DIY: Archimago's "RED DRAGON" Speaker Cables - Canare 4S11G (OFC, Star Quad, 11AWG). [And fascinating Townshend video with Wireworld in the mix.]

Alright friends, time for another fun and easy audiophile craft project! 🙂

Among the cables we use in audio, I would argue it's most fun fooling around with speaker cables as a DIY project. This is not necessarily because it "sounds different" (after all, this recent blind test didn't show a difference between $27 12AWG OFC zip cord and a $20k Gryphon set as discussed here, right?).

No friends, within reason, speaker cables have never really been proven to sound all that different from each other unless there are clear effects designed into them (stuff like the MIT cables with "articulation control" filter box come to mind). Rather, these are "fun" to make if you have time because you and your visitors can see the cables. A nice looking, relatively thick set can look impressive compared to generic thin wires. While we might measure and find good numbers, or subjectively hear nice-sounding music regardless, appearances cannot be underestimated in the world of the audiophile; after all that's been said and done, we don't need to pretend that it's all for improving sound quality, right? 😉

And so, for fun and curiosity, I found the Canare 4S11G which is the Oxygen-Free Copper (OFC) variant of the well-known 4S11. Many cables claim to be OFC, but the conductor here is certified Japanese Industrial Standard JIS-H-3510.

I reached out to AVshop.ca here in Canada and grabbed 25' (CAD$3.16/ft or just less than USD$2.50/ft) of this wire to play around with. Here's the result of a little DIY, what I'll call my "RED DRAGON" speaker cables. Because red is cool and dragons are auspicious and marketing departments seem to think "mythical creatures" cables 😯 appeal to audiophiles:

Come to think of it, who knows, maybe I chose the red/black color because I was at PAF'24 recently and thought the red pattern looked really nice (the indigo/violet one is also cool but seemed a little over the top for my room):

I've been aware of the 4S11G's existence for awhile and noticed that it has only been more easily available in the last 2 years for shorter lengths. Here's the part listed in Canare's catalog, and here's the specs sheet which is mostly about the physical characteristics rather than electrical properties. 

The 4S11G has the same internal construction as the standard 4S11. Years ago, I posted on a similar speaker cable project with the 4S11, but this time let's make it look prettier.

Beige color with white brand marking and "Made in Japan" looks dull and boring. Can't just have that in an audiophile sound room, right? 🙂 I assume "2409" either refers to the 9th week of 2024 or September 2024 this was produced.

Outer diameter for the cable is 10.7mm and as the name indicates, there are 4 wires, each wire being 14AWG so two combined would be 11AWG. They're internally twisted in a "Star-Quad" configuration such that the 2 wires carrying each leg of the signal will be spaced across from each other. Here's a cross-sectional looks and the materials in the cable:

Wires 1 & 3 and 2 & 4 carry the + and - signal pairs. Polyethylene
wire insulator has dielectric constant ~2.3, close to Teflon/PTFE ~2.15.
See here. The 100mm "pitch" refers to the length of the twisting cycle.

There's a thin white paper "tape" that's hard to see in the picture surrounding the internal contents.

The use of cotton filler inside the cable is to "maintain cable shape" and "keep conductors from shifting"; important for the consistency and accuracy of that quadrupole geometry when twisting and turning the wire.

A look at the wires with the outer PVC sheath and paper tape removed; notice the dense packing with the cotton filler.

This type of cable geometry can reduce EMI radiation especially if you're running these against adjacent low-voltage cables (like phono wires for example). They're also able to reject interference, beneficial if you're running long lengths.

Here's an oldie-but-goodie video from Benchmark demonstrating the difference in noise immunity between the Benchmark Star-Quad cable and standard shielded microphone cables based on the same principle. There's also a demonstration of the difference between linear and switching power supplies with much less magnetic interference from switching supplies in the audible band:

I. Cable Construction:

Alright then, let's grab our pieces together and make the RED DRAGON:

As you can see on the left, I have a partially-constructed cable. I wanted to make 2 x 9' lengths so I will need about 20' of the Canare 4S11G (I bought 25', enough for another center channel cable as well).

Other than the wire, everything else was sourced from Amazon:

--- Locking gold-plated banana plugs (I used these GLS Audio ones but they seem unavailable these days), quite similar to these sold by Benchmark. You'll need 8 for standard cables, and 12 if you decide to bi-wire. 90° gold/rhodium-plated locking plugs like these would also be excellent.

