The sounds of silence. (Surveying The Soundscape).

The Sounds of Silence: I just got back from Tim's house. Tim lives across the street; his carpentry skills recently saved my beloved Soundwave Fidelity Soliloqy speakers. And that wasn't the first time he's come through with table saw or router. So when he told me his recently acquired home theater sound system just wasn't doing its job--I got the impression that "Jurassic Park" might as well have been "Gertie the Dinosaur." I was almost happy about it. It was payback time.

Tim has decent gear in place: Sony AV receiver, Philips Hi-Fi VCR, Boston Acoustics sub-sat speaker setup, Pioneer CD changer. I carried over "TDK's Ultimate Guide to Great Sound" CD. It includes a few home theater test tracks and some Dolby Surround music tracks. I also grabbed an old (1993) "Consumer Guide to Home Theatre" videotape that Dolby Labs put out.

We played the CD first. Aside from a bit too much volume in the surround channel (probably from Tim's trying to get ANYTHING out of them before), everything was just fine.

Then we tried the tape in the VCR. Nothing. No sound came through the system speakers at all. Oh, if we cranked the volume full up, we could get some hiss, but that was all. Tim checked the cable routing. I checked the cable routing. It looked fine. I disconnected the VCR audio and plugged the CD player into those inputs. Sound came through fine. So I switched interconnects, putting the CD player cables between the VCR and the receiver. We got sound!

It seemed that the cables that had been connecting the VCR to the receiver had to be the problem. These were brand-new cables, Radio Shack's step-up model, gold connectors and all. Tim had bought two--one for output from the VCR to receiver, the other for input to the VCR from the receiver. So put the CD interconnect back where it started out and moved the newer and one from VCR sound in to VCR sound out. After all, both sets of brand new interconnects couldn't be defective, right?

Wrong! We were back to no sound from the VCR.

To confirm the diagnosis, I put the ohm-meter across the cables, checking for continuity and for shorts. Both of the offending sets of interconnects check out okay. Still, it had to be the cables. I crimped the collars a little and tried again. No luck. So I went home, got a spare (cheapo) audio interconnect. When I plugged them in, the sound was there.

So for reasons I couldn't establish, the cables Tim bought failed to make proper contact with the jacks on one of his components. I think the problem occurred at the receiver end, but it could have been at either ... or both ... ends, maybe from a too-short center contact.

In any case, I was very surprised that a set of Radio Shack's better cables wouldn't at least provide basic operation with anything it might be connected to. I've always felt quite confident in the Shack's cables of every sort. This failure to perform as expected stunned me. But it did prove once and for all that cables can directly affect your listening experience, in this case in a rather extreme way.