Interconnect "sound": Kimber vs. Audioquest vs. Cardas

I know this is probably a ridiculous question--and there will be those who say an interconnect should have no sound of its own at all--but if interconnects didn't sound different, there'd be no need for more than one to exist.

In the $150-250 for 2-meter sweepstakes, there are entries from Kimber (PBJ), Audioquest (Mackenzie), and Cardas (Crosslink). For a little less money there's Analysis Plus (Oval One). And of course for a lot less there's good old standard issue Radio Shack, or Belden, or Blue Jeans.

Just wondering if there's any consensus as to a "sound signature" offered by these various cables. Don't want to get into a discussion of "worth it," or "all cable differences are mumbo-jumbo." Also don't want to get into value judgments--one person's "full and rich" could be another person's "bloated and tubby." Hoping to hear objective descriptors (if any) as much as possible. Thanks.

 

Objective descriptors are impossible. If there is a difference between analog interconnects, the sound would be affected by the other components in the chain, and entirely subjective to the ear. Although I own Kimber Kable Hero, I got a "deal" and wouldn't pay that kind of money for interconnects again. If you want to get something with panache, and support a U.S. Veteran/family owned business, order a custom set from these folks:
http://douglasconnection.com/Douglas-Connection-Analog-Interconnect-Cables-DCFAIC.htm

 

Also, it was my observation before settling on what cabling I currently use that even within a manufacturer's lineup there are differences.

I went up the AQ line starting with Sidewinders to King Cobras to Columbias and settling on a used pair of Jaguars. All sounded subtely different.

Good luck in the rabbit hole...

 

I currently have Kimber Timbre interconnects, with extension to one pair of PBJs. I find the resulting sound to be very open, spacious and almost holographic in nature, That is their forte. The downside is shielding, or rather, the lack of shielding. I use Ortofon phono cables for the connection between my TT and phono amp to avoid interference.

 

Would the audible effect of lack of shielding be hum? And would it affect a connection between CD player and integrated amp?

 

Also, if you can, consider Chord and Atlas. Both make excellent cables and in your price range. I use the Atlas Navaigator and Chord Chorus interconnects. Both are around the £220 mark. Opinions on sound, wholly subjective, so I'll pass on those.

 

I bought some Cardas cable and built my own short CDP to integrated amp cables.... much cheaper to build your own.

 

Kimber Kable makes excellent cables in the the price range you mentioned. I use Kimber Select in my system except on the turntable where Cardas is doing duty because of the shielding.

 

How can a person be objective over something that is ultimately a subjective evaluation?

It's like picking between different types of a specific food, like apples or peppers. We may all agree a Fuji apple is sweeter than a Pink Lady but is it sweeter than a Gala? That's much harder to determine. Is a Serrano pepper hotter than a Jalapeno? You might say Jalapeno. I might say Serrano. It's how they hit your tongue and nose, with the emphasis on your.

I liken it to buying shoes. They have to fit you and you're the only one who knows. But then, I've never understood how someone could buy shoes out of a catalog. People do all the time and it seems like a fool's errand to me.

I appreciate you want to make the best purchase you can but the only thing to do is try them. It's the way you learn with this hobby. The Cable Company has a loaner evaluation program. I'd consider using that if you want to find the best cable for your stereo, riddlemay.

Even then, it can be a crapshoot. When I first bought and used the Decware Silver Reference cable I thought it was too bright. After hanging on a hook in my basement for a year, today it's in my system and sounds just right. What changed? Hell if I know except that after I had my integrated amp rebuilt and upgraded with better caps and contacts, it became the perfect match to my system.

 

The audible effect of a lack of shielding definitely could be hum, depending on the circumstances of the installation. Between a CD player and integrated amp, probably minimal to no problem with hum depending on environmental circumstances. Between say a SUT and a phono stage, almost certainly loud hum.

But it's not always just audible hum, noise can sometimes noise and spurious voltage from electromagnetic induction can manifest as a kind of hardness or hashiness to the treble or just kind of a general obscuring of low level detail.

 

Is the cheap Radioshack good?

I also would like to know about the "sound signature" of the cables you mention. I have read that neutrality in cables is impossible, so, it's a matter of matching them with your components.

 

Check out Signsl a Cable, very reasonably priced product of high quality from a small shop that doesn't believe in crazy mark ups. I have their phono a Silver Resolution interconnect and just ordered their SR digital coaxial cable and a power chord for my newly upgraded CD and DAC Components.

http://www.signalcable.com

 

All I can tell you is that Kimber Heroes sounded well balanced in my system.
Only Cardas I have heard was a mates Clears.
They sounded absolutely phenomenal (like clearing a big bottleneck) but cost a fortune.
No experience with Audioquest.
Currently getting some good results with Belden 1800F including improved depth and bass.

Auditioning really is the best way forward but.....If you are a DIY type.....
You could just buy some Belden and make up your own set for like... $25
Only way to be sure and not the end of the world if you don't like them.

One thing I have noticed is that low capacitance can play a role in SQ

FWIW I have listed the capacitances of some cables for you........

Kimber Hero...........XLR 33 pF/ft.........RCA 78 pF/ft
Cardas Clear............XLR 8 pF/ft.........RCA 16 pF/ft
Belden 1800F..........XLR 13 pF/ft.........unknown

Cardas Crosslink.....XLR 22.8 pF/ft.....RCA 36.9 pF/ft
Kimber PBJ.............XLR 18.3 pF/ft......unknown

Note that the Cardas Clear exhibits the lowest capacitance (and highest price!!)

Other properties of any cable.....eg shielding.... will also come into play.

Good luck with your search.

 

Personally, I pretty much buy cables based on the specs since I think the grossest audible differences between cables result from the interaction between the cable capacitance and the input and output impedances of the load and source devices.

I've built or purchased readymade unbalanced interconnects of various types -- twinax, coax and pseudo litz cable; solid core and stranded core wire; shielded, double shielded, unshielded, sheild connected on both ends, shield floating on one end; sheilded against triboelectric noise; teflon, foamed PE and other dielectrics; etc. In my experience there's usually relatively small differences between different types of cables and cable geometries in different applications; the differences are far smaller than the kinds of gross differences that you get from, say, changing the position of your speakers or listening position or changing room treatments; and they're not always entirely predictable, and, like everything in audio, there are always tradeoffs and compromises. My favorite sounding cables have been twinax, teflon-insulated, double shielded, with the shield floating at one end, but they're not the most quiet cables I've used and they're really stiff and hard to terminate. Coax, with low resistance double braided bare copper shield, are the most quiet, and I've come to favor that sort of inexpensive, flexible, low capacitance, coax -- the BJC LC-1, Gepco XBand, Belden 1505F, etc. -- as a base line or for long runs where very low capacitance is essential and flexibility is a big plus.

 

I'm appreciating this tutorial. Basically, is it the case--not to oversimplify, and all other things being equal, etc.--that the lower the capacitance, the better the sound?

And if so, what are the improvements in sound that result from lower capacitance?

 

No it´s not possible to say that IME. The capacitances are very low normally and have no influence on audible sound IMO, if we are not talking about phono cables, which is a totally different matter, and mostly then regarding MMs.

 

No. Here's the thing, the output impedance of the source device and the capacitance of the cable together will form a low pass filter circuit; in almost every commonly encountered home audio circumstances, you'll have sufficiently low output impedance and low capacitance such that the cutoff frequency of the filter will be way above the audible range and shouldn't present any issues. There are however circumstances where the lowest possible capacitance might be helpful -- when you have a source component with an unusually high output impedance; when you're using very long runs of cable; when you're making a connection between a SUT and a phono stage or tonearm cable or turntable to phono stage w/ MM's; etc.

Ideally you'd always have the lowest capacitance, lowest inductance and lowest resistance, in the case of the former two characteristics, they are usually mutually exclusive -- the higher the cap, the lower the inductance and vice versa. But we make compromises. (And worth nothing sometimes with readymade cables, the biggest contributors of capacitance are the connectors, not the wire).

What exactly "better" sound means, of course, is pretty subjective.

 

Agreed with chervokas and missan that the a cable's sonic fingerprint is most apparent on a phono circuit. Otherwise, not so much as long as you follow basic engineering principles, described perfectly by chervokas. My subwoofer and speaker wire runs are 35' long and I use Blue Jean Cables LC-1 for the sub and double runs of their Belden 10 gauge wire to bi-wire the speakers. I'd like to use high end cables for both but it would be the price of a nice used car, and that's just silly.

The only place I have interconnects in the main signal path are in the phono circuit. Currently I'm using a Black Cat Lectraline Xe cable from the turntable to the phono stage and the Decware Silver Reference from the phono stage to the integrated amp, with a short piece of Cardas added for an attenuator I built. When I swapped the Black Cat and the Decware cables, it totally changed the sound and not for the better. I also tried half a dozen other good cables I have lying around here, including another Lectraline Xe, a stock VPI cable (probably too short for you but a terrific cable that sometimes can be had for the low end of your budget), a Monster Interlink Reference2 cable from the 1990s designed by Bruce Brisson, and an older Kimber given to me by Ray Kimber (my stereo store wired up a yacht built for him using his cables - that was a trip). This specific combination of the Black Cat first and the Decware second sounded the best, by which I mean it had the best tonal balance, speed, image, openness and depth.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I like food analogies. It's the old stereo salesman in me. Everyone eats and most people cook at least a little. They can relate to a food analogy. Picking the right phono cables is a lot like that last step in any recipe: season to taste.

It's too bad you need a 2m cable, riddlemay. The Decware would be at the top end of your budget but they don't make it longer than 1m. It's a really good cable. It might be worth dropping Steve Deckert a note, seeing if he'd make you a longer one and what it would cost.

Decware's website

 

I've used both PBJ and a similar homebrew interconnect derived from van den hul continuous-cast copper crystal wire. With the hot output level of a CD player shielding is not necessary. I find the lack of shielding tends to make for a more 'open' [read: brighter sounding] interconnect.

 

And, just to throw in the other side of the arguement, sometimes I suspect the brighter, more open seeming sound of an unshielded cable could very well be extra added zinginess from spurious induced voltage from nearby power cords and such. (And I've also heard cases where, with very short, very low cap shielded coax cable vs. 3 feet of unsheilded mid-cap Kimber pseudo litz, the coax sounded brighter).

I really think the best way to check out the effects of all this stuff is to acquires some relatively inexpensive cables of differing types -- twinax, coax, copper, silver, whatever -- and known parameters (especially total capacitance including plug capacitance) -- and start swapping them in and out of different positions in one's own system.

 

You can do a search here for Grover Huffman, but I've been very impressed with his cables. They sound better than the other ~$200-400 cables from various OEMs that I had in my system before.

 

You got there before me. I ditched some expensive cables (e.g. Harmonic Technology Magic Link II, MIT Shotgun) for Grovers and am not disappointed at all, plus I had extra cash to apply elsewhere.

John K.

 

Grover will build custom lengths too.

I recently got a 1.25 meter Empress IC that sounds very nice.

 

To the OP: Although the link below is a pretty exhaustive evaluation of interconnects in the next couple of price ranges up, I actually found after listening to all the sample files that it gave a fairly reasonable idea of the sort of "house sound" you might get from different brands of cables at least based on my own experiences of the different brands over the years. Although the link is to Wireworld there were a huge range of other brands tested. Even if it is of no specific help to you, it is educational to download all the files and do some comparative listening. I even downsampled and reduced the wordlength so I could burn a CD and it was still a somewhat useful comparison.

The thing that makes the testing linked to below so interesting and educational is that is compares everything to a very think solid direct connection. Though I have to say that after my own listening tests, I found it difficult to fully accept the superiority of that "direct connection" (which is about an inch worth of copper) versus Wireworld's top of the line Platinum interconnect which is pure silver! But it probably does not help that my most resolving system is unfortunately CD based so I am losing a lot of the subtleties that the 24 bit 96 KHz downloads originally possess.

http://www.wireworldaudio.com/reviews/CableSurvey_2014.pdf

 

For line level interconnects, basically yes. As stated by others, however, the relevance of capacitance in high-frequency rolloff is more severe with long distances. Most consumer gear should have plenty high input impedance and plenty low output impedance such that you would need extremely long cable runs (hundreds of feet or more) for that to be of much concern.

The other concern is shielding, the relevance of which will depend on the environment you are in. I've dealt with systems right below major broadcast towers on the tops of hills which were a nightmare, whereas if you're living in a cabin in the woods, will hardly be a concern.

Having dealt professionally with many cables out there, I take a very hard-core engineering perspective when it comes to cabling, and which will likely differ from the dominant opinion here. I ONLY let cables from respected professional cabling manufacturers WITH DETAILED SPECIFICATIONS touch my system, even if it's usually overkill, from the major three brands: Belden, Canare, and Mogami.

I never let boutique cables anywhere near my system. They lack specifications, and are thus entirely inappropriate to an engineering problem. And I am not aware of any of these brands, many of which are mentioned in this thread, having any engineering skills to speak of, nor any manufacturing facilities. And in my experience, they often have absolutely atrocious performance, which is not surprising given their lack of engineering or thoroughly nonsensical approaches to cabling (aluminum alloy conductors, no shields, claims about twisted pair noise rejection on unabalanced lines, etc etc).

For example, I sold and installed Audioquest for many years. I would never let an Audioquest interconnect cable come anywhere near my system.

Cables matter in certain situations, and when they do, buy a professional cable with specs that is engineered and manufactured for cost-no-object performance: Belden, Canare, Mogami. Period.

My opinion, FWIW.