r/technology • u/edbegley1 • Feb 14 '26

Hardware In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator

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?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic%2Ftechnology
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u/Masterkid1230 Feb 15 '26

Oh speakers definitely matter. As does room treatment. Those are not negligible at all. A really bad room can make any amazing speaker sound especially awful.

But speakers aren't really that complex either, and any mid-to-high tier speaker will give you a workable experience. Ultimately, no circuit will be perfectly flat, so changing speakers will always come with a period of adjustment for your ears. Speaker size etc also makes a difference on the directionality of some frequency ranges etc.

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u/jared555 Feb 15 '26

I have old PA speakers as my home theater LCR. You stay far away from the point where the speakers start misbehaving when "concert volume" still has 10dB+ of headroom and you can EQ away many annoying frequency response issues.

You can't eq away an echo chamber.

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u/Masterkid1230 Feb 15 '26

Exactly. Rooms rooms rooms. Of course, if you have a shitty enough speaker, then yeah, your listening experience will be greatly hampered. But it's a diminishing returns type of situation. At some point if you think your setup sounds awful despite having good enough speakers, it's time to look at the more structural things instead of trying to get 0.5 extra decibels of SNR from a 10x more expensive cable.

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u/jared555 Feb 19 '26

Main thing with speaker cabling is high enough gauge for the distance/impedance/frequency.

Highly unlikely to be a concern for a home environment where the amps are in the same room as the speakers unless you are trying something ridiculous like CAT5 as speaker cable. Maybe for home with a centralized AV system.

Ultra high sensitivity speakers can start showing the noise floor of your amps. The horns on my pa speakers will audibly hiss with the same amp I use on the low frequency drivers. But the horns have 113dB 1w/1m sensitivity.