The non-biodegradable version is made from marble like the Sennheiser Orpheus headphones, comes with audiophile rocks made from the same rock to suspend your biodegradable cables.
Ok ok ok that’s enough
1 Like
Yes, I understand lol. Personally if I were to buy something it would be an ac regenerator
Rather than start a new thread I was hoping that I could get some assistance… Looking for 10-12 foot speaker cables (Maggie LRS speakers) in the sub $250 level although I’m fine going plenty lower. I’m looking at the following:
BJC “Canare”
World’s best cables " Mogami"
Audioquest Rockets
Kimber TC4:
Anyway I see Canare, Mogami, Rockets, and Kimber thrown around alot just have no clue on what really is quality and what is fluff. I’m not interested in DIY hack stuff and want an affordable quality finished product.
If you have your eye on Kimber stuff, I would recommend visiting their eBay store. They sell their demo stuff at a discount.
1 Like
Not meant to make anybody angry but look how thick Monster is compared with regular Cordial.
It is a Monster! 
Thick and weighty beast!
Have to wait little more to hook these beast’s back to use.
The XLR connector makes a “click” noise when connecting, nice to know they really are locked now.
Now someone can get upset. 
2 Likes
Question is if they hold up to beeing run over with a flight case like Cordial cables do 
1 Like
They will eat the flight case! lol
If only thickness was a measure used for everything. I’d be pretty damn good. lol
2 Likes
I was there when the audiophile cables got started - mid/late 70’s. First it was Monster and AQ, then Kimber, XLO, and all of the others.
It was fairly easy to see the difference in zip cord vs Monster. It was also fairly easy to hear. By the mid 80’s it was already very common in shops and ads.
I got seduced enough to buy a 5’ long used power cable for amps used for $200 in the early 90’s. My friends and I started getting into SE interconnect AB testing. They were different from each other.
Speaker cables were even crazier (on some very difficult speaker loads - Apogee Duettas, ML CLS). But it became clear that there wasn’t a firm hierarchy across speakers (even with normal electrical behavior). So you could never get a strict A->B->C->D order.
In the mid 90’s a dealer showed me a $5k power cord, in a system with 5 of them. I brought my $200 one to compare, then brought it home. My $200 was better (slightly) than those and a small number of others. Is it the best EVER? Doubt it, but it was good enough. Still using it, tossed the $5k cable back to the dealer.
The other thing was that I have a murderous time telling apart balanced interconnects from each other - unlike SE. So I went all balanced in the mid/late 90’s, and that’s it.
-That’s about 20 years with no attention paid to cables, and a few DIY projects. That changed in 2016. Headphone cables are not consistent. Mostly it’s Hifiman cables that suck, but cheap MD X00 & 4XX cables also are poor. So I’m back to playing with cables. Oh yeah my cheap cables for streaming from my LG to my DAC keep dying. Jeez.
2 Likes
I f nothing else, headphone cables are way cheaper. There’s a certain satisfaction in making ones own cables. The reality is that once you get proper noise rejection. build quality, address the desired physical properties and (gasp!) appearance, all you’re doing with megabuck esoteric cabling is purposely changing tonal qualities that may or may not have the desired effect when they become part of the chain not better not worse, just slightly different if perceptible at all.
There’s a reason why we never see A/B/X testing done when people claim they can hear the difference between one RCA cable housing and another. Because those tests are not good for business.
Hell, my system sometimes sounds glorious and other times I swear I hear something off… maybe 70% humindity and a changing barometric pressure? Or maybe it’s the refrigerator running LOL
It’s insanity to me that someone can be sold a 5K power cable, but hell a fool an his money they say.
1 Like
Copper price keeps climbing, desire to make lighter and more flexible cables (fuck you Apple), so on…
You would be surprised how little “copper” you need to get a signal through some soft PVC.