--- 32' 1/3" PET expandable braid sleeve (Black Red - or whatever color you prefer)

--- Some 3" x 1/2" 3:1 shrink tubing (I have this assorted sizes kit)

--- Various tools like a utility knife, wire stripper, scissors, tape measure.

--- Not shown - for heating the shrink tubing you can use a small lighter, or even better yet if you have one, a hot air gun works really well.

--- For the tweakers, you'll notice in the back there's a bottle of Caig ProGold GP5 contact enhancer. I bought this ages ago and it has followed me through the years in my box of knickknacks. I don't think the stuff goes bad in the can stored in a cool place, I suspect this bottle will last me a lifetime. It's similar to Stabilant 22. These days, you can get DeoxIT Gold G5 (further discussion here). It's a contact enhancer and can protect from oxidation over time.† I typically will spray a small amount to clean the banana plug connector, copper wire and inside of the connector, wiping off the excess liquid before assembling the pieces.

Okay, let's put it together. The nice thing about cable projects is that it's all straight forward and hard to go wrong unless you short out the wires or something!

1. Cut your Canare 4S11(G) to the appropriate lengths. I used 9' as mentioned above.

2. For me, on the amplifier end, I removed 8" of the outer sheath so that the cable can be used for amplifiers with widely-spaced terminals. The widest I have is the Emotive XSP-1L with the +/- connectors 9" apart. 

3. Strip off ~1/2" of the polyethylene insulation and twist the red + translucent red wires, and the white + translucent white wires together. (In the cross-sectional diagram above, this will be wires 1+3 and 2+4.)

4. Feed the Canare 4S11G cable through the expandable braid sleeve, leaving about maybe 1-2cm exposed PVC sheath near the end. This allows the shrink tubing to grip part of the underlying cable sheath, not just the braided sleeve.

Because the sleeve has to expand, you'll need a longer amount than the length of the cables, 30' 1/3" sleeve for about 20' total cable length is safe.

NOTE: Be patient with feeding the braided sleeve since it needs to expand around the
PVC outer sheath for a snug fit. This takes the most effort in the construction process!

5. Slide the 3" x 1/2" shrink tubing over the end and I allow it to overhang by about 1/2" to overlap with the wires. Then heat up the shrink tubing to basically "cap" the braided sleeve, the 4S11G, and the insulated wires so they hold together.

Hot air gun works well... Note I used black shrink tubing for left channel.
Can use red tubing to denote right channel.

6. Connect your banana plugs as appropriate. BTW, I'm using the same GLS banana plugs as for the "Colorful Set of Speaker Cables" discussed a few years back with their dual set-screws internally.

7. On the other end of the cable (speaker connector end), I removed a shorter 6" length of outer sheath - can go shorter like 4" since speaker terminals usually aren't spaced far apart. Again, pull back the expandable braided sleeve a little to expose 1-2cm of the outer 4S11G sheath.

8. Apply the 3" x 1/2" shrink tubing and heat up to cap off as we did the other side in Step 5. Then install the banana connectors to the wire.

9. Do the same with the other cable... And you should have your pair of RED DRAGONS ready to use.

Black and red shrink tubing to indicate speaker channel. Can be useful when installing the speaker cable behind equipment rack to make sure not mixing up the channels.

As you can see, I didn't bother with bi-wiring the speaker end although it'd be easy to do. Bi-wiring doesn't really make a meaningful difference electrically although 4 banana plugs could potentially improve the connection to the speaker terminals I supposed.

II. Cable Measurements

Let's get measurements to confirm what we expect. Here are the results using the Reed R5001 LCR Meter; these numbers are from my full build with Canare wire, GLS banana plug, red braided sleeve - both left and right cables measured to check for consistency in my construction:

Using the resistance/impedance averaged at 1kHz and 10kHz, insertion loss across 10' of this cable (round trip, 20') into a 4Ω load would be around -0.026dB only. As usual, with thicker gauge cables at normal lengths, this insertion loss is simply negligible.

Modeled as RLC low-pass network. As usual with reasonable cables,
the wire only imparts tiny effects into and beyond the 20kHz audible limit.
Speaker effects are obviously orders of magnitude higher compared to this,
likewise room character and even where we're sitting in the room
will have greater impact.

