I recently had a PM exchange with a very interesting person with some very unique ideas about cables, my R10 and the the AKG K701. He was a lurker who'd read my reviews, and wanted to contact me to let me know that in his opinion, the K701 could be made to sound better than the R10, not by replacing the wires, the drivers or anything else-- but by replacing the 1/4 *connecting jack*.
At first I misunderstood him and told him I'd heard plenty of replacement cables for the Senn headphones and while they helped at the margins as cables do, there's no way they could magically transform them into R10 killers (as if!
). No, no, no, he insisted, the problem with the K701 (and presumably the Senns) was that they used such inferior *jacks*. No other aftermarket cord using all the standard aftermarket jacks need apply; in his assessment, they're all flawed.
He agreed with my basic evaluation of the stock K701 but insisted that when he replaced the stock cord, and most importantly the stock jack, with his own elaborate home-brew version, it lifted the humble K701 over the level of the R10.
In his opinion (and I'm badly paraphrasing), one of the chief reasons the R10 sounds so good is the insanely elaborate and expensive way the jack is constructed, which he detailed for me extensively. Forget drivers, enclosures, etc, for him, it was all down the the jack that made the R10 special. There is no off-the-shelf jack that matched the construction of the R10's or that of his own of his DIY version for the K701, it's totally custom.
I invited him to post here with his findings, and his jack recipe (which he assured me was WAY too expensive and elaborate to reproduce by DIYers here), but he has not sadly.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the relative importance of the quality of the jacks on your RCAs/XLRs/Headphones, and I suppose the female RCAs on all of our euipment, vs. the importance of quality wiring, cable geometry, materials, shielding, dielectric, etc. I'm thinking this relates mostly to interconnect cables, but also to headphone cables. There are very many elaborate aftermarket connectors that all the cable-makers choose from, some costing more than many major components. How important are they in determing the quality of sound reproduced by a given pair of ICs?
This thread is essentially for cable believers, because I suspect that nay-sayers will laugh and say, not only is all wire created equal, so are all connectors.
if you have any insight to share (such as the differences you heard or didn't hear when swapping different connectors on the same wire), that would also be interesting.
So, what's more critical, the medium/component that creates the connection between one component to another, or the medium that carries that signal from one to the next?
At first I misunderstood him and told him I'd heard plenty of replacement cables for the Senn headphones and while they helped at the margins as cables do, there's no way they could magically transform them into R10 killers (as if!
). No, no, no, he insisted, the problem with the K701 (and presumably the Senns) was that they used such inferior *jacks*. No other aftermarket cord using all the standard aftermarket jacks need apply; in his assessment, they're all flawed.He agreed with my basic evaluation of the stock K701 but insisted that when he replaced the stock cord, and most importantly the stock jack, with his own elaborate home-brew version, it lifted the humble K701 over the level of the R10.
In his opinion (and I'm badly paraphrasing), one of the chief reasons the R10 sounds so good is the insanely elaborate and expensive way the jack is constructed, which he detailed for me extensively. Forget drivers, enclosures, etc, for him, it was all down the the jack that made the R10 special. There is no off-the-shelf jack that matched the construction of the R10's or that of his own of his DIY version for the K701, it's totally custom.
I invited him to post here with his findings, and his jack recipe (which he assured me was WAY too expensive and elaborate to reproduce by DIYers here), but he has not sadly.
Anyway, it got me thinking about the relative importance of the quality of the jacks on your RCAs/XLRs/Headphones, and I suppose the female RCAs on all of our euipment, vs. the importance of quality wiring, cable geometry, materials, shielding, dielectric, etc. I'm thinking this relates mostly to interconnect cables, but also to headphone cables. There are very many elaborate aftermarket connectors that all the cable-makers choose from, some costing more than many major components. How important are they in determing the quality of sound reproduced by a given pair of ICs?
This thread is essentially for cable believers, because I suspect that nay-sayers will laugh and say, not only is all wire created equal, so are all connectors.
if you have any insight to share (such as the differences you heard or didn't hear when swapping different connectors on the same wire), that would also be interesting.
So, what's more critical, the medium/component that creates the connection between one component to another, or the medium that carries that signal from one to the next?
