Cables can make a difference
Wait! Before you click away, hear me out. I don’t mean expensive cables make a difference. Nor do I mean “high-end” Power cables make a difference (not an appreciable one anyway). No, I mean headphone cables can make a difference.
I bought a pair of HiFi Man HE-4xx headphones and immediately fell in love with their sound, but I needed a longer cable to be able to use them with my receiver. So I looked around and found Periapt Cables. They weren’t too out of the realm of affordability and seemed to be pretty well made. I purchased a ten-footer and waited anxiously for it to arrive.
When I finally got my hands on them I took them to my office and plugged them into my desk amp and was NOT impressed, to say the least. They almost ruined the sound I loved so much while using the stock cable. To be sure I wasn’t just imagining things I swapped back. There was the sound signature I loved right back where it belonged. The midrange was buttery, the highs were rolled off at just the right point as to not be piercing but still clear and distinguishable, and the bass was appropriately extended and hit the way you would expect from a planar magnetic.
So what gives? Well, I tried this little experiment on a different amp and got different results. The Marantz amp I use for home theater duties (and gaming, let’s be real here) sounded pretty good with the stock cable AND sounded even better with the Periapt cable, that sound I was so in love with was intensified.
The best part of this is that cheap replacement cables make a difference too, replacing the stock cable on a pair of AKG K-240s resulted in a much more relaxed, less piercing sound signature. A $10 replacement for a pair of Phillips SHP9500s made the sound seem more spacious and open as opposed to closer in and more confined. There was a moment late at night I was in my office playing an intense game and thought for sure something was happening elsewhere in the house. I took the headphones off and the sound vanished. Sure enough, it was in the game and not in real life.
I’ll certainly be researching this further but for now, I’m a believer in aftermarket headphone cables.