The resistance values are low, as expected, for what one would see with 11AWG high-quality copper. Notice the resistance within the audible spectrum is very low and better than the Nordost-like "silver-plated OFC" ~12AWG cable measured not long ago. However, the rise in resistance at 100kHz is indicative of the skin effect whenever we have individual thicker wires. That 3-4x jump between 10kHz to 100kHz is typical of what I've seen over the years, and mitigated when wire strands are isolated like with Litz cables, the flat individually-insulated Nordost-like, or Kimber Kable-like designs. IMO, there's nothing wrong with the skin effect at ultrasonic frequencies since this will naturally attenuate some of the switching noise when using Class D amplifiers for example even if just by a small amount.

Beyond impedance/resistance, I would say that the results here are a good balance when it comes to series inductance and parallel capacitance. Inductance is low, not as low as the comparatively straight DIY "Colorful Cable" but the capacitance is about equivalent to that loosely twisted design.  For very low capacitance, one should look again at something like the straight Nordost-like flat designs. On the other hand, the Kimber-like interweaved cable clearly has much higher capacitance (~3x that of the 4S11G, still not very high compared to 500pF/ft Polk Cobra cables of old which were tightly braided and insulated with enamel).

What this cable brings to the table however is that Star-Quad configuration and potential benefits around EMI susceptibility and lower radiation as discussed above.

III. Subjective Impressions

So how did the RED DRAGONs sound?

Glorious my friends! It's always exciting to have a listen before taking the measurements. I had them connected to my main hi-fi system in the sound room, listened to a few albums and was blown away by what I heard. It was so good, one evening I couldn't stop listening until 3:00AM when I checked the clock! My wife even came down around midnight and asked what that beautiful sound was.

As you can imagine, with high-quality cables that conduct the music signal smoothly from the start, there is no "break-in" period needed here folks. Furthermore, since the oxygen-free copper is of such purity, there is no need to wonder about directionality - only low-quality metal is so asymmetrical as to result in directionality! The use of the ProGold contact enhancer has smooooothed the flow of those beautiful-sounding electrons to remove harshness between metal interfaces. 😉

Let's talk about a few albums I had a listen to...

If you're into James Bond, the Bond 25 (2022, DR10 stereo, DR12 multichannel) collection from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road, might be up your alley. Soundtrack scores are modern classical music these days and there's certainly quite a bit of material in the Bond series of films starting with Dr. No in 1962.

The well-known "James Bond Theme" (from Dr. No) is right at home in this collection played by the orchestra as a good recording of the iconic music. Nice dynamics, energy, the arrangement doesn't deviate much from the original.

Once we get into later films from the 1980's onward, like "A View To A Kill" which I associate with the pop song, the classical arrangement comes across as subdued, serene and obviously more "easy listening" than Duran Duran. Nice soundstage with great channel separation through my system (and the Red Dragons of course). Excellent luscious tonality and precise placement on that flute on this track as the signal is caressed down the wire.

"Die Another Day" dug into some deep bass, demonstrated 3D depth with the percussion section placed in the back (as one would imagine in an orchestra). My favorite arrangement on this album is probably "You Know My Name" from Casino Royale.

Once awhile, I'll dig into some old Cantonese pop from the '80s. One of the superstars back in those days was Leslie Cheung (張國榮). He was also known for his acting roles like on the action flick A Better Tomorrow 2 (英雄本色2) or the more artistic Farewell My Concubine (霸王別姬).

This album Final Encounter (1989, DR13 as a SHM-SACD rip to 16/48, music of this vintage has no business being hi-res) is one of those I heard when growing up. Yeah, the '80s production with its synth sounds has aged a bit but that's part of the charm with music; they will indubitably remind us of a time and place, along with the emotions attached to those chapters in our lives.

On this album are a couple of interesting examples where English pop made its way into the Hong Kong "Cantopop" music scene, not uncommon I think since the '70s. We've got "Miss You Much" (Janet Jackson), and "Song Of The Future" (未來之歌) based on the Bon Jovi tune "I'll Be There For You".

The first track was my favorite - "When the Wind Blows Again" (風再起時). Pop from the '80s often can sound a bit harsh, typically lacking the amount of bass depth we're used to these days. For this album, the Dolby Atmos Music Curve discussed recently might help pleasantly tone down the treble if your speaker's native tonality tends to be a bit bright. As you might know, tragically Leslie Cheung committed suicide in 2003 at 46.

