Quote:
Originally Posted by Lapo
One thing to keep in mind is tgat Tommy Embanuel, with his active Maton pickup sysrem, still heard a difference with better cables,hence him now endorsing the Laboga cables. In Tommy's words:
“I use David Laboga cables because when I first tried them out I heard
a big difference in clarity and in the openness of my sound."
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As much as I love Tommy and his skills, that statement taken at face value flies in the face of everything to do with transmission line theory.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he wasn't just paid to say that. Maybe someone set up the system either starting with a bad cable, changed something else during the test, or there was something seriously wrong to begin with. It's also possible multiple variables changed at the same time he started using the new cable. Or maybe it was placebo - those David Laboga cables are very well made and look great, so there is already an expectation of 'high quality'.
After decades of working as an electronics engineer in the telecommunications field, I've performed measurements on much much longer cables and across pretty much every type of optical, wave guide, free space, and electrical transmission lines from DC to baseband audio to millimetre wave radar. There is nothing a simple 20 foot cable can do that could audibly affect the sound between a typical guitar preamp and an amp input unless it (or the cable it replaced) was defective.
I've seen experienced engineers confounded by 'hidden' variables until they worked out that something was happening elsewhere in the system, sometimes coincidentally and sometimes causal. I've even myself been impacted by confirmation bias and placebo in audio reproduction systems and after double blind testing found that what I thought I was hearing was greatly affected by what I expected or could see. (We did this a lot when working with lossy audio compression schemes to determine subjective codec quality at various rates, especially when tweaking algorithms to improve performance.)
That being said, those David Laboga cables look like excellent high quality cable. Not cheap though, but built like a tank and they look pretty. IMO, on par quality-wise with cables made with Neutrik/Amphenol plugs and Sommer/Mogami/Canare bulk cable, but at 5 times the price.