My opinion is to consider these factors: (1) looks (2) connectivity (tips, connectors, etc. ) (3) physical characteristics like length, weights, kinkiness, microphonics, etc. ) and buy based on those. I doubt there is any meaningful electrical difference between most reasonably decent cables. Airline freebie headphones? Probably junk cables. Hifiman or decent 3rd party cables, probably all fine electrically.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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There are a few things that make a cable influence sound:
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It's important to use oxygen-free copper. Crap copper can lead to channel imbalance
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It's important that they're built properly. Well-soldered, gold-plated. Bad electrical connections = bad signal transmission.
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EMI shielding if needed. If you live near a radio tower, every wire is an antenna and will pick up interference. Similarly, if you live in an apartment building and you have 30 WiFi networks all around you.
Fortunately, none of these things are expensive. You can tick all these boxes in a $10 cable, easy. Everything else is just snake oil or aesthetics.
Oxygen free copper cables aren't humanly distinguishable from a coat hanger last I checked. So I wouldn't really call that important. But if it's cheap anyways, why not?
EMI shielding is only relevant if you expect interference in the frequency region that you are working in.
If you want to transmit a 2.4 GHz signal, then your cables should be very well shielded - there is a lot of noise in the 2.4 Ghz band (since you will always have WiFi and Bluetooth devices nearby which operate in this range too)
But there is no relevant electromagnetic noise below 20 kHz - and in addition to that, the impedances we are working at to connect headphone to amplifier (much less than a few hundred kiloohm) are low enough for EMI not to be an issue (since the stray pickup current will be many orders of magnitude lower than the current of the actual signal)
I had picked up a couple of openheart 8 core cables 1.5-2 years ago, and they were nice and didn't tangle or kink, though it was hard to tell the left and right plugs apart. But the ones I bought were no longer available, so I tried a different version, and they were just so stiff, despite being slightly more expensive. They actually felt far worse and tangled/kinked more easily than the $4 cables I use when loaning to friends.
FWIW, there was no difference to my ears or on a frequency response graph (crude testing rig) between all the cables, including the old stock hifiman cables and even some regular electrical wire, lol.
Totally. I've been known to hook up my Magnepan speakers with lamp cord in a pinch. Shhh, don't tell my audiophile friends...
I have that experience as well, I have several of the black/brown/brass hardware one that is nice but I have another OpenHeart cable that's very stiff.