Let's hit the '90s now with the Gin Blossoms' New Miserable Experience (1992, DR11 stereo, DR15 multichannel). This album came out the year I got into medical school so served as a backdrop through many late evenings of studies and "miserable experiences" as one matures into the career. While alt. rock/pop that came out over the grunge years isn't going to win many audiophile production quality awards for clean, pristine, undistorted sound, this one is pretty good coming out in the days before excessive dynamic range compression.

Beyond the popular songs like "Hey Jealousy" and "Until I Fall Away", we have some surprises like the country-rock "Cheatin'" which I think was recorded very well and reminds me of classic Eagles material. Recently, the Atmos/multichannel mix was released and it sounds alright. No major revelations on that mix other than a bit better channel and instrument separation, occasional instrument and background vocal elements placed wider out and in the rear. It's probably a good thing that the remixer did not get too trigger-happy with shooting sonic "objects" here, there and everywhere with recordings like this. Wise choice to just open it up to hear the multi-layers in a de-congested fashion.

(Another tragic story of an artist with substance use issues and suicide - see bio of Doug Hopkins.)

Here's one for those who love excellent production quality; a combination of vocals, Indian classical, minimalism, and even electric jazz! Arooj Aftab' Night Reign (2024, DR9) has a bit for everyone. Beautiful, detailed, clear vocals and instrumentation on the opening tracks "Aey Nehin" and "Na Gul" (sung in Urdu). Interspersed with some English tracks like "Autumn Leaves".

My favorites are "Last Night (Reprise)" with its well-recorded bass and apparently Elvis Costello donated some playtime on the Wurlitzer, and the electrojazz "Whiskey". Depending on the mood and current company's enjoyment of more exotic world fusion, there's some good audiophile demo material here. Notice the black background, the tantalizing space between notes in this album, I felt was enhanced by the highly noise-resistant nature imparted by these custom-made cables.

In summary, the music sounded phenomenal through these RED DRAGON speaker cables. When fed with a high-quality source recording, these cables are able to convey the vibrancy, organic richness and midrange blooms of vocals like Rebecca Pidgeon's "Spanish Harlem". It leaves nothing behind when asked to convey the propulsive force and laser-focused temporal and spatial delineation that resonates through your being on Marcin's "Kashmir". The soundstage expands into breathtaking dimensions on Francine Thirteen's "Queen Mary" as you are caressed by the music's warm embrace one moment, then adeptly transported to nether regions by the deep visceral bass the next moment. To hear the RED DRAGON is to unlock a world where sound is no longer mere audio, but a potentially mind-altering journey of emotion, expression, and soul.

[While the album discussions are genuine, clearly some of my comments are tongue-in-cheek spoofs of what we read all the time in subjective reviews. 🤮 Needless to say, the idea of expressing meaningful "subjective" sonic impressions implying dramatic sonic changes with otherwise transparent speaker cables is absolutely ridiculous but it's hard to call someone a liar for saying whatever they may believe! How do honest individuals best confront either lies or delusions so common in discourse well beyond audiophilia these days?

Regardless, I guess audiophiles still love reading and watching others proffer subjective opinions after all these years? And presumably some people still put faith in the often-ridiculous prose.]

IV. Conclusions

Of course it's silly to stick a name like "RED DRAGON" and a logo on what's basically a home-assembled Canare 4S11G cable with some trimmings! Isn't that also just part of the fun as humans with our psychologies?

At the end of the day, isn't this also basically what most fancy cable companies do? They hopefully use some high quality conductor metal (OFC/OCC copper, maybe silver for that 7% improved conductivity, insignificant for audio purposes, usually from an Asian OEM*), apply good insulation material, good connectors, some external fixings to make it look nice, give it a catchy name, throw in techie acronyms, and slap on a story of how great their product line is for marketing and justification of the highly padded margins on the MSRP. They send it to a reviewer who then subjectively "hears" and expresses descriptions of beautiful sounds which the company then quotes in their ads. Rarely do audiophile cable companies bother to publish the LCR measurements for customers. And I don't know if very expensive cables ever come with individually confirmed measurements of consistency for each serial number.

* There's obviously nothing wrong with getting the OEM wire from Asia. That's where most manufacturing for high-tech products that use pure, highly conducting copper is done.

