What we hear from a cable isn’t just in the cable—it’s in our brain.
That’s one of the most striking ideas from AudioQuest founder Bill Low, and it runs somewhat parallel—but also in contrast—to my own view.
I preach that when we hear brightness in a cable, it’s usually because something in the bottom end has gone missing. Bill takes a different approach. In his view, brightness, harshness, or forwardness isn’t necessarily about a shift in tonal balance. It’s about how the brain processes distorted or compromised information—how we neurologically react to subtle timing errors or phase anomalies, even when those distortions don’t show up clearly in traditional measurements.
He argues that what we’re really responding to isn’t added treble, but the brain’s discomfort with timing distortion. When fine details in the signal are smeared—arriving slightly out of sync or stripped of their spatial coherence—it creates a sense of tension or fatigue. The upper harmonics become disconnected from the musical foundation, and what should feel natural starts to sound edgy or forced. We may not be able to pinpoint the cause, but our brains tell us something’s off.
Bill suggests this kind of distortion isn’t caused by a change in volume or frequency, but by how the signal travels through the wire. Let me explain.
At higher frequencies, a phenomenon called skin effect causes the signal to migrate toward the surface of the conductor. At the same time, variations in inductance—the wire’s opposition to changing current—can create uneven delays within the signal. These subtle shifts in timing don’t show up as obvious errors, but they can blur transients and confuse the brain’s interpretation of what it’s hearing. That’s the kind of distortion you feel, more than measure.
This idea lines up with what I’ve heard over the years. A cable doesn’t need to shift the tonal balance dramatically to sound off. Something as subtle as the timing of transients—how fast a note starts and how clearly it stops—can be enough to change the emotional response to a piece of music. It’s a kind of distortion that bypasses measurement and lands directly in the part of the brain that says, “This doesn’t feel right.”
And then there’s the issue of added noise—RF interference, induced hum, poor shielding. Bill rightly points out that this noise doesn’t always show up as hiss or hum. Sometimes it triggers non-linearities in connected components. TIM, slew-rate limiting, oscillation—all of these are real possibilities, especially when an active circuit is pushed into behavior it wasn’t designed for. I’ve seen this firsthand when testing new preamps or digital gear. One cable might create no problems, while another—using the same connectors and similar materials—introduces just enough noise to destabilize the whole system. The result is a sound that’s brittle, mechanical, or fatiguing.
What Bill is ultimately getting at, I think, is this: fidelity isn’t just about accurate signal transfer—it’s about how faithfully the signal preserves the brain’s ability to believe in the music. And that’s a subtle, slippery thing to design for.
In tomorrow's post, I want to look at another idea Bill raises: how conductor size and geometry affect what we perceive as bass impact, warmth, and body—not through amplitude shifts, but through time-domain behavior.
Because once again, what we hear isn’t always what we expect.
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