Cable Believers -- Price/quality tipping points? - Page 3

great example

The vast majority of cable companies I have seen offer a money back if not satisfied guarantee.

Look for quality, not price. Find out about specifications and build and if that is not available, avoid.

Second hand is a great route to buying cables, but since you are unlikely to be able to return them, you need a way to sell them on yourself if you are not happy.

Cable sceptics note, you can safely experiment with cables without risking spending silly money.

It has more to do with the cable than the cost. The Signal SRs can challenge most competitors costing up to $400 or $500, and some costing a lot more than that. I prefer them to Cardas Golden Reference which is $800, but I think the Kimber Select 1021, also an $800 cable, is significantly better. Same 800 bucks, but I think the KS walks all over the Cardas.

I know you've been talking about wire leads here but I've got to blurt out my new experiences with fiber optics. I'm coming from my PC to a DacMagic to a Samuels Hornet to K701's. I first used a 75ohm coax from my soundcard, then tried a 4 foot $25 Monster standard fiber cable from my motherboard's Realtek HD. Big improvement. But what blew me away was when I replaced the Monster with a 6 foot $40 Dayton real glass fiber cable. More air, definition, less sibilance. What does Monster make it's fiber out of, recycled milk bottles? I've never heard that dramatic a difference out of wire cables.

Blue Jeans Cable here

DaveBSC, how do you value gear? For example, if something cost $4,000 in 1988 dollars, discounted from $6,000, and you paid $500 for it used last year.

Would it be a $500, $4,000 or $6,000 piece of gear? Or would you have to adjust the $6,000 for inflation, possibly turning it into - say - a $9,000 piece of gear in 2010 dollars?

Depending on valuation, you could pick any number of price ranges for cables as well.

Also, how do you value DIY projects? If you go strictly by the parts cost, you leave out labor and other costs of production in commercial gear. Oh, that includes profit. So if I spent $6,000 to complete the Orion+, then I could potentially classify it as a $6,000 speaker, or possibly as a $50,000 speaker, if I wanted to cover all the labor and overhead and then pretend that a dealer marked it up 100 points. Or maybe a $40,000 speaker, assuming the imaginary dealer gives discounts.

Do you think it might be a better idea to value all gear based on internal parts cost, DIY or not? Then again, you might end up with expensive components poorly employed... which would mean that two $3,000 parts cost amps are not of the same quality.

Oh, and the cables.

Well, I'm thoroughly confused about the valuation of a rig and can't quite put a value on my components.

But can someone recommend a RCA cable that makes a noticeable difference connecting a SACD player to a tube amp? Both the SACD player and tube amp have good specs and measurements. I'll probably run a HD-800 off the combo.

If anyone can recommend a cable that will make a difference, I am interested in buying one. I'm not sure what my rig "costs" so I'm not sure which price category of cables to choose from. Though the cables confuse me, too. Used ones are often much less than retail and even retail cables are often heavily discounted. Further, dealers traditionally have the highest markups of any product on cables. Material costs? Let's not get into that right now. How about simply a recommendation of a cable that makes a difference.

Actually they might want to put you in a strait jacket and lock you in a padded room for believing that you can hear a difference in cables. Well i guess we should look no further than Radio shack , problem solved.

Valuation is indeed a tricky subject, that's a great question. It's simply impossible to account for every pricing variable out there, so my most general suggestion is to spend 10-20% of the original price of your equipment on cables.

There are always bargains out there. For example I use an $850 Magnan digital cable in my setup. There's no way I would spend $850 on a digital coax unless I had a $15K+ system, but I got the Magnan used for $180.

As for specific recommendations, I would suggest trying either the Signal Cable SR or the RS Cables Silver Interconnect. Both start at around $100 with Eichmann connectors, and both are excellent but very different designs. The Signal is a two conductor silver/copper design with a shield, while the RS is a Kimber style unshielded triple solid core silver braid. Both companies offer money back trial periods, so maybe try both of them.

i'm a believer after listening to Skylab's blacksilver RCA-3.5mm interconnect. since then, cables from Whiplash Audio and my optical cable from Van Dan Hul only reaffirm my faith.

My rig right now is not resolving and hi-fi enough to justify spending more than $150 on a single interconnect. Furthermore, i've discovered the joy and cost saving diying your own interconnect can bring. Personally, with my rig at it's level, i'll get the most bang out of my buck diying my cables, saving the labor fee for other stuff. and the level of skill needed to diy an interconnect is really really very low.

I think $200ish should be more than enough for quality interconnects. I been looking at the DH Labs cables since they have great quality cables for the cheap.

I don't think there is some sort of cost/benefit curve for cables, with diminishing gains at higher price point. Instead, I think there is very little correlation between price and cable performance, except possibly within a single brand of cable. Some manufacturers, like MIT, just charge very high prices for their cables with little evidence that they sound better than brands that are less expensive. In general, I would look at all the cable manufacturers who distribute from The Cable Company, an internet retailer, and assume that you are getting ripped off, whether you buy a $100 interconnect or a $5000 interconnect, because the margins you are getting charged are astronomical and their value in the used market is far below their retail price. Buying used is a better proposition, but that still entails risks. There are a lot of used interconnects from well-known manufacturers that sit unsold on Audiogon for many weeks before the Audiogon ad finally expires. I assume that these cables never get sold, regardless of price.

I would instead look on audiophile forums like Audiogon and Audiocircle to find out about the smaller cable makers who have a very loyal, enthusiastic following among owners. Those smaller companies, often one-man operations, do not distribute through dealers and have succeeded through word of mouth. And they cover the whole gamut from relatively inexpensive cables to quite expensive cables. Many offer a full line of cables, from inexpensive ones to very expensive. They will often offer informal in-home trials.

In my pursuit of this hobby (more for my speaker rig than my headphone rig), the cable manufacturers who seem to have very good word of mouth among owners are: Gabriel Gold, Jade, KCI, Grover Huffman, Reality Cables, Auricle, Signal Cables. I listed them in descending order from most expensive to least expensive. If you find cables from these companies on the used market, you stand a good chance of either liking them a lot or selling them for about the same price you paid. I would take a $200 used Gabriel Gold Extreme over an $800 MIT interconnect any day of the week, because the Gabriel Gold sounds better, costs less, and can be resold easily in the used market.

Given low barriers to entry into the cable business and information assymetries between the buyers and the sellers (the sellers knows whether he is selling a very good cable or is just a BS artist, while the buyer doesn't know that), the buyer is at a disadvantage unless he does his research.

I have gravitated over time to Gabriel Gold cables. A very long thread of positive impressions on Audiogon led me to buy some of these low end cables used. Every time I have upgraded, I have been very impressed by how much better my system has sounded. In my headphone rig, I recently upgraded from the Gabriel Gold Extreme (the least expensive cable in the line) to the Revelation (a more expensive cable that goes for anywhere from $300 to $500 in the used market.) I thought the Gabriel Gold Extremes were great interconnects when I first bought them, improving sound quality as much as swapping out stock for NOS tubes. I then replaced the Extremes with the Revelations. All I can say is that I used to read while listening to my headphone rig. Now I just put down my book and listen, as the sound is so immersive. But obviously, I would not use a $300 interconnect if your amp and source only cost $500. I think the extra money would be better spent on the amp and source. But if you have found your "destination rig" (e.g. a Meridian G08 and a Zana Deux), I think one can definitely improve the sound quality of the rig substantially by experimenting with cables, sticking to brands that have an avid fan base.