To make these, other than some time, the total cost including the wires, connectors, braided sleeve, and a few shrink tubes was maybe CAD$125 (~US$100) including shipping for the bulk cable for a pair of 9' wires. I fooled around one Saturday evening to examine the wire measurements and had them completed on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

The physical girth of the 4S11G cable is clearly thicker than typical zip cord but it's not a terribly heavy cable and should not tip over smaller amplifiers. Despite the thickness, flexibility is still quite good, making them reasonably easy to make twists and turns around corners.

The Canare 4S11G (OFC) is about 40% more expensive than standard non-OFC Canare 4S11 around here. Honestly, while it's nice to have some higher purity OFC wire, I don't believe anyone would be able to hear the difference in controlled, blinded, test situations. Already, we can buy many fine 4S11 cables online like WORLDS BEST CABLES and Blue Jeans Cable, although making it myself is still cheaper, customizable for length and appearance, and there's personal satisfaction.

While those WBC and Blue Jeans look like very good cables, I think the RED DRAGONS still look prettier and visitors might notice and ask more about them. Custom made using locking banana plugs, hand assembled in Canada, individually measured to ensure excellent electrical characteristics to tight tolerances, more resistant to electrical noise, plus constructed with materials from Japan, certified to be oxygen-free copper are true statements I can say to those wondering about the snakes behind my speakers. 🤓

To say I believe these cables can easily compete with any 8.2' US$35,000 speaker wires in a blind listening test - "master-built" or otherwise - would more than likely also be a true statement. Prove me wrong. 🤣

Here's what I used the remaining 7' (of the 25' total I bought) of the Canare wires for - the center channel - an important audio channel for dialogue in movies and vocals in many multichannel recordings. Rear, side, height channels don't need the bling:

As usual, all my cable measurements and discussions collected and linked here over the years.

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Star-Quad and the "need" for cable risers?

As I demonstrated in early 2023, as far as I can tell, cable risers/lifters don't have the ability to change the electrical properties of cables, nor have I personally heard any imbalance in sound when one channel is lifted compared to the other. Yet, some audiophiles still insist that they can hear differences usually because of some belief about magnetic fields created by electrical currents and that this could somehow be affected by the flooring material that the wire sits on (hard wood, carpet, tile, putative dielectric effects, etc.). All kinds of discussions online like this.

Here's a question to those who believe in cable risers: Does the use of Star-Quad cables where the magnetic field pattern induced by the cable is different from a standard 2-conductor cable affect whether cable risers will make a difference?

Star-Quad magnetic field attenuation as per Canare. They're saying that
the magnetic field with Star-Quad as measured from the center point between
the conductors is dropping off as an inverse cube function compared
to inverse square.

I'd be curious if those who use cable risers and claim to hear the effect can explain whether there are still concerns. Or would the use of Star-Quad speaker cables like these remove the need to buy cable risers/lifters (or at least make them much less necessary)?

Instead of just effects from the magnetic field around wires, for those who believe actual physical vibrations are what causes improvements by lifting cables off floors, does the use of the soft cotton filler insider the Canare 4S11(G) cables - which could dampen vibrations all across the wire - help?

Out of curiosity, let's throw a simple calculation in here to estimate how strong of a magnetic field would be induced around a single speaker cable conductor when playing music. Suppose we look at a single straight leg of your speaker wire, connected from the amplifier to a 4Ω speaker load, pushing a 1kHz sine wave at 100W peak. This would be an A/C signal of 20Vrms, with a peak current of 5A. If we use the simplified Biot-Savart equation for a straight wire, we get:

So, without getting into the complexity of parallel wires (zip cords) or the quadrupolar pattern of Star-Quad where the magnetic vectors determined by the respective "right-hand rule" causes cancellations to the summed field, at a mere 5mm away from the wire, playing at 100Wrms peak into your hypothetical 4Ω speakers, we might see up to a 200µT field affecting whatever flooring the wire is sitting on. 

Depending on where you live on Earth (higher at poles), the magnetic field is between 25-70µT so we're looking at 4x that of the Earth's magnetic field; nothing scary, right? A typical fridge magnet is about 1000µT or 5x the magnetic strength around that hypothetical speaker wire blasting 100Wrms peaks!

Since the magnetic field will correlate with the current, it'll fluctuate with the complex music signal; the vast majority of the time well below that calculated peak value. Furthermore, unless you have very low efficiency speakers (or blasting tunes outside over a PA system!), it would be rare that the current would hit 5A! Most of the time, we're playing music at <1W (<0.5A or <20µT - less than the Earth's magnetic field).

The bottom line is I'm not sure what audiophiles who believe cable lifters improve sound quality are worried about. Small electrically-induced magnetic flux around speaker wires somehow causing an effect when lying on the floor doesn't really make sense. Others like this company and this guy talk about "formation of capacitance between cable and floor"; if that's the case then higher capacitance cables like the braided Kimber-like cables or the Polk Cobras should sound awful - yet they don't. I think the cable-lifter-believers are in need of other hypotheses. 🤔

BTW, I don't know if there's consensus on how high speaker cables should be lifted off the floor, I've seen at least 1" (25mm)?

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A look at a Townshend video & Wireworld comments from a few years back...

Finally, to end, I mentioned recently in the comments to one of the posts that it's important to read and look at what's out there so we're not stuck in our own echo-chambers. While doing a little research on this article, I came across this video published by Townshend Audio from a few years back during the pandemic - here's their accompanying paper:

So this is the level of discussion and equipment testing from guys who make expensive wires? Listening to noise levels and examining REW FFTs of what looks like a noise floor taken from a Focusrite Scarlett Solo with his cable testing machine?

The Townshend DCT Isolda speaker cables retail for about £765/2m (or about US$1,020 for a little over 6'). Max Townshend seems like a nice enough man although he doesn't quite explain much of what he's claiming with those cables. The nature of the testing/experimentation looks more than a little rough!

Then he brings out the supertweeter later (24:00) and claims it's useful for CD audio. He cites the James Boyk paper "There's Life Above 20 Kilohertz!" from 1992! We've talked about this stuff years ago with hi-res recordings as well as that Oohashi effect research. Yes, musical instruments can create vibrations above 20kHz - so what? (For those interested, here's the Townshend Maximum Supertweeters.)

What's more shocking is the personality style of that Wireworld guy (David Salz) - comes across as an obvious salesman in demeanor - more than a bit off-putting as he claims he "tunes" speaker cables by how much he spacing them apart, examines square waves, claims to do blind listening, and the results good enough for all speakers/crossovers/amps.

"I'm not talking about a technical tuning" 31:30, not making a "technical argument" seem to be his answers for not being more scientifically precise! So what if he's been doing this "since 1980" - does that imply he's right? Even the literal snake-oil salesman Clark Stanley profited from sales for something like 30 years until the government shut him down by about 1917. I don't think the government cares to shut down cable snake-oil salesmen so this will continue unless audiophile consumers simply lose interest and stop the flow of money into questionable "high end" (aka "high priced") products of this sort. I see Salz also promoted Milind Kunchur's stuff in that video. He claims to have done all kinds of blinded listening tests with people of high hearing ability - never published, not even on his company webpage apparently (all I see is this 1-page handwaving note which is what his comments basically all amount to).

Wireworld PLATINUM ECLIPSE 8 speaker cables, 9AWG, OCC-7N, "Octo DNA HELIX" wires - a mere $20k/2m pair anyone? Do we believe David Salz has any special engineering knowledge, used proper blind testing, and applied the science to these cables to prove an audible benefit anywhere close to approaching that comically high MSRP "value" for mere wires?

BTW, every once awhile we see cable-makers talk about time-domain reflectometry (TDR) (11:40) techniques to measure audio cables. Sure, one can use TDR to measure impedance changes through pulse reflection principles in transmission lines. However, these measurements use high-frequency pulses on the order of many MHz or even GHz to detect the anomalies (radio frequency range). This is not meaningful when talking about 20Hz-20kHz audio frequencies across short speaker cables. It's all a bit like with jitter measurements when we can see anomalies out in the tens or hundreds of picoseconds equivalent. An engineer could use that to design an even more "perfect" DAC, but improvements would be audibly meaningless. Unless proven otherwise, it's the same thing here. Not all measurements are meaningful unless taken into the context of the gear/room used and limits of human hearing.

Such is the level of discourse among the wire salesmen, friends - superficial, and almost magical! Good job to Dan Thomas in the video who's "very familiar with the literature, this is what I do for a living" (22:10) for challenging the silliness, claimed correlations, and just plain vagueness. I see Dan gave 'em hell (33:40). So, was that a fun debate? 😉

Hope you're enjoying the music and having fun in this hobby, dear audiophiles!

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† Test graph from Caig/DeoxIT; here's their use guide: