Would you abandon your expensive cables if there was a much cheaper alternative?

I was under the impression you were not making a serious statement UltraFast. I understand purchasing is a mater of what something is worth to you.
 
At a big hi fi show in Uk , one chap wired up his amazing sounding speakers with mains cable [twin and earth cable] just to demonstrate you don`t need expensive cables [ this is an amateur hi fi show where folks bring all their kit to set up in rooms ]
 
hifinutt said:
At a big hi fi show in Uk , one chap wired up his amazing sounding speakers with mains cable [twin and earth cable] just to demonstrate you don`t need expensive cables [ this is an amateur hi fi show where folks bring all their kit to set up in rooms ]
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Not "Needing" and "Sound Different" are 2 different things.

The Vintage guys at AK swear by Lamp cord or extension cords for Speaker Wire because the speakers deliver sound when connected.

So the question remains, Do you want sound, or do you want good sound?
 
You know when I do use inexpensive speaker wire. When I am wiring rear satellite speakers. I use 14 or 12 awg romex. It sounds just fine for the money in that application.
 
Kingrex said:
You know when I do use inexpensive speaker wire. When I am wiring rear satellite speakers. I use 14 or 12 awg romex. It sounds just fine for the money in that application.
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I have a set of speakers in my family room driven by a receiver in my living room. The wiring is spliced together with probably 4 different gauges of did-similar wire.

Nobody would really know because the placement of these speakers in built in corner cabinets projects the best imaging and stage over my expensive main system.
 
Shadowfax said:
I have a set of speakers in my family room driven by a receiver in my living room. The wiring is spliced together with probably 4 different gauges of did-similar wire.

Nobody would really know because the placement of these speakers in built in corner cabinets projects the best imaging and stage over my expensive main system.
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How Funny. Go figure. Why do you think corner speakers do as such?
 
I did- many years ago. Starting In the early 1970s I noticed that you could hang Neumann microphones over the orchestra and the mic feed sounded amazing! A the time I there were no exotic interconnect cable companies but then I met Robert Fulton and went down that path for a while (in case anyone doesn't know, Robert Fulton of FMI produced the first high end audio cables anywhere back in the 1970s).

But I remembered my experience playing in the orchestra. So when I developed my own amps and preamps I made sure they supported balanced line operation- which then as now has a set of standards. What I found was that if you supported the standards (in particular, low impedance drive ability and ignoring ground) then the interconnect didn't make any difference in the system! This allowed my to place my amps right by the speakers and that meant shorter speaker cables, for which the system also improved.

Over the last 35 years or so all that I have seen is that if you support the balanced standard (now known as AES48) then you don't need expensive interconnect cables because all cables will sound very very similar and its not worth writing to a forum about the differences. But- and I have found this to be a big one- the vast majority of audiophile balanced line products don't support the standard and as a result, most audiophiles really haven't heard what that brings to the table.

So anyone that is curious and has heard a recording made in the 1950s might actually already have an answer to their questions. All the recordings made in the Golden Age of Stereo were done with balanced line connections. Imagine sending a microphone signal 200 feet without degradation, such that decades later, as your stereo improves all that happens is those classic LPs sound better and better. You don't 'hear' the cables; this was 20 years before Fulton came along.

The only reason no-one brought balanced line into the home before we did was because it was expensive- the only way to do it right before we came along was with line transformers which are expensive. Eico certainly wasn't going to install them; neither was Fisher, H/K or any of their successors. We sorted out and patented a transformerless means of supporting the standard.

But if you want a way to finally get off the cable merry go round (since if you don't, next year there will the next latest and greatest) quite simply the means to do it has been in existence for 60 years.
 
jadedavid said:
…Their top end speaker cables (from the website) use a blend of three different metals. Silver for the highs, Tinned copper for the mids and bare solid copper for the lows.
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This could be a perfect example of what I meant when I wrote

Spock said:
Because geometry counts a lot, I believe that, looking for the best solution and the ultimate discovery, sometimes things get complicated and the end result turns out to be worse.
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Back when I owned B&W 802D's I used Synergistic Research B&W Spec cables. If I remember correctly the split towards the speaker end into biwire that connected to the mid's and woofers. I believe one was silver the other copper.
 
Cheap copper wires are fine and dandy, but if you ever had to fend off Lycans you'd be praying you had kept your expensive silver cables.
 
UltraFast69 said:
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$18k for a POWER CORD? [emoji33][emoji1787]
No wonder audiophiles get such a bad name.
 
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