How long until we have muddy banana filled speakers?

( Archive version: https://web.archive.org/web/20260216200328/https://www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-a-blind-test-audiophiles-couldnt-tell-the-difference-between-audio-signals-sent-through-copper-wire-a-banana-or-wet-mud-the-mud-should-sound-perfectly-awful-but-it-doesnt-notes-the-experiment-creator )

I work with audio and while I didn't mean it to, my hearing has become pretty keen. Would be interesting to run the experiment.

Fun experiment but not terribly surprising once you think about it. A signal is a signal, not matter what medium it passes through. If it's not distorted and no additional noise is introduced, it should be indistinguishable.

The bigger impact would be from anything that interprets the signal, like and processing/crossover/speaker output.

It was gold plated mud though.

Amateurs! True audiophiles know to use 24K gold plated TOSLINK cables. (optical)

Yall remember when Monster cables were popular?

That's why I consider myself an "Audio Enthusiast".

Good audio reproduction rooted in science and empirical evidence. Do I think a Carver TFM-15cb sounds different and even a bit better than a McIntosh MC7108?

Yes I do.... Why?

Because I have both amplifiers sitting in the same rack and have A/B'd them extensively. Honestly, the Carver's build quality is utter crap. Barely above what you buy in a box store, but damn does it sound nice. I use the McIntosh exclusively because it's just a better piece of equipment, even though it doesn't have those 2nd order harmonics that the Carver is tuned for.

As someone who cares about audio fidelity a lot, there is definitely a diminishing returns. You'll see me here telling people who complain "I have to constantly turn volume up and down for dialogue in movies". That's because your sound is TV speakers, basically phone speakers, go buy a sound bar and your life will get infinitely better.

If you want to go further you can get a nice set of speakers, even surround sound, and it's fun, but it's not as impactful as the first step.

Then though if you're already at a sweet 7.1 surround sound system, it's not going to matter if you get the high end cables, or spend 5k on the most bestest receiver. At that point you're just wasting money. You may get... 1-5% better fidelity for..... 500% of the cost?

Perhaps true, but I think we can all agree that copper wiring is more convenient.

This gets proven over and over again, people will continue to believe what they want. The only thing to spend money on with audio cables is build quality but the promise of improved audio quality is a siren song.

I dunno, reading the article it seems like a flawed experiment? The audio wasn't played back through those mediums but recorded through it and uploaded to a forum. I might've missed what software was used to do the recording but a lot of ADCs have some built in high-pass/low-pass filtering that could remove noise. I'd be interested in the audio played back through them to headphones cause that would sound like shit