I would imagine that cables are the worst investment in terms of $ per % change in sound all the way up the price spectrum. Yes it may provide you satisfaction to know you have better looking cables or elite cables but that likely is either placebo effect or just flex mode.
Obviously the cheapest of the cheap bargain bin rca’s or xlr cables won’t be great but you can find something decent for well under $100.
I wonder if power conditioners might be in a similar category.
Different can of worms.
Really depends on what you want or need to achieve.
When your Amp-rack keeps blowing fuses, a good power conditioner that can pick up voltage drops under 220V is a big headache relief.
A rack full of preamps and processors making wierd sounds is also a contender for a conditioner, but maybe a filter is enough.
“I want my high-end headphone setup consisting of 3 components to sound better” may be a case where I would not throw money at a conditioner, but maybe ask someone with a setup that costs more than a good conditioner instead of me 
I can tell differences in RCAs easier than differences between DACs. And consistently! With power cables I hear nothing. Haven’t experimented enough with speaker cable.
Ultimately though, I think it’s to some degree a fool’s errand for 2 reasons:
-
If your goal is to reproduce the sound of the performance, unless you were actually there and have super-human auditory memory, you have no reference as to what is correct and what isn’t.
-
If you simply want something that sounds good to you, remember that a cable’s effect on music is exactly the same as a fixed equalizer. So it makes a lot more sense to just buy a quality eq and set things the way you like instead of chasing your tail finding that perfect cable match.
Do spend money on build quality though. Luckily it doesn’t cost a ton.
Yes. Barometric pressure changes - esp high to low change my hearing which is probably tied to my migraines. I also have heard issues when the VAC coming in is under 114. I’ve had that happen twice in the past 25 years for months at a time.
I was a audio sales guy in the mid 70’s thru the early 80’s, and remained an investor in a high end shop after that (so you can walk out with whatever you want on a weekend, and bring it back Tue or Weds). And that $5k cable made the pit of my stomach fall off a cliff. I found one via google a few months ago for $9k. The same people that buy that rubbish take no care with their listening env. Poorly placed speakers, too much glass, too much carpeting, etc. I also did custom rooms for decades after my sales days. One guy had 6 systems all $20-$60k but he wasn’t happy - he had great TT’s sitting on rickety credenzas and worse. I cut him to two rooms and two systems, with ample ASC tube traps, etc. He made a pile of money selling off al the stuff he didn’t need, and besides my fee gave me a VPI TNT jr, a Jadis amp, and a pair of Maggies. And he was happy that he finally got the sound he paid for,
3 Likes
I checked this out previously. I’m glad they’re at least making it easy for folks that want to put some elbow grease to bring the cost down by a huge chunk. He’s making quite a mess of the construction of them… my ocd can’t cope but I think it’s a good alternative and like he says, you can get the same thing for a lot more money.
These woven cables do work but not the way people think, they’re better at rejecting noise. Noise that 1) may or may not be audible and 2) if you don’t have noise to begin with, it’s absolutely pointless.
How do you not have noise? Cable management up the wazoo, clean power and noisy power supplies far away from sensitive cables.
Speaker cables aren’t nearly as sensitive to noise as signal cables. In addition the fact that signal cables carry a signal, (noise included) that then gets amplified, those are the primary sources of quality cabling you should be looking at.
There are other ways to create noise reduction, simple twisted pairs! (think CAT5) with a lot less complexity while gaining most of the same shielding effect.
Another OCD point of contention is the horrible way the kit approaches termination as there’s no way to get that much wire into the terminator they provide, then they’re soldering and dremeling off material as a solution. You want wire to terminal nothing in between! Hex crimp tools TFW.
2 Likes
Those sorts of heavily braided DIY cables have been around forever, they have relatively high capacitance, and that can actually prevent them working well with some amps.
1 Like
Resistance and capacitance, the two MOST important things in speaker cables. Everything beyond that is eye candy and “tuning” which… why would you ever want to tune your system with over priced cables? Save your money for better equipment.
1 Like