out of balance with the budget for a $50K audio system. It's still a complete and total waste of money, beyond the psychological aspect that it buys you, and the bragging rights you get being able to tell people you spent $2K on speaker wire.

Of course, that bragging will not have the desired effect on guys like me and @utee94 lol...