How careful listening helps us chose the best audio connection

The challenge of releasing the best sound from a hifi system by choosing the right audio cables is in many ways a creative process with methods shared by those in other artistic walks of life. Music producer William Orbit, in discussion with portrait painter Jonathan Yeo, on BBC Radio Four’s ‘Only Artists’, reveal methods that can be usefully applied to choosing new audio cables.

Yeo and Orbit talked about the techniques they use to monitor the success of the projects they’re working on. Yeo finds that looking at one of his portraits for too long makes mistakes invisible, so he looks at it in a mirror to make it unfamiliar again.

Orbit agreed that music production was not so different. Any time he hears something that he feels is the best in the world, or even the worst, he performs Yeo’s mirror equivalent — running the music backwards, putting headphones on the wrong way round, listening from another room, or letting other people listen to it.

In short, if, as a music composer or producer or, dare we say, an audiophile, we think something’s great, we shouldn’t accept it as fact immediately. It’s all too easy for our brain to ignore problems and indulge our ego, to focus on something to the exclusion of other opinions, and to end up with a self-indulgent mistake.

But is it possible for us audiophiles to detach ourselves from our own opinion to obtain an objective perspective of say a high-end audio cable? There are techniques…

Listening from another room, for example, can allow you to hear what you’ve been missing for weeks. The use of wives, brothers and friends can be useful; they can be direct in pointing out the ‘obvious’ problem and they are often irritatingly correct.

It’s an approach that works well at audio shows; listen in the room, then from the corridor, ask someone else’s opinion, then listen in the room again.

This process of re-listening in order to tease out hitherto invisible aspects of a musician’s work is something we all do whenever we can. A new audio cable or amplifier has us playing all our familiar bands and finding delight in previously ‘hidden’ voices or guitar strings, or even that squeaky drum pedal. It’s likely these sounds were not completely invisible before, but a change in perspective nudges the brain to appreciate them anew.

When auditioning new cable geometries and materials using our REDpurl™ Adaptive Geometry, at Wire on Wire we are sensitive to the way a cable can make a difference and are careful not to be lulled into a false sense of achievement. A new design can sound great on first listening because it does introduce new elements to the musical experience. One can be initially seduced. But it can be at the cost of something unwelcome as well, so we can be thrilled at the sharp outline of a musical image but find that it no longer gives us any sense of a real instrument. We too listen in another room with half an ear open; it’s great at spotting errors.

What’s great is that finding these new aspects in a favourite piece need not demand the expense of one new piece of equipment after another. Our range of audio interconnect and speaker cables for example allows you to alter the presentation of your favourite music. Inserting spacers into specific loops within the cable's structure of our Experience880 audio interconnect or Experience660-S speaker cable, the listener at home creates a new perspective on much-loved music tracks without any loss of recorded detail. This approach can show just how much hidden potential can be unlocked from within the capabilities of existing HiFi amps and speakers.

Can we say, then, that we audiophiles are artists in our own right, using the medium of recorded sound to explore the musical experience? I think we can and long may it continue.

Find out more about our range of audio cables and interconnects.