Headphones

(This is an edited version of a post I made on another subreddit.

This post is not here to cause debate or discourse but to try and research and study this topic

before you read I would like to say that this entire post is for discussion/theorizing please do not take this post as undisputed fact. The information presented comes from me asking a professor outside of the audio community what he thought the effects of cables would be on various audio devices)

I would like to state that personally I haven’t bought any of the super high dollar premium cables because I’m a broke lad, but that this is more of a theoretical discussion!

I think the answer is yes cables do make a difference but they also most likely do not matter to everyone (or a majority of people)

I am a mechanical engineering student that is quite fascinated in material sciences and the more I’ve seen the cable debate the more curious I have become. I am more on the side of the cables not changing much if anything, but I simply wanted to know more.

My curiosity continued to grow and I happened to be in a materials science class this semester! So who better to ask than my professor whose entire job/field is researching the properties of materials!

So I asked the professor after class one day and we began talking and of course he was excited to share with me his knowledge. He told me that the difference would be found in the metal itself! The higher the quality of the metal in this practice would be related to the crystal size of the materials being used. Ideally you would want your cables made of larger crystals if not one single crystal, but of course this process is expensive meaning that to make a profit brands have to sell this premium manufacturing for a premium price. He told me that you most likely wouldn’t be able to sell any sort of “single crystal” cable for less than a hundred dollars at least so there’s a good chance that a lot of the “single crystal” cables seen online are in fact not single crystal and that they’re just marketed that way to compete with the multi hundred dollar cables.

Now when I asked him what the benefit of these higher quality cables would be I noticed an interesting response! He told me that as the power and signal moves up the cable you can think of each crystal as having a barrier around it (called a grain boundary) and that every time the signal SMASHES past that barrier it uses some of its power and it can potentially mutate the signal a tiny bit. If you have a super cheap cable with billions of these crystal boundaries then that’s billions of times where your signal is smashing it’s face into a wall potentially harming your signal more and more as it makes the short trip up the cable and to your ears. In premium cables where there’s only one crystal or maybe only a handful of crystals that greatly reduces the amount of times the signal is being forced to charge across the barrier!

The reason this response really interested me is because while the professor is not present in the audio community his description draws parallels in the instances where people notice a difference in the budget vs premium cables the things they note are more volume and a richer (commonly) warmer sound! That could very well be explained by the grain structure differences in the cables themselves!

Now in theory this would mean that everyone could notice a more powerful and detailed listening experience by gradually upgrading their cables HOWEVER in practice unless you’re rocking premium premium headphones the chances of you noticing a big difference is small because you also have to consider the quality of the materials your headphones THEMSELVES are made of! If you buy a 700$ cable for your 15$ iems the weakest link is still most likely the 15$ iems. This does mean however if you’ve already spent thousands of dollars on headphones maybe you can squeeze even more performance out of them with a high dollar cable upgrade since the components of the headphones themselves might be held back by the quality of the cable.

The moral of the story and the true question presented is while yes the cables can vary in quality which undeniably causes differences, are these differences significant enough to change how a human perceives the audio?

In the other post some individuals have found research articles regarding to this topic and with the numerous amount of people present here I thought it would be possible to gather even more information!

I would like to again say that the point of this post is NOT to cause any debates where the evidence is subjective information but instead try to find objective/logical/numerical answers