A non confrontational cable thread? We will see...

I was skeptical when I first started reading about different interconnects on the Forum around five years ago, but eventually purchased a pair of Black Cat Morpheus cables and found they offered better sound than the Monster cables I had been using. Continuing to browse the classifieds here I eventually purchased some Harmonic Tech cables, one pair copper the other a copper and silver hybrid. Once again I heard improvements.

I also purchased direct from Signal Cable their Silver Resolution phono interconnects and those made a big difference in that chain. Eventually I learned of Morrow Audio, and here in my New York System it’s all MA-2. Aside from the Signal cable and Better Cables products which are very reasonably priced, all of my purchases have been for used products at under $100.

Over time I came to learn that I really liked silver hybrid wire in my phono chain and sometimes for disc players, but really dislike the silver hybrids in my DAC chain where there was a shrill character to the music.

Most recently I purchased a couple of pairs of Grover Huffman cables and found I didn’t care for the sound in my NYC system at all. However I brought them back home to L.A. and in that system which has a Fisher 800 C at the heart, the Grover Huffman cables worked out nicely and bumped out the Harmonic Tech wire.

So all in all it’s been fun and relatively reasonable money to play with different interconnects. All I’m looking for is increased realism and openness in the sound, when the wire delivers it stays.

 

Directional cables? Sorry I still have a hard time with that. If its better or less on either end then there has to be some sort of issue. Don't even start on cable batteries....

 

I have never paired interconnects with speaker cables yet the reviews always seem to intertwine the sound of each within a given brand's range- and assume most will do the same.
Is it a good practice to assume that brand X model A interconnects should be paired brand X model A speaker cables?
it seems as if there are too many variables to assume that would be yield the best sound.

 

Using the same brand and series of cables usually works great if its compatible with your systems frequency response. Otherwise mixing and matching can work great but you might have to try multiple different combinations, which is mostly what I did. Generally speaking, intelligently designed pure silver wire cables sound the purest and cleanest, but that's just one aspect of the sound. Many great copper cables out there too.

 

I just changed my Canare for inexpensive Kimber 4PR and things got better still; perhaps worth checking out!

 

Don't buy the most nor the least expensive. Probably value to be found in the middle. I don't think cables are any different than any other product!

 

The vast majority of cable doubters (that they make big differences) are not people comparing top of the line MIT Oracle vs. top of the line Audioquest cables, both of which cost around new car prices. They are usually people who have gone down to Lowes Hardware and then to Home Depot and cut up some heavy duty extension cords and then compared each one as speaker wire, and when they do not hear any difference, they infer that all wires sound the same. Neither of those wires have advanced engineering and materials employed so that's what you'd expect. They haven't ever spent an evening of listening with a true state of the art cable or even one that's anywhere close. People who are not willing to experiment should not be taken seriously IMO. There are countless high end cable companies who will send you any cable in their line if you have a credit card, and give you a 30 to 60 day money back trial period. Which is even more reason to be confident about them. Due to financial limits I am an interested cable consumer only with cables under $1,200. Usually way under. Generally cable companies are good people. If you think a company's cables are too expensive, hear them first before making a judgment. It's easy to have an open mind when there is a money back guarantee and no risk. The better designed cables from the better companies rarely get a return. After having lived with them a while, you just can't go back to your previous so so cables. It's like Yuk !

 

Good info. A couple of suggestions for the OP... If you want 60 days to try cables and get free break-in for most of the RCA / XLR / speaker cables they stock, try "Future Shop". I have found them to be really helpful and they won't point you to a more expensive cable just to get more money out of you.

www.futureshop.co.uk


If you want to try an independent UK cable maker & supplier, try Mark Grant Cables. I have a pair of HDX1s (RCA) which displaced two pairs of much more expensive cables and will shortly be looking at further MG offerings (HDMI; XLR; speaker jumpers; mono 3.5mm jack trigger).

www.markgrantcables.co.uk


Given the well worn debates about the merits of otherwise of cables, there isn't any point going there just to repeat what has already been discussed (and argued). So, I will merely wish you happy listening...

 

First time I heard a difference between interconnects, was between 2 cables with a big (measured!) Capacitance difference: less is more. Dynamics went ⬆️ (in fact everything went ⬆️). Those with less capacitance were also the cheapest. A win in every way .
My advice : if you get new cables, first get a capacitance meter, they cost pennies compared to cables!

 

I'll give my humble experience and thoughts and then i'll leave.

I was always a reader of Stereophile, Audio, and High Fidelity magazines. In the 90s, when I got some money to throw around, I started to buy audiophile interconnects because I was looking for something better than the cheap RCA cables that came with the equipment. So, I decided to buy some Monster cable at the PX. I don't recall which grade I bought but I didn't like the sound. In fact, I thought the sound was worse. To top it off, the connectors were soooo snug that they almost broke the female jack on the back of my equipment. I decided to avoid Monster brand cables as a result. However, since I did hear big differences, I realized that there were differences in interconnects.

So, I discovered a place in Tucson called (now defunct) Wilson Audio. I bought some Kimber PB&J braided wire and liked the sound. It was clean and the treble was tamed, with good mids. Then, I tried Straightwire pink, and then blue cables. Again, I liked the sound of the pink ones, but the blue ones were a bit thin. I tried Audioquest Topaz and they made the music sound incredibly compressed and loud! I don;t know why, but I never used their stuff again, and didn't care about their reputation. Then I bought some $200 MIT Terminator 2. They sounded great! In fact, I still use all of those cables now. But, as buying all those cables were getting quite expensive, I was in Circuit City one day and decided to pick up some decidedly cheaper Esoteric Audio Musica 500 and they sound almost as good as the Straightwire, except with a lot more heft. For my mid-fi stuff, the MIT, Straightwire, and the Esoteric Audio are all working well for me. I lost the interconnect bug.

Then, I decided the 16-gauge speaker cable wasn't cutting it, so I went to a nearby audio store on Wilmot (also defunct) and bought some 12 gauge Tributaries cable. 12 ft. runs each. They sound damn good, too. Every few years I trim off the ends because of oxidation. I bi-wire my speakers, too.

yeah, i'm weird, but I can hear all these differences, so that's why I bothered. If I didn't hear any differences, i'd have stuck with the cheap $1 RCA cables.

One more thing: the cable materials/wires, and how the cable is constructed, plus the length of the runs, all have an impact on the induction, resistance and capacitance, and, therefore, the sound quality. I hear it. I compared them with the cheap crap.

I also like and really prefer using digital coax and fiber optic (Toslink) where possible. but, when I want to tailor the sound, it's analog all the way. If I could use balanced cables I would.

OK, i'm outta here before the lock.

 

Quad famously forgot to put the speaker cable in the van for one audio show, so they went to a large DIY store and purchased a bright orange power extension cable, which was cut up and stripped back.
They had more queries about that cable than anything else

 

I've built a bunch of my own interconnect cables -- coax, twinax, twinax with shield floating on one end -- and bought a lot of other types -- unsheilded Kimber braided, cables with triboelectric noise shields in addition to braided shields, solid core, stranded core, etc -- involving a variety of different dielectric materials, trying out different connectors from KLE, Neutrik, and other providers.

My conclusion from those experiments are, first and foremost, the most important thing is choosing the right cable fore the application -- a three foot cable between a CD player and a preamp, is, frankly, not critical. A phono cable is always going to matter a ton -- go well shielded and low cap there.

Second, things that "shouldn't" make a difference -- like mechnical damping of connectors -- do. In fact, the connectors may be more important than the cables. The cables are all pretty much electrically similar anyway. And of course the construction.

Third, there are SO many things in audio that make much, much bigger differences than cables -- especially room acoustics, room treatments, etc -- that I stopped worrying too much about cables. Your going to get a lot more return for your time and money buying a calibrated much and doing real time analysis of your room and doing careful speaker and listener positioning and room treatments and, if you're in the digital domain anyway, DSP, than you're going to get from changing cables.

Fourth, in a single ended system, one of the biggest sources of noise comes from AC leakage current. Using the lowest resistance return path/shield in the cables and you'll significantly lower noise and improve low level detail.

I haven't done very much experimenting with speaker cables. I've tried zip cord, extension cord, some cheap AQ speaker cable, and now I'm using some Cardas 12 AWG litz cable. Frankly, I never heard much of a difference between any of these. I might have been able to ID differences in a blind test, but if there were sonic differences they were minor, however, given the litz cable's lower self inductance, I stuck with them. But I'm sure differences will depend on the output impedance of the amp, the impedance curve of the speakers, the length of the speaker cables, because really, when we're listening to the "sound" of cables, we're not actually listening to the sound of cables -- they have no sound -- we're listening to the electrical interactions of the cables and the components they're connecting

 

My experience with cables is quite extensive. In a post several up, someone mentions Quad demonstrating their electrostats at a show using orange wire from a DIY place. It was a bright orange with black stripes extension cord from Home Depot with the end parts cut off. Reminded me of a tiger I once saw. I hadn't read that the reason they used it was because they forgot to bring their own. I went to Home Depot & bought one & did the same thing. Compared to the modest Mega Cable from Radio Shack that I had been using at the time, it had more growl in the bass (no pun intended) ,it also seemed to accentuate the leading edges of notes and sounded a bit more open, but I eventually went back to the Mega's which were favorably reviewed by the Audio Cheapskate, because they sounded more natural. That was before I got into the more serious stuff.

I think the right cables can make at least as much improvement as amp and cartridge upgrades; maybe even speaker upgrades (depending on which one). I once had a lengthy in home trial of a set of Spectral Ultralinear II speaker cables, specially made for them by MIT. Near each end of the cable they had these heavy rectangular shaped boxes that must have weighed near 5 pounds each. The brand Spectral makes power amps that have a high frequency bandwidth that is beyond a million hertz. I read that Spectral would only honor its warranty if their amps were used with this special recommended cable. Ordinary speaker cables would cause their amps to oscillate and could fry the output stages.

The cables were very expensive ( thousands of $$ new). When I started listening, the bass was so deep, solid & impactful that I couldn't believe it. I noticed that all the instruments in the midrange not only were bigger sounding but really ballooned in size; still maintaining perfect focus and phase. The sound was dark with my particular system, but the transients were lightning quick without any help from crispness of frequency response. The sound was so overly warm that I remember saying that I never heard such warm sound with such amazing definition. All the instruments sounded like they had such body that the effect was not sounds coming from speakers, but real instruments in the room. Like if you closed your eyes and walked toward the sound, it sounded like you would meet up with physical resistance. The cables themselves were thick enough that you could barely get your thumb to touch your forefinger when holding them in that way. There are a lot of very advanced things out there. One's limited experience should only be viewed as such. An open mind is very wise in this hobby.

 

Simple, we just talk alternating current out of alternating. And then train metal domains to like current going in one direction. Nah, be easuer to just have the marketing people tell lies.

 

I've got the

I have Kimber 8vs speaker/PBJ IC's. Great value and sound.

 

I have found that to be the case. I match AQ front to back or Kimber or Transparent etc. Mixing them up kinda leaves me a little flat. I have a very modest system but I think each manufacturer of cables I own has it's own character. The Kimbers probably have the best clarity and "speed". Transparent a fuller midrange and the best bass response of the litter. AQ somewhere in the middle.

 

So they built amps that couldn't function in the real world, then marketed cables with a some kind of circuitry attached to the end -- maybe a Zobel network or some other kind of impedance matching or bandwidth limiting circuitry -- because the amp couldn't drive real world speakers without oscillating, and they made you buy this pricey cable or they wouldn't honor the warranty on their gear?

 

Some cables are directional because the shielding is grounded at only one end. In a cable constructed like that you'd want the grounded end to be connected to the source component and you'd want an arrow or some marking on the cable to remind you which end is which.

 

I never actually owned Spectral equipment, but that seems to be the consensus. It is too expensive for me, but I have dreamed of owning something that chased the state of the art, like their equipment did (does?), at least for solid state. Haven't heard much about them lately. The late Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound at one time said that if you're looking for ultra purity of sound their equipment is the one. I think you could use their amps with certain other cables, it just wasn't the safest thing to do and was not recommended. Just how risky that would be I don't know.

 

Pleased to see someone has saved me from having to type all this in.

Peter Walker, famed designer of Quad ESL 57's & ESL 63's, once said in an interview words along the lines of " I have two requirements for speaker cables; they must conduct an electrical current and be long enough to reach the amplifier."

I have a distant recollection of reading about the orange cables. Pretty sure they would have been connected to ESL 63's.

 

I’m so non-confrontational about cables that I don’t list them in my profile. I’m happy with what’s in my system but feel no need to impress (or depress) y’all with my choices.

M. M.

 

Love your Adcom> Vandy 2ce rig! I see SoCal, buy your stuff in San Diego by chance?

 

No, nothing purchased in San Diego. Except for my Adcom 555 II and speaker cables (bought in Los Angeles area), everything else purchased on-line out of state.

M. M.

 

In the old days, San Diego had an Adcom dealer (Stereo Design, got my 535l there)) and Vandersteen (Stereo Unlimited). Way back in the 90's, it was down to 3 or 4 pairs of speakers for me. The Vandy 2ce, Mirage M7si, Martin Logan Aerius and Thiel cs 1.5. Stereo Unlimited has survived unlike Stereo Design.