Try it and see if you agree.

Any well made speaker wire should sound just as good.
I have read many of the white papers regarding high end speaker cable and their logic is so full of holes I would never give most of them a cent of my money.

Buy high quality cable and make high quality terminations.

With speaker wire, I would say that you would not be able to hear a difference, if you are comparing wire that is the same gauge and the same distance.

Think about this. Think about all of these "tweak" people that insist on high-end cable throughout their studios, patchbays, etc. That's fine. But they are only interconnecting their gear with it. If you were to open up their consoles and components, they don't have the same spec wire in there. Open up the speakers. Most don't have Kimber or another high-end wire in there. That makes no sense to me. Beldon 8450 or 51 is goog enough for me. I have put it on a scope and it passes 20 to 20k + + so it meets my digital needs.

I remember at an AES show back in 89 or so. There was a guy who had a black box, In it he had three types of wire. He had High, Med , Low quality labeled on the outside. You could switch between all three while listening to music on phones. Everybody picked the high-end. On the last day of the show, he revealed that the low end actually the highend wire, and the high-end labled wire was Beldon 8450. There you go. It's all in your head.

Monster Hype, Monster profits for Monster cables.

I couldnt tell the difference between my cheap guitar cables and My monster Cables, but its worth it to me because They have a lifetime gaurantee and when you play out every weekend you tend to trash your cables pretty quickly! I just go to GC and get new ones no questions asked! I have already seen the pay back as far as that goes!

I had a young guy a GC telling me that Monster guitar cables are made to pass only "guitar frequencies".

See what happens when CG pays minimum wage and makes them work six days a week. ; )

Originally posted by Brett Driscoll:
I couldnt tell the difference between my cheap guitar cables and My monster Cables, but its worth it to me because They have a lifetime gaurantee and when you play out every weekend you tend to trash your cables pretty quickly! I just go to GC and get new ones no questions asked! I have already seen the pay back as far as that goes!

GC guarantees their regular cables for five years also. I just use them for a few years and by that time they have a rustle in them or they have been shorted out, I take them back and get a new one free of charge. You don't have to buy Monster Cables to do this. Kurt

Check this out. Jon Penner, the bass player for Junior Brown, and I had trouble with his Music Man fretless bass with active electronics. We would have RF problems. We plugged in his 20 year old generic Fender cable, and it sounded and performed better than his $50 Monster cable guitar chord. We had it replaced twice and the replacements made no difference.

I will say that it is important to buy the "correct" cable for guitar, to minimize pick-up loading and tonal changes.

Originally posted by Brett Driscoll:
I couldnt tell the difference between my cheap guitar cables and My monster Cables, but its worth it to me because They have a lifetime gaurantee and when you play out every weekend you tend to trash your cables pretty quickly! I just go to GC and get new ones no questions asked! I have already seen the pay back as far as that goes!

Yeah, your 10' Monster Cable that you exchange today becomes the 3' Maonster Cable patch chord tomorrow.

SRV used Radio Shack

Originally posted by lowdbrent:

Originally posted by Brett Driscoll:
I couldnt tell the difference between my cheap guitar cables and My monster Cables, but its worth it to me because They have a lifetime gaurantee and when you play out every weekend you tend to trash your cables pretty quickly! I just go to GC and get new ones no questions asked! I have already seen the pay back as far as that goes!

Yeah, your 10' Monster Cable that you exchange today becomes the 3' Maonster Cable patch chord tomorrow. Well whatever, I was just telling ya what I thought of them, I give to sh*ts what they do with them afterwards aslong as they keep giving me new ones.

KURT
Thanks for the info I will have to look into the GC cables since I havent had a cable last me more than 5 years they would probably work out better cause I am sure they are cheaper!

Brett,
The cables they will replace are the ones that are branded with the Guitar Center logo.. go get 'em! Kurt

what is the story with these new planet wave cables. a guy came in with a guitar cable, and said i was hooking it up backwords. alfter i stopped laughing, i looked at the cord, and it was labled guitar on one side. and after i stopped laughing again, he showed me the speaker cable, which was suposivly one directional too.

:D :D :D :D !!!
I wonder if you hook it up in reverse, do you get a backward guitar effect? A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Speaking of appropriate cables, here's another take on them by Bill Lawrence...

http://www.billlawrence.com/Pages/Connector_Cable.htm

I'm sure this will extend the cable discussions :D

I have just started using some monster cables. They ar not available in Brazil yet, but an engineer friend brought them to me. I connceted tone to my PT interface word clock connectors and others to my 2 main condenser microphones. I felt a little more presence in the highs, but it is very hard to realize that. We started noticing that while recording kick, vocals, violin. If I am crazy or not, that is another question.
LOl

I'll just share two experiences.

Many years ago while i was a young impressionable college student, my engineering teacher, Carl Beatty, who is a phenominal engineer (did the grammy winning Zappa album), showed us a noticable difference in the sound quality of certain patch cables. It was subtle but obvious. Since then i paid a bit more attention to what i used to connect things with, however, i'm far from obsessive about it.
Story 2. Cesar Diaz, who was SRV's guitar tech since before he was signed and (at least in Cesar's version) gave stevie his tone, said in fact Stevie hated monster cable. "It passes too much electricity". but one day in the studio i was using just some old guitar cable and Cesar came in and changed it with this crappy looking thin grey Belden oxygen free cable and it was a VERY noticable difference. More highs, more presence. He gave me that cable and i use it religiously now. Stevie would have hated that cable.
Story 3, some young wannabe engineer type recognizes Bob Clearmountain at a restaurant one night. Starts firing a bunch of absurd questions at bob who humors him for a few minutes until the guy asks bob the Fatal question, "what kind of wire sounds best to you", at which point Clearmountain loses his cool and berates the guy with "I DONT LISTEN TO WIRE I LISTEN TO MUSIC AND VOCALS".

At the end of the day Bob is the most right of all.
-Ken

BTW.. what has Bob being recording lately? He is my recording/mixing refernce.

A guy came into the shop one day wondering if we would be interested in being a distributor for monster speaker cable. He said that anyone can clearly hear the difference between his cable and other inferior cables. To humor him I hooked up an A/B setup and told him to be fair I would compare his wire to some coathanger wire that I proceeded to bend into shape to terminate on the A/B switcher. After flipping back and forth between his cable and the coathangers he told me this wasn't a fair test and I obviously knew nothing about audio; He then took his wire and stormed out of the shop!!
In all fairness, heavy guage fine multistrand wire is useful for long speaker runs to preserve the dampening of the power amp and to reduce line loss and the multistrand is supposed to reduce HF loss through skin effect, but I am not entirely convinced this is a factor at audio frequencies. For the average studio setup, if you have a run less than 12' you would be hard pressed to hear the difference between 16 guage lamp cord and monster cables.
Bill Y

Originally posted by cjenrick:
SRV used Radio Shack

So does a friend of mine, they are gold plated and are insulated just like monster cables.

I personaly like the sound of monster cable 500 series guitar cables, they actully let my guitar shine through. (better lows and mid responce)

I do like planetwaves banana plastic protector idea tho. Keeps the cable from being snaped at the connector area.

Originally posted by Kurt Foster:
:D :D :D :D !!!
I wonder if you hook it up in reverse, do you get a backward guitar effect? A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

That's not how you use it... what you do is angle your guitar amp at a studio monitor and play your favourite song through the monitor. Your guitar will then move in sync to the audio that's being played!

No more making your ears bleed trying to figure out HOW Hendrix played some of those screamin' soloes.

I know this is not for everybody, but I will say that I think the best cables are the ones you make yourself...

(given you use quality parts, can afford to make the initial investment & spend the time).

I used to contstantly be buying Hoser (oops, I mean Hosa) crap & replacing busted connectors & shorted cables, before I was finally 'enlightened' to cable making...

Of course, it requires time & patience, as well a small degree of skill/workmanship...
But the end results are incredible cables - all custom fitted, high quality, durable & if one goes bad, you can easily repair it...
I went Neutrik, Canare, Mogami & haven't looked back since.

I will say that I do have one Hosa snake which has been in my possesion since 1990, I've only had to replace 1 connector to date...
(Kurt, this cable dates back to the days at B.F.).

I dunno about the Guitar Center cable/replacement deal...
I would imagine that would suit some well & if it is truly swap out (a-la the old Sears & Craftman tools deal), then sure it's not a bad deal...

But me personally - I can't imagine wanting to go to GC that often!

I know I'm going to open myself up to ridicule judging by the responses so far, but here goes.

In my home stereo (which is of very high quality) I can hear differences between brands of cable (interconnect & speaker cable).
This is not Monster Cable we're talking about. Sometimes the differences are not subtle. I can hear a difference between cable made of copper & one made of silver. Some sound better in my system than others. Maybe it's interaction between components, damping factor, loading, HP/LP factors, I don't pretend to be an E.E. so I can't tell you why, but to my ears there is a difference and that's all that matters to me.

In the studio I use Kimber speaker cable & Canare & Mogami interconnects. I had Monster speaker cable at one point & replaced it.

:) I use the wireless speakers, that way I don't have to be concerned about how the cable sounds. Ok, I know, that was a dumb remark.

It would seem that powered monitors using very little cable would demonstrate the issue.

Some exotic cables use a shielded type cable involving some kind of looping with the center conductor. Given the voltages, it could create an RC condition, and give a noticable change in performance.

It should be something that can be documented in a lab, but once again, we are back to our subjective selves. Vinyl is better than digital, sort of thing.

As always, let the buyer beware. However, there is no real excuse for the outright use of crappy cable.

--Rick

skin effect into audio recording? Oh My GOD!!
This is related to medium to high power/voltage delivery